Featuring a superb guest blog from my colleague, Katrine Horn:
Why Self-Love is NOT Self-Indulgence
When you think of self-love, do you think of self-care? Do you immediately feel into delicious massages, fantastic holidays in the Caribbean or gorgeous meals in fancy restaurants? If so, think again. All the above can be enjoyed as rewards or indulgences but in no way can they be the foundation for self-love. Self-love goes so much deeper. So what is self-love?
Self-love is when you allow your thoughts, words, and actions to align in the truest expression of your desires. This is why massages, holidays or meals in restaurants in and of themselves do not constitute self-love nor even self-care. Whether they are an expression of self-love or not depends on what the intention behind them is. To illustrate this, let’s take an example.
Imagine you decided to eradicate stress from your life. If you wanted to align your thoughts with your words, you couldn’t call your favorite massage therapist to book a massage if that meant squeezing it into an already over-full schedule. You couldn’t have a massage if it meant sitting in a traffic jam, letting your blood pressure rise because you’d be late for your other appointments and obligations. If you did, it would mean your thought (eradicate stress) would not align with your word (booking an appointment) and likewise for your action: sitting in a traffic jam feeling stressed out. You just allowed more stress into your life, not less!
If you decided to clear your debt and then went on to book a holiday in the Caribbean charging it to your credit card, well then you had only added on more debt and not allowed your actions to align with your thoughts and words.
If you wanted to lose weight and decided to go on a diet, well then the fancy restaurant might lead you into temptation and put your thoughts, words, and actions out of alignment.
The kindest, the most self-loving thing you can do is to honor the promises you make to yourself and that sometimes means foregoing pleasure.
If you do forego pleasure in the moment, you could prepare to enjoy it WITHOUT THE GUILT in the future. Once the pleasure aligns with your thoughts and words, you’ll no longer feel guilty about indulging.
Let’s feel into this: feel into the difference between being on a diet yet letting yourself be tempted to reach for a chocolate bar. When you bite into the chocolate bar, the feelings there are sadness, disappointment, frustration perhaps even disgust. How can that be self-loving? Well, it can’t and it isn’t. Nothing, to a self-lover, is more important than how you feel.
Now feel into how it would be to taste a scrumptious chocolate parfait prepared by a French chef in a fancy restaurant as a treat to celebrate your recent weight loss. How would that feel? Rewarding, delicious, extravagant, gorgeous. Now, which would you choose, the chocolate bar reached for in a moment of frustration or the delicious chocolate parfait? Which is the most self-loving action?
If you want to love yourself fully, you have to honor your decisions and the promises you make to yourself. You can do this by living intentionally. When you’re aware of your intention, it’s so much easier to follow it. When you follow it, you get the results you desire. What could be more self-loving than allowing yourself to experience your desires?
If you desire to experience yourself as slim, sexy and gorgeous-looking then the self-loving thing to do would be to set the intention for staying or becoming slim. That would perhaps mean putting in place an exercise program that you’d feel comfortable with and that you could realistically maintain over a period of time. It would probably also mean taking a look at your current diet and eliminate what does not support your desire of being slim, sexy and gorgeous. You might also have to learn how to say NO lovingly and gracefully when temptation comes your way.
If you desire to experience lounging on white beaches and dipping your toes in the Caribbean but 
haven’t got the money to pay for it, the self-loving thing to do would be to start saving up for it and if necessary eliminate any debt that prevents you from saving up. Again forgoing immediate pleasure in the form of an impromptu shopping spree to concentrate on the self-honoring pleasure of a holiday in the Caribbean is the choice you want to make.
If you desire to live a stress-free life no number of massages can help you do that. No amount of self-care rituals can mask the underlying dissatisfaction of too much to do in too little time. They are indulgences that support your stressful life because they allow you to continue it, they make it bearable. They are symptom-treatments if you will that mask the underlying issue.
Living your life in self-love is honoring your thoughts and words and putting into place actions that will support them and eliminating actions that will baffle them.
Once you get used to aligning your thoughts, words, and actions, you’ll feel a new sense of confidence emerge. Why? Because you’ll be honoring the promises you made to yourself. You’ll no longer be breaking your word by adopting self-defeating behaviors that will make you feel bad about yourself. You will stop betraying yourself.
You’re then free to indulge without the guilt. When you do bite into the chocolate parfait, it’ll be a celebration instead of a guilty indulgence. When you holiday in the Caribbean, you can truly luxuriate in all the feelings of pleasure that it’ll allow because you’ll know you earned it. It’ll be the natural outcome of aligning your thoughts, words, and actions.
When you learn to eliminate what doesn’t support your stress-free life, you’ll be able to reap the benefits of an indulgent massage because you’re no longer having it to make the stress go away but as a means to support you in your self-care. Having a massage will be just as important to you as your obligations to others used to be. You won’t have to justify it. It’ll be your appointment with the gorgeous being that you truly are. This is the person you want to honor and support.
If you liked my perspective on self-love, you can check out my Self-Love Activation Course, a 12-Module Online Video Course, here: https://katrinehorn.com/self-
In Modules 1 & 2, we free up space to honor yourself and align your lifestyle with your values. In Module 6, you learn how to lovingly and gracefully say NO to what is no longer supporting you. Modules 9 & 10 we dive deep into your needs and desires. You create a manifestation plan so that you can honor your desires by experiencing all of them.
If you liked this article from my guest blogger, you will also love this article on Mindset
Sheri Kaye Hoff
Coach, Trainer, and Author, Sheri Kaye Hoff, is a Business Coach known for inspiring massive action and a catalyst for personal and business growth, joy, and profits in a way that is fun, relaxing, and fulfilling, Sheri inspires people to do the work they love and make more money. Sheri helps business owners and professionals to relax into success. She uses both spiritual and practical techniques to obliterate blocks and create dramatic change. She is a business, leadership, happiness, and inner game expert. She has overcome nearly dying, and the loss of her brother at an early age. She has made it her life mission to discover the keys to happiness and success and then share them with her clients and community. Learn More About Sheri
