When We Don’t Love Ourselves

A big part of the spiritual movement is love. Loving ourselves and loving others. And something I’ve been struggling with for the past few years is the ability to feel love. I mean, it feels like my heart keeps getting plugged up and closing. But having regular healing sessions allows me to bring things to light, releasing all sorts of darkness and feeling open, until before I know it, my heart is plugged up again with things needing to be released. It’s honestly been really weird because the incredible and amazing healing work I was doing prior to six years ago left me so open-hearted and connected to my higher self and Source that love flowed through me more than it ever had in my entire life. I was more connected to my intuition than ever, I had lots of great energy, and more often than not life just flowed. Such is the path of my Kundalini awakening, having turned me into a vessel for repeatedly transmuting darkness. For now.

What healing by using hypnotherapy has taught me is why we don’t always love ourselves and what to do about it.

Energetically, spiritual love is the love of our Source. It’s absolutely unconditional, is ever expanding, and is filled with knowlege and information. It’s also incredibly healing. What we as humans call love ranges from the more spiritual and unconditional love, to attachment and sometimes outright pain.

When we as souls choose to merge part of our energy with a physical body, we enter a world that’s very different from the world of spirit. Cut off from knowing we’re eternal, never alone and have all sorts of guidance and help in the asking, it’s a world where we experience physical and emotional pain unlike that of the spirit world. Pain that we reject because in this world, pain equates to injury, alienation, and in the extreme, ultimately death. In order to perpetuate this experience of incarnation, we need to be alive. Of course, it’s not all bad. We’re also here to experience comfort, satisfaction, happiness, and joy.

I’ve used hypnotherapy to tackle emotions that send me running to food when I’m not hungry, and following threads of discomfort, I’ve been led to my childhood and even to a few past lives when I was terrified and in fear. Not only was I scared, but there were a host of thoughts associated with the fear, such as, “I’m not good enough. I’m defective. I’m broken. I’m fat and unacceptable.”

And every time I looked at the scenes through wise and compassionate adult eyes, I saw the higher picture my inner child wasn’t privy to. I saw my mentally ill mother screaming at me or the one time my father was upset with me. I finally realized the reason my mother went off on me was due to her mental illness, not because of anything I’d done. And I saw that when Dad was upset, he was actually upset with Mom but let some of it out on me. I hadn’t done anything truly wrong. During these times I was a toddler and was beginning to individuate.

I also saw past lives when I was killed because I was intuitively connected. One when I was a large black man who was a slave. Another when I was a white woman in the late 1800’s who was an herbalist. And one when I was a young woman accused of being a witch. I developed the belief that it wasn’t safe to be intuitively connected because it would get me killed.

With the sessions going back to my childhood, I not only saw beliefs I carried, but I realized I’d created them in order to explain away the pain I was feeling. They made sense of things. If I hadn’t been able to withstand what I now call the pain of life, I would have died. The pain would have been too much. I also saw during a few sessions that I’d picked up the exact belief from my mother.

Like when I tuned into the thought that I was defective. Looking down on the scene from a higher perspective I saw that as a toddler I wasn’t defective after all – I’d been acting age appropriately and Mom was sick. As soon as my inner child began to let go of the belief, I suddenly knew that my mother had felt like she was defective and I had taken on her belief as my own. What an epiphany!!

All of these beliefs I held deeply buried in my unconscious mind would occassionally simmer to the surface causing agitation and irritation that I soothed with food. However, after bringing them up and healing them, the desire to nibble would vanish.

Not only have I looked at food cravings, but hypnotherapy has been an incredible tool to look at all sorts of stress and some disease in my life. And each time I found the root cause, it’s always gone back to what amounts to a block in my energy field. A block in my ability to allow love to flow through me. A moment in time when the pain of life became so bad that I created a belief to explain it away. A belief of less than perfect and whole that allowed me to continue this physical experience. That’s what I call the human condition in a nutshell.

We create blocks in our energy field (unconscious negative beliefs) in order to be able to perpetuate life. But they end up creating a spectrum of pain, suffering, and disease.

Moments when we don’t love ourselves are when our unconscious beliefs of less-than are activated. They are part and parcel of simply being human. They may sound like, “I’m an idiot. I’m fat. I’m lazy. I’m not worth it.” They are moments of judgment where we hold some sort of disdain for ourselves. There are so many ways we don’t love ourselves and they all stem from these persistant little parts of us who are essentially stuck in time just waiting for us to find them and set them free.

And they affect all sorts of areas of our lives. My focus for years was the size of my body and my relationship with food. For others it’s about chronic money, relationship, or (physical and/or mental) health issues.

These moments focus on ourselves, but quite often we turn our focus externally, judging others as less-than and seeing the world in general as unsafe not trustworthy. All of this can be changed by doing inner healing. What we see externally is merely a reflection of our inner thoughts and beliefs.

There are all sorts of ways to love ourselves by honoring, respecting, and taking care of ourselves. By making time for those we love and doing things that bring us happiness. And the really cool thing is, the more you heal and change the landscape of your inner world, the more Source love is able to flow through full-time. You are able to love not only yourself more fully but others as well. After all, you can’t give what you don’t have.

Make time to love yourself because you’re worth it!