Find your Inner Love

I’d like to share a very personal post today...

I didn’t have a loving start to life, I did for the first early years but then not so much.  It was very confusing to go from knowing and feeling loved, to have it withdrawn from your life for many years.

It was so painful that I locked up my heart and disconnected from life in many respects.  I pushed away friends, I zoned out a lot at home and spent the vast majority of my time on my own.  I stopped trusting the world.

Love came rushing back into my life as a teenager, and I got so caught up in the hedonism of feeling this loving protection for the first time that I chose it above everything else and very nearly lost everything else as a result.  It rocked my world but made me feel again that love was unsafe and not to be trusted, so I locked up tight again after that fire-cracker fizzled out.

It wasn’t until my marriage broke 20 years later that I started to investigate what was going on with me and my heart.  That was when I came across Louise Hay’s work for the first time. 

“Love is never outside ourselves; love is within us”  

Louise Hay

I grew up in a South Yorkshire mining village, one of the most common insults that adults would throw around as I grew up was ‘he/she really loves themselves, don’t they?’   This was aimed at anyone who had self-confidence, self-esteem and even healthy boundaries!  What a confusing message to be around.

I remember being around age 7 and telling my mum that I had seen my step-mother reciting ‘I love and accept myself exactly as I am’ in front of her mirror.  The ridicule response that came from that went on for years.

I grew up believing that you must not love yourself, you must not approve of yourself, you certainly must not say positive things to yourself in a mirror.  

But then came Louise Hay into my life at my rock-bottom. 

I watched her videos on Youtube and I read her books and slowly I started to love myself first.  To really look at myself in the mirror every day and not scan my face for flaws to be covered up with make-up, but to meet my own gaze and to give myself love, approval and gratitude.

Everything shifted. 

I met my own needs first and stopped looking for anyone to meet them.  

My husband amazingly was inspired and started doing the same for himself.  We had stayed close friends after the split, but when we both started to care for ourselves and meet our own needs we saw each other in a different light and had so much clarity over our difficulties together  - all being rooted in the fact that we each didn’t feel enough inside.

And then came Marisa…

I came across Marisa Peer online.  Marisa has a thing where she encourages everyone to write ‘I am Enough’ on their mirror in lippy as a daily reminder.  She was doing a free online ‘I am enough’ session that I hopped onboard.  That one session blew me away.  I was hooked.

Marisa Peer’s RTT hypnosis has completely changed my life.  As part of the RTT therapist training and the ongoing professional development that follows you receive so many sessions on you, so you really feel the benefits of this profound therapy yourself. 

I began to feel like a different person, I began to look like a different person, in fact when I see old friends they say ‘You are a different person’.   

I am and I’m not.  

What I have done is, I have stripped away all of the harmful and destructive beliefs about myself and my life that I was carrying for years - beliefs that were making me ill, that were keeping me isolated because the world felt unsafe to me, that were locking my heart up so no-one could hurt it, that were weighing me down heavily.  

And I’ve returned back to the Kate I was born to be.  I haven’t turned into anyone new, I’ve returned back to me.  

And it all started with loving myself first.

If you are feeling alone, isolated and hurt this Valentine’s Day, please don’t.  

Give yourself the love you need.  Go to a mirror, look yourself in the eye and say ‘I love you’.  Go buy yourself a card if that’s what you need and write something honestly beautiful to yourself, buy yourself flowers or chocolates.  

We all need love.  But we need to give it to ourselves first.  We can all have our deepest needs met, by giving meeting them for ourselves.  And when you do that, everything around you changes.

Much love,

Kate xx