Heidi’s Happiness
Maybe happiness is this: not feeling like you should be elsewhere,
doing something else, being someone else.
Isaac Asimov
There may be some that say, oh Heidi, it’s easy for you to say, you are single, your children are grown and you don’t have all the distractions of a relationship and children. Actually, loving yourself has nothing to do with your relationship status, being a parent or single, ethnicity, beliefs, and so on.
I was listening to a podcast recently and the woman had gone through some amazingly horrible circumstances in her childhood. While living in a foster home, she started to write, over a period of time, 100 things she loved about herself. ONE HUNDRED! The neat thing was that she wrote them out in color crayon and hung them on her bedroom wall thereby creating a cocoon of art and love.
I thought, could I come up with 100 things I love about myself? Right now, where I’m at in my life, I could get a pretty good number going, however, one hundred is a stretch. While listing out might be a challenge, what about how we use our words?
The other day, I had a client send me a text apologizing for missing her appointment. She texted “Oh my, I forgot I am a dumb ass. I am so sorry”. My reaction was to text back, “please do not describe yourself that way”. It hurt to see her call herself this and all she did was forget an appointment. No biggy, we rescheduled. Self-love comes in a variety of ways.
I catch myself at times having thoughts or using words that are not flattering to me. Growing up, the words that were used when I didn’t do something quite right were not encouraging, they were actually quite deprecating. It has been a process to stop hitting the replay button of those messages and remind myself those words weren’t and aren’t mine.
What words are you using, what steps do you take daily to love yourself? Taking the first step can be scary, but, living in mediocre is even scarier. Your soul yearns to have you live the fullest life you desire. Really! I encourage you to take ten days, and each day, write something that you love about yourself. It can be as simple as your smile, the way your hands remind you of your mother, the choices you make to move your body more, or drinking more water to hydrate.
Want to explore this more? Dear God, How Can I Finally Love Myself? By Barbara Rose, Ph.D. – great book for digging a bit deeper on loving yourself.
