Loving yourself is the core of successfully leading your life in tune with your soul and your deepest desires. And how can you know who you are without sitting still and turning inward to discover what lies beyond your ego and the endless chattering of your mind?
Life can be a series of experiences in which you learn Not to Love Yourself. These experiences include – less than great and respectful parenting, the structure and focus of our school systems on academic perfection, an economic system based on ego/fear models of interactive humanity, and never learning the importance of your inner life. These four significant patterns are the bulk of what I work on undoing consistently as a Life Coach and Spiritual Teacher. Then my clients and I work on recreating the pattern of Loving Self. I say recreating because we were all born self-loving until we were taught otherwise.
Here are examples of personal experiences and ways to enlighten yourself, freeing yourself of your own detrimental conditioning
Read about my personal pattern of self-criticism when I was anything less than full of energy and ready to perform at life, and awakening to my own entrenched inner critic in one of my first blog postings entitled, My Body Is My Teacher.
Read about my mentor and friend Baeth Davis’ wake-up call to make spending time communing with her Self a priority. Her cancer diagnosis is bringing her deeply within, to the truth of what her being calls her to experience in this lifetime.
Every client that I work with walks the inner path of discovering, layer upon layer, the myriad ways that they judge themselves and often hold anger and disappointment for simply Being who they are. A great culprit of the inner critic is the less than “cover girl body and face” pattern that causes women to loathe or attempt to control their body image. Wow, ladies, we still have work to do as a team to end this war against our bodies. Follow Dr. Christiane Northrop, a holistic medical physician who focuses on helping raise our consciousness about the seriousness of this war with self, and has been for more than thirty years. She is a wealth of knowledge and self-disclosure.
The prevalence of anxiety disorders is an epidemic in our culture! Who is not anxious about living today? Only those who learn how to be still with themselves. Count the ways the culture instills fear into our very being daily in order to create momentum in particular directions – our political system, our medical system, our economic system!!!! Yipes! What is the antidote to anxiety? Cultivating inner peace. (Cultivating inner peace workshops with Laurel are available). The other staple of my business is guiding folks into the space within that is a sanctuary of peace and ultimate bliss. Yes – right here Within YOU and ME! US! Right here. You don’t have to GO anywhere. You simply have to stay still until it is a habit.
Once you can – Stay Still Until It Is A Habit – your answers will eventually emerge. The early experiences of sitting still require discipline to create the habit of moving into the role of Observer, where you watch how Your Mind creates personal misery until directed to do otherwise. The wisdom and love that reside in the deep recesses of your being – beyond the mental chatter – will help you Count the ways you love yourself. Trust me. It works every time!
The sitting in stillness habit
Join me and many others who are making this miraculous discovery that all you need, your greatest resource and wealth is already within you. The meta-physical directive that heals – “The Kingdom of Heaven is Within” – is being discovered as the path to healing by the latest generation of seekers. Come on along and enjoy the experience with us. You’ll be glad you did.
Laurel Holland 