#16 3 Self Love Practices To Heal Your Life

Learn 3 self love practices that you can implement immediately to heal your life, and to live more boldly and with confidence.  From nervous system healing to inner child work, these self love practices has the power to change your life. 

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About Tertia

I am a certified feminine embodiment coach and embodiment teacher.

In my private coaching and online programs, I teach you to drop from your head into your body so you can take your nervous system out of survive into thrive, clearing the way for you to live a life that fills you with joy and be guided by your inner knowing instead of outside influence.

I trust you found this episode helpful! It would mean the world to me if you could leave the show a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and share it with your friends. That will help me reach more people. If you have any questions about this episode, I'd love to hear from you, send me a message via the links above.

Transcript

Having a great relationship with yourself is a game changer. How you talk to yourself, and maybe even more importantly, how you feel about yourself is going to have a direct impact on your relationships with others, the confidence that you have in going after your goals, and just the way in which you move through the world. So I have come such a long way myself in healing the relationship with myself, and this is what I help women with today in the videos that I share here on my channel and in my private coaching practice, and my group coaching programs. And today I want to share with you three self-love practices that you can implement immediately so that you can begin to heal that relationship with yourself so you can live boldly and with confidence. So if you're excited to learn about these practices, then hit the like button.
And if you want to go deeper, I've created a free guided self-love meditation, and you can grab that from the link below in the description. And this has really been created to support you to connect to your beautiful heart and to connect to your worthiness. So if this is something that you want to have more of, then go and grab that free meditation from the link in the description. Alrighty, let's get into the three self-love practices. And practice number one is to redefine what self-love and self care means to you. If you've been following me for any amount of time, you'll know that I do not equate self-care or self-love to bubble baths and facials. They're really great and they can be very relaxing, but those things don't do anything to move us closer towards our goals. They are a pampering aspect of self care and self-love, but that's not truly what self-love is.
So something that almost all the women that I speak to in my coaching practice struggle with, something that most of them mention at some point is how guilty they feel about taking time for themselves and about practising self care. This is a real thing, this guilt about taking care of ourselves. And I believe it has so much to do about how we've been socialized as women. It has really been imprinted into us that we need to take care of everyone else around us. We need to put their needs ahead of ours. And if we don't do that, it makes us selfish. So if you're going to focus on yourself, you're going to focus on your needs, it's going to make you selfish. And even if that is never directly stated, that is so much implied to take care of everyone else first and then whatever resources or energy it is that we have left over this then what we can use for our own wellbeing. We also tend to get fed the idea that self care is an external action that you place upon yourself. So it's products that you buy, it's activities that you do, it's things that you spend money on so that you can look better or create a better impression. And I think this is why it is so crucial for us to create our own definition of what self care is. To me, self care has to do with your physical, your mental, your emotional, and your energetic or spiritual wellbeing. And it has the purpose of nourishing you on these levels so that you can feel whole, grounded, well resourced and resilient. Our true inner confidence really asks us to use our own truth and our own wisdom as a yard stick, right, to use that as our guiding principle. So we want to disconnect and unhook ourselves from the social view of what it means, the socialized conditioned view of what it means to love yourself, to practice self care, and to take care of yourself on a level that allows you to then be resourced enough to take care of everyone around you. So I invite you to start thinking of self care as a non-negotiable and something that doesn't necessarily cost money. The second self care practice is to love on your triggers. Typically, you are not really being triggered by what's happening in the here and now. This is a nervous system response because what is happening in the here and now is a reminder of some traumatic or very big impactful experience that happened in your past. So something interesting, which I've been noticing on the psychology bumper stickers and the, and the memes, is that there is a move and a desire and the idea that our nervous systems should be constantly regulated and non-responsive and we should be non-responsive. We should be able to become an observer of our experience and remove ourselves from that emotional reactivity so that we can from a place of distance, observe and then make decisions from this place. A challenge that I have with that is that it can so easily turn into another shame fest. We don't want to be in a nervous system or have a nervous system that's constantly overactivated. And we also don't want a nervous system that doesn't get activated at all. As humans, it's not possible for us. Our nervous system has the important job of keeping us safe. It has the important job of getting activated. But if you believe what we see out on social media, it's easy for us to think that whenever I have a trigger, whenever I have an emotional response, it means that there's something wrong. And so that there's something that needs to be fixed. Instead, what I want to invite you to do is to use your emotional triggers as a starting point for personal healing. So when we are being triggered in this moment in the here and now, this is an opportunity and a place for us to start healing. And in my own life and also in the work that I do with my clients, one of the primary areas that I focus on when it comes to working with our nervous system, working with our emotional reactivity is to do some inner child work to develop and nurture the relationship with your inner child, your inner girl. In my experience, working with your inner girl and really making her feel safe, making her feel heard, understood, and seen, it's a foundational practice, a foundational piece of the puzzle in terms of healing the relationship with yourself and really loving on yourself. If your inner girl feels safe to receive that love, I see that it opens you to allowing more intimacy on all levels of your life into your experience. And then the final self-love practice is to connect into your body. So often when we are caught up in this dialogue of feeling guilty or we are in a shame storm of wanting to put our own needs first and feeling resentful because we are feeling so exhausted, there's a lot of mental activity that happens. And not only that, as we go around in modern world, in our, in our jobs, and even at home taking care of our family, we spend a lot of time in our minds. We spend a lot of energy in this area. And what I see happens is we disconnect largely from the data that our body has available to us. And if you're spending so much time in your mind, it's easy to get stuck in the story of how you should be better, how things should be different, how you should try harder, how there's something wrong with you and you need to fix it. As our thoughts create our feelings, I see this as a loop. Our thoughts create our feelings and our emotions, but our emotions and feelings in our body also give us thoughts about that. So the one is not exclusive to the other, but as we develop these thoughts about our worthiness and how good or how bad we are faring in something, this creates an emotional response in the body, a somatic response in the body. And often because this is very uncomfortable, and if you are a senstive iperson, I feel that we are particularly prone to, to feeling and noticing these uncomfortable sensations in the body. And so many of us, we've never really been taught to go into the experience of that. What we tend to do is we take the feeling and we pull it into the mind and we start analyzing and processing and trying to understand what this feeling means. So this then becomes a cycle, a continuous cycle of we 're continuing to pull our energy into our minds, into our minds and cutting ourselves off from the neck and this beautiful body of wisdom and information that is available to us. When you have the practice of connecting into the body, not only processing whatever it is that you're feeling on a mind level, but really working with the somatic experience and with your inner world, with that inner felt sense, when we do that, it allows us to actually go beneath the surface and to get into the real truth. So not the beliefs that we have been conditioned with and not the beliefs that we have created ourselves through imprinting, but really then deeper and more empowered beliefs that are not coloured in by these conditionings. And this of course, is a practice. The practice is first to really learn the skill of dropping into the body and not to get sucked into the temptation of getting into the story about something, but really staying with whatever the sensations and the emotions and the feelings in the body. An embodiment practice that I teach my clients, and it's a practice that I do myself regularly, is called deep flow. And it really is the practice of feeling what your thoughts and your experiences, the response that it gives in your body, and then moving closer towards those feelings and sensations. The intention behind doing such an embodiment practice is not to solve or fix whatever undesirable or uncomfortable feelings you are experiencing, but it's really to get to that truth, that wisdom of your body that is not coloured in by the overlying beliefs that we've been imprinted with and that we've created ourself through our lived experiences. Another embodiment practice that I really love and that I encourage all my clients to do is to take up walking. I've spoken about that so much on my channel. As sensitive woman, we do so well when we connect with nature, when we can go for a walk in nature, it just really helps soothe our nervous system. It helps bring us down a little bit. So that's a very powerful practice. You can also use walking as a co-creative practice, and this is really where at the start of your walk, you set the intention to gain a deeper awareness around something or to have an insight around something or a resolution or an answer towards something. And as you are walking and you allow yourself to relax, allow that nervous system again to relax, you'll often find that there is some shift or some new realization or insight that drops in. And then the final practice that I really love is to dance. And this is a little bit different from the deep flow practice that I teach where we don't use the external sounds like music or rhythm to move us, but we are really following the rhythm and the information from our internal world to inform our movements. With dancing, we are really allowing the music to move your body. The faster the music or the slower the music will really inform the pace and the speed at which you move. We can also use the music to create emotions and feelings. So dancing can be a really powerful self-love practice.