Saturday Morning Inspiration: Love Yourself

The quest for 68,000 positive thoughts a day

How inspired are you by the thoughts you have, the words you use, the feelings you feel, and the core values and beliefs you live by?

It’s not so black and white, and there are many missing pieces of the puzzle. The more information we have on diet, exercise, and weight loss, the higher the rates of body dissatisfaction and life dissatisfaction we have than ever before in history.

I’m going to leave you with two things by the end of this writing.

One is how greater self-love will inspire your life.

And two, how to cultivate more of it.

One of the first and most basic fundamental needs that we have as humans is a connection through love, a bond.

I remember, like it was yesterday, feeling so much love and adoration for my mom, who, in my eyes, was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. She was a mix between a supermodel and a superwoman, and she could do no wrong. I used to love watching her get dressed, watching her get ready for going out, dressing in beautiful outfits.

I would always compliment her. “Mom, that dress is so beautiful on you! Where are you going? Let’s take a picture. Oh, I love that. That looks so good!” And in return, I would receive, “This? Oh God no. I look so fat today. No pictures. Oh God, no."

Like a slap in the face.

I felt wrong.

I was wrong while I was extending love that she couldn’t accept at that time because of a block of her own.

When will it be that we stop justifying, people-pleasing, and looking outside ourselves for validation about our worth that we know comes from within?

Maybe if we felt that true depth of worth and love for ourselves, we wouldn’t constantly be comparing ourselves to everyone else, looking at others, and feeling that if they succeed, that means we must fail.

If they’re good, I must be bad.

This natural scarcity and this feeling of competition with all those around us

When will it end?

I know it’s possible for us to look in the mirror and see true beauty and true love, with kindness, compassion, empathy, and true magnanimous love.

Magnanimous is deeper than unconditional love.

It goes to the depths that include compassion and kindness—true depth.

Diets don’t work. Love does.

Negative emotions cause nervous system chaos, while positive emotions bring the nervous system into alignment. We make better choices for our lives and for our health when we come from a positive emotional space.

Did you know we have, on average, 70,000 thoughts in a single day?

And did you know that 98% of those thoughts are repeats from yesterday? And that about 80% of them are negative towards ourselves or somebody else.

How do you think all that negativity is making you feel? Love. It’s one of those first things we feel, but while we go through these experiences in life that shut us down a little, I want to get closer to you, so I compliment you. I’m in awe of you. And yet, little bit by little bit, we get shut down. I feel very fortunate to have had an experience like I did. Upon being born, I was removed from my parents shortly after, and they were told that I had a problem with my lungs. I was not alright; I had to be taken away to be put in the incubator, and true fear came over them, as it would any parent. What I didn’t realize at the time and only now looking back at it is that all the attention—all the love, healing, worry, and positive vibes that were sent to me growing up—in all my many visits to the hospital, checking up on me, making sure I was still okay—unbeknownst to me, this actually strengthened my lungs, my heart, my soul, and my breath.

Did you know positive emotions actually strengthen the integrity of our hearts and our arteries?

We can literally harden the arteries of our hearts through negative emotion. It’s quite fascinating.

Gratitude.

I feel very grateful that my mortality was shown to me at a very young age. You have a problem. Let’s make sure you are always okay. I wasn’t sure there was always going to be another day. So I lived in gratitude. And I knew the feeling when my mom didn’t like my compliments or didn’t receive them, and I didn’t want to do that to others.

These were two really great lessons in my life.

Interestingly enough, it wasn’t until the biggest life lesson, pregnancy and postpartum, came to teach me something that I had not yet learned.

The true depth of self-love

Day after day, thousands of babies are being born, and moms are feeling the pressure. Feel the pressure of needing to lose weight, of looking a certain way, and of doing certain things to make sure they measure up. But we don’t really want to lose weight during that time of our lives. We don’t want to focus on things that we should be superficially obsessed with.

We want to focus on the love, connection, and bonding with our babies.

And you know what I did? I gave myself a really, really, really horrible injury. I injured my back to the point where I ended up in the hospital twice in a single week. My baby was just three years old at the time. I was not able to lift her. I was not able to bathe her. I was not able to care for her in the way that I, as a young mom, would have loved to.

This brought up in me more than I ever could have bargained for. I didn’t even realize how much I often justified, “Well, sure, I’ll eat this, because then I can go work out and I’ll work it off. “ I had all these weird stories and messages that I didn’t even realize were happening in my head. Not being able to exercise, not being able to work up a sweat, and even having pain just breathing allowed me to learn the true essence of what was necessary. It’s the inner work—the inside work—that was absolutely necessary for me to rehabilitate from this experience of having a child.

From the time that I hurt myself, I learned everything that I could about the core. I wanted to understand exactly how I could rehab my own back, and through this, I learned about pelvic health, the deep versus the superficial core, how to rehabilitate it, and how to breathe in a way that was actually supportive to me.

It’s not about all those superficial external things that you think you need to do or have to do all the time.

It’s all about slowing down and trusting your gut.

This is our second brain right here—our intuition.

I specifically wanted to target our weight-obsessed culture.

Weight loss, weight loss, weight loss.

We judge people over and above what is necessary.

What if instead of weight loss, we did judgment loss?

What about letting go of all that scarcity that we have, that feeling of unworthiness? That should never be up for debate.

You are worthy.

You began that way.

You will end that way.

That never needs to change. Trust that. Trust that knowledge.

Did you know there is no survival-adaptive benefit to being your own worst enemy? None whatsoever. We can give it up.

Get it out and bring it down. Bring it down into the positive emotions of the heart, remembering a time when you felt true, deep love. This is where the magic is.

It starts from the heart.

It moves into the core, where you trust that the beliefs and values that you live by are worthy.

All we want is connection.

We want love.

We want to feel loved and connected to people, not because of how we look but because of who we are on the inside.

I want to leave you with three things that I do because I don’t recommend things to others that I do first and always don’t do myself.

The first thing is positive self-talk only.

Under no circumstances do you deserve to be berated for the fact that you missed the gym, ate a piece of cake, or did anything. You don’t deserve it, especially not from yourself. Make a pact.

Number two:

Remember those 98% of your thoughts that you repeated yesterday? Let’s ditch them. That leaves you with over 68,000 thoughts that you could instead say: thank you, thank you for this day, thank you for my friend, thank you for my heart beating. You could find 68,000 things in a day that are, for sure, going to positively impact your life and inspire you much more than those negative thoughts.

And third:

Take time every single day to breathe.

Breathe into that heart space and feel the love.

Positive emotions will keep your heart strong. Breathe into your core. Understand how it works. Get deeper than the superficial. There’s always more than meets the eye.