Love Yourself There!

February is LOVE month, right?  Whether it is romantic love, friendship love, familial love, we celebrate LOVE!  We give Valentine’s Gifts and notes of appreciation and do heart attacks on people’s doors.  We create Valentine’s Boxes for school and a Love Note jar for home. We make pillows and banners and cookies and candies. L-O-V-E is IN THE AIR and all around.

 

Going into 2014, however, I was made beautifully aware through pain of a love affair I had very much neglected for too long.

 

See, I had this thing that I was working on overcoming, without success. I had been working on it for a while.  I would make a few steps of progress, then digress even further from where I started.  It consumed my every thought — it ruined my dreams, it dominated my relationships, it surfaced in my darkest hours, it destroyed my brightest moments.  It was a powerful “thing.” Sound familiar?  Sound like a “thing” in your life right now, too?

 

Then one day, I was talking with a friend who has struggled with a similar “thing” in her life.  I asked her how she finally overcame it.  She told me that one day she met the author of a book that was dedicated to helping people overcome said “thing”; it was someone she had known for some time, so she decided to buy the book while at an event where he was selling it.  As he handed her the book, he paused for a moment and said, “You need to love yourself _____________.” He filled in the blank with the struggle she was trying to overcome.  She drifted away with those words running through her mind, hardly aware of anything else.  She did read the book, thumbed through it anyway; but she could not let go of those words.

 

When she said them to me, they clicked for me as well.

 

What do you desire for yourself?  What is the struggle you are working so hard to overcome — over and over and over again?  Is it financial, physical, emotional, social?  What is the end of this sentence for you? “Love yourself ____________.”

 

Love yourself strong.  Love yourself financially free.  Love yourself brilliant.  Love yourself irresistible.  Love yourself happy!  Love yourself beautiful. Love yourself enough.  Love yourself healthy.  Love yourself successful.  Love yourself inspiring. Love yourself respected.  Love yourself in the relationship dreams are made of and stories are written about!  Wherever and whatever you desire and are working towards, LOVE YOURSELF THERE!

 

YOU are your greatest power!  YOU are all you need to overcome ANY struggle!  For good or for bad, whatever you are seeking in your life, the answer is and always has been YOU!  Are you wasting a lot of energy hating the thing that needs your love the very most?  Are you killing the most beautiful, powerful, inspiring, successful “thing” in your world? Are you giving it power it has no business possessing and using?

 

For me, the application of this was that I had put so much focus on my four children, my husband, my husband’s schooling, our moves, our finances, just so many “things” in my life that I had forgotten ME!  I had forgotten to love myself enough to make ME a priority, to give myself what I needed to have what I sought and desired!  To say NO to things that took away from me, even good things that I knew I was “supposed to” do, embrace, have, create.  To say YES to things that filled me up.  To stop hiding behind failure as an excuse.  To stop drifting between other people’s opinions and thoughts rather than embracing and honoring my own. To simply say, “I am worth it; I am MAKING this happen!!! I deserve this – my family deserves this!” To realize that I was teaching my children how to treat themselves and needed to recreate what that looked like for them.  To turn off the negative dialogue in my head that was manifesting itself in my life. To stop resenting others who had it.  To stop getting lost in the struggle.  To see the beauty and joy and LIFE that was happening around me at every moment, just waiting for me to embrace it and enjoy it! To LOVE MYSELF where I wanted to be!

 

So this month, as you are focusing on giving and gifting and celebrating and LOVING every which way but loose, remember this: If you are unhappy about some “thing” in your life, you need to simply LOVE YOURSELF THERE!  Love yourself through it and to it. Perhaps the most amazing thing about love is, the more you give, the greater your capacity to give.  When I had two children, I didn’t only have enough love for one!  When I had four children, my love for the two wasn’t divided more, it was INCREASED more! So everyone around you will only benefit and receive MORE from you, too!

 

Happy LOVE month, my friends!

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