It’s Valentine’s Day so I want to talk about love.
Love it or hate it, it’s one of those times when we seek validation from somebody else to gives us that feeling of love, that feeling of completeness and that we are worthy of love.
However, if you are in relationship that’s not so fantastic or you are single, it can become a pretty tough time. Even if you are in a good relationship, what I am going to teach you today is still really valuable because the problem that we often have is that we don’t love ourselves.
So what I want you to do today is not to look outward for love, but to look inward. To give yourself validation on your own that you are worthy of love.
I want you to do an exercise today which is all about how amazing you are. In particular how amazing your body is! Our body does so much stuff for us. Our body is growing our hair, it’s breathing, digesting our food, we can sense the world about us. Our body allows us to have our human experience.
Often we’re beating up on this body. We look into the mirror and say “oh I didn’t like this part of me”, “oh this is not good enough”. We compare ourselves to others by thinking – they look like this so I should look like that, this mean I am rubbish and I have too many wrinkles, I am too old, I am too young to be taken seriously. And so on and so forth.
We build up all this negative chatter in our head that we take out on our body. A body which is doing its very best to keep you alive and to keep you functioning.
So here is a practical exercise for you…
I want to draw a little person on a piece of paper – it doesn’t have to be a masterpiece, it can be a stick man 😊
I want you to write across on the top:
My body is amazing!
Then go around and start thinking about all the reasons why your body is amazing.
For example: you have hair that can be coloured and styled, you have eyes that can see, a nose that can smell, a mouth that can taste. You’ve got hands that can touch & make food, arms that can hug, a heart that beats. You have a digestive system to absorb food, kidneys that filter and detox, lungs that breathe. You have legs that move you, feet that ground you to the earth and so on and so on…
I want to go through absolutely everything about your body.
There are also all those internal chemical processes that I am happy that we don’t even think about: our blood, our muscles, our cells. I am a biochemist so I can get very geeky! 😊
We can go on about all the wonderful things our body does.
So, if your body is this amazing then why are you saying it’s horrible? Why you are being so against this body that is doing so much for you?
With this in mind and remembering that your body is so amazing, I would like to turn this into:
If my body is doing all this for me, then how could I love it more?
How can I say thank you, I love you, you are brilliant, you are awesome?
Really start to validate yourself and give yourself that love.
So make Valentine’s Day this year all about the celebration of you!
Have fun with this exercise. Really go for it.
From now on – everyday look in the mirror and thank your body for being so awesome and give yourself that sense of love…