How Louise Hay Inspires Self Love

Let’s get clear on what we mean when we talk about loving the self.  

“What about me makes me an incredible partner for the right person?”

This is a question we can ask ourselves whether we are single, in a relationship, looking for a relationship or not. As humans we co exist and co create with others. It can be applied to a relationship of any form – with a lover, a husband, a friend, a relative, a co worker a neighbour or even a stranger.

No matter what we are trying to overcome within our lives - all literature, teachings, transmissions and guides point us in one very specific direction.. learning how to love the self. Loving ourselves fully activated miracles within our lives.

Hesitation in loving ourselves rises up in worrying this might make us seem full of ourselves, unaware of the arrogance we are cultivating. We worry people might see us as being stuck up.. but that is only our fear expressing itself.

Love of the self is to feel a great respect and connection with and for our bodies and minds - and as we learn to love ourselves, we realise that what we love and respect within ourselves creates an overflow that allows us to be in loving connection with everything around us.

I can feel love for:

The miracle of nature and all it provides.

Knowledge and wisdom shared.

Our incredible bodies and the way they work.

Playfulness and our ability to experience joy.

The way the universe provides experience to us, through us, as us.

Another person.

The list can go on and on and on - what would you start your list with?

Unconsciously, we have taken on many ways that we don’t love ourselves and overtime we might have even normalised these thought processes and ways of being.

We are not loving ourselves when we:

Judge, blame and criticise ourselves.

Mistreat and punish our bodies with drugs, alcohol or foods or withhold nourishment from our body.

Procrastinate about things that are in our best interest.

Create debt and future burdens.

Attract relationships that hurt us.

A lack of self worth stems from an expression of not loving ourselves.

A lack of self worth begins to build momentum and manifest in many ways within our lives, each layer of this nonsense starting to make us feel like it’s real and true and we begin to believe it and carry it as who we are and what’s available for us.

Here are some examples:

Someone takes us out and then never calls again. We think something must be wrong with us.

Our friend is tired and irritable. We wonder what we have done wrong to cause it and why they don’t want to talk to us today.

Our marriage ends and we believe this makes us a failure.

We are afraid of intimacy or allowing anyone to really get to see who we are so we have anonymous sex.

We don’t trust ourselves to make decisions because we are certain they will be wrong.

How does your lack of self worth express itself through you?

You might have some doubts about your ability to love yourself completely, you might even think it’s not possible for you - but you have already been able to do this. You were born in awareness of your own perfection.

When I gave birth to my son, I remember witnessing the way he really existed as if the entire universe existed only to meet his needs. He would freely express his emotions, asking for what he needed, letting himself be fully expressed in his frustration, his exhaustion, his happiness and his excitement.

Tiny babies actually have both a physiological and psychological need for love - they will suffer greatly without it. Babies will not stand to be alone, they will scream and cry and call out for the connection they crave, but as adults - we have learned to live without love.

Babies don’t feel insecure or judgemental about their physical form. They love every single part of their bodies. You were like that. You were fully expressed in your needs and desires and completely accepting and embodied within your own physical form.

It is only when we begin to listen to outside influences, adults that had learned to be fearful that we begin to deny our own brilliance.

We have all experienced loving ourselves fully, deeply, without reservation - we can remember this, we can reunite with that love within us, it is natural and normal and innately placed within each and every one of us as we come into this world.

A very simple exercise to begin to reconnect with the love you have for yourself is to stand in front of a mirror, look into your own eyes, hold your gaze, breathe and feel the rise and fall of your own inhale and exhale within your body. When you are ready, say your own name and declare “I love, you, accept you and support you exactly as you are”

Working within gyms for over a decade has given me deep insights into understanding that we we perceive “the problem” to be about ourselves is very rarely the actual problem.

A lot of people spend years of their lives trying to correct a problem that isn’t actually going to offer a solution to what they are suffering within them.

People spend decades of their lives in a war with their physical appearance, fighting fat and remaining overweight. People are often convinced that their limitations in life are because they are overweight - but time after time I have seen, and the work of many embodiment affirms that excess weight is only an outer effect of an inner problem.

Time after time I was able to support women that had tried every diet under the sun, had berated themselves for years, tried to force themselves to exercise excessively to lose weight with what appeared to be effortless ease.

The diet that worked? Cutting out negative thoughts. Not focusing on weight and instead devoting themselves to learning how to love and approve of themselves supported women in becoming confident in their capacity to make better choices for themselves and their bodies - and the flow on effect included weight loss.

Not everyone wants to believe that experiencing success can be as simple as this. Some people are still programmed to believe that systems and strategies are the smartest and only solution for the problems we encounter.

There is no judgement around this. We all open ourselves up to what we are willing to experience, see and claim for ourselves at different times. I was 33 when I first decided to develop a truly loving and connected relationship with myself.

When we choose force and we believe we can produce a result that will have us feel differently about ourselves we come to find that we can in fact produce anything we want to .. but it won’t necessarily change how we feel about ourselves.

Loving ourselves requires us to devote ourselves to dissolving self criticism. In fact, it asks us to never criticise ourselves.

This can feel almost impossible. Do you criticise yourself often?

We have allowed self criticism to be normalised. We do it openly and in front of others. We use it as a twisted form of motivation - how will I ever change if I don’t criticise myself?

At the core of all self criticism what we find is one belief that simply must be dissolved if we are to ever offer ourselves the love we crave - the belief that we are not good enough.

So this is where we start. This is where we focus all of our life force energy. We get to stop telling ourselves we have to not be bothered by what other people are saying about us and finally, powerfully, acknowledge that was really bothers us, whats really getting in our way, what the biggest problem has always been – is the way we speak to ourselves, as ourselves, of ourselves and the impact that has had on our own ability to develop a loving relationship with self.

Louise Hay Prayer of Affirmation of Self love

In the infinity of life where I am, all is perfect, whole and complete. I am always divinely protected and guided. It is safe for me to look within myself. It is safe for me to look into the past. It is safe for me to enlarge my viewpoint of life.
I am more than my personality – past, present or future.

I now choose to rise above my personality problems to recognise the magnificence of my being. I am totally willing to learn to love myself. All is well in my world.

So, here we are, in this moment, tuned in to the understanding that what I have thought the problem was – may not be what the problem is. I thought it was something outside myself. I thought there was someone else to blame. Now I feel the power I have to call back my own accountability and responsibility for the experience I have of myself, as myself and for myself and to admit to myself that I have been feeling, all this time, as if I wasn’t good enough and I have a lack of self love. I am starting to understand that anytime I experience a problem in my life it will highlight that – that I am in a state that has me thinking and believing that Im not good enough, and not tapped in and connected to the self love that would uplift and affirm what my absolute truth is, what it always is – I am safe, guided, protected and loved.

In this life we don’t have to be stopped or disheartened by our early limitations. We are given endless opportunities to recognise our own brilliance and divinity no matter what we have been told.

We get to look at the thought forms, beliefs and ways of being that we have taken on throughout the course of our life and decide whether we are willing to continue to experience ourselves and the world through their effect – or whether we are consciously choosing to bring an end to what was and create tomorrows experiences with clarity, presence and intention as the woman we are today.

We don’t have to get mad or upset or disheartened about what has been. What has been has no impact on what is available to us, unless we keep looking into the future through the same lens. We will only experience the same limitations of our past by carrying them into the future with us. We get to design a future that simply does not align with our old ways of being when we consciously create new thought forms, generate new emotions and call forward the actions that affirm and awaken the new reality we are manifesting.

I have worked through many of my own limiting beliefs – one strong one being ‘im not good enough’ and it came from the fear or being abandoned & ignored.

I found it really difficult to speak about my needs as an adult. Silence through struggle had become a way of life for me. As a child, my Dad travelled for work constantly – justifying his absence in my young life as having to work to provide for the family. I felt a sense of shame that because I needed provision my Dad had to leave. Later on, when my parents marriage suffered terribly, I witnessed the way my mother suffered in silence and that when she did speak up about her dissatisfaction, it made the situation worse. As a teen, when I struggled within myself and it came to light and I admitted the ways I had been suffering – I was pulled from one school and put into another. Alone. Isolated. I internalised that as being the consequence of speaking up about my own struggle – to me, in my life, having a need, asking for help, admitting some sort of deficiency meant isolation, silence and the threat of people leaving.

Its little wonder I held so much of my own inner conflict in. Its little wonder I had such a hard time reaching out for support. Its little wonder I felt safer to suffer in silence than to face the perceived consequences of speaking my truth.

The truth is, I had to learn that if I developed a strong, loving relationship with myself and with god then I would never have to fear isolation again. I had to witness and realise I had been abandoning myself through all of the self harming distractions and disassociations I had created. Some obvious like self medicating, others hidden and a little more tricky to call out – like over exercising or throwing myself into work and becoming unavailable even to myself. 

Going back into our own lived experiences can be seen as a deep cleanse of your own personality & the reactivity that has been coiled inside you in response to how you interpreted and internalised what was said and done to you and around you.

Understanding why we are experiencing ourselves and the world in the way we are supports us in making new decisions and definitions for ourselves moving forward. The past cannot be changed – but the future will be shaped by our current thinking. Understanding enables us to rise about the conflict and tension within us and empower ourselves to take greater control of our own future.

There have been many authority figures who were influential in your childhood. When we sit and ask ourselves to consider all the ways we feel about ourselves, and ask ‘who told me that? when did I first start believing that?’ we realise that a lot of what we think and believe isn’t even reflective of a truth that has risen from the base of our being – but the residue of someone elses projection thrust onto us when we were at our most impressionable and easily influenced age and stage.

What were you told about money? About your body? About love and relationships? What were you told about success? What were you told about your own creative talents? As a child did you realise that the grades you received in a report card were reflective of what you could produce at the time you were tested, or were you lead to believe your grades were reflective of your value and worth?

When we write down all of the negative things that have been said about us, all the negative messages we received or internalised as a child – even from mainstream media, we can begin to just look at them objectively. We realise we might never have believed that ourselves at all – we can simply begin to say ‘oh, so that’s where that belief came from’ and we begin to create some separation between who we are and the beliefs we have had that were making us feel not good enough.

What do we do from here? Well, there is so much to do, far more than I can share effectively like this right now – but I don’t want you to think it’s a long and complicated process. It doesn’t have to be.

We get clear on what we have believing, we courageously question all that we have believed and work out what is really true for us now, we navigate our resistance to change and we actively build a new reality for ourselves, as ourselves, through ourselves.

We dissolve resistance, we forgive, we release what doesn’t serve us. We put awareness into practice and learn to create new, supportive thought forms & use our own creative intelligence to co create with the universe and support ourselves in remaining in alignment with what is truly, divinely, undoubtedly meant for us as it waits for us to become an energetic match. We claim the new by developing daily practices that reinforce our learning and confidently demonstrate the results, celebrating every little miracle you witness unfolding before you.

Above all, we get to choose to make this process of life easy. We get to remember that its supposed to be fun and playful and exciting and expansive. We get to make this transformational change funny – its all temporary anyway, and if we can learn to play with life, have fun with life, laugh with life then absolutely nothing can touch us.

Find your way back to joy and love and laughter and ease and the knowing that you are perfect, whole and complete. You are only asked to be a living, loving, joyous expression of life.

All is well.  

Let me finish here today with another Louise Hay prayer that will usher us into a feeling of faith, allowing, guidance and trust.

I rejoice in the knowledge that I have the power of my own mind to use in any way I choose. Every moment of life is a new beginning point as we move from the old. This moment is a new beginning for me right here and now.

All is well in my world.