After watching my video which outlines my personal road map to healing, a viewer asked me if the steps were written down anywhere as she'd like to follow them. I thought, 'Your wish is my command!'. Here they are.
A practical reason to focus on self-love: You will not be able to stop your negative habit for someone else, no matter how much you love them. It might seem romantic, valiant or selfless to state that you'll change in order to make the people you love happy, but it's usually a dead end. This may leave the people you've made promises to feeling hurt and let down, so it actually causes more issues. This your journey. You are the one in control, you call the shots - put yourself at the centre of it.
Radical acceptance is the release of 'What if?' and 'If only' in favour of 'This is it'.
It is right and healthy and to be conscious of the pain you've experienced and how it's negatively affected you. That is a normal part of the process but it's important to make sure you don't drop anchor there. Victimhood becomes your normality when it's more desirable to justify standing still than it is to instigate changes. It's easier to identify victimhood mentality in other people than in yourself, so this ties in with radical acceptance intimately. I had to get seriously honest with myself about the extent to which I was holding myself back and how I was actually scared of leaving my self-harm behind because I didn't know who I'd be without it.
It takes so much bravery to turn your fears, anxieties and disappointments into something tangible. So many people want to keep their responses bottled up, afraid to actually go through them. But, buried inside, they only end up being deeply confusing and serving to keep you stuck. Once you begin to see art as therapy, you can see your emotional responses as they occur, charting your evolution, charting your territory and permitting you an important release.
Ask yourself questions, check in with yourself, open up to inner dialogue and appreciate the relationship you have with yourself. When you're mindful of your needs and emotions, you're less controlled by fear, peer pressure, comparative thinking or outside expectation. You don't have to like every single thing about yourself. Don't hang up the phone to your inner voice just because you're flawed. It's about accepting those flaws so that they don't hold so much power over you. The source of -self love is self-acceptance and that requires realism.
It's simply not going to happen overnight, and that is the gift!
It is a terrifying and wonderful gateway to joy.
Committing body and soul slavishly to a destructive pattern such as self-harm or some kind of food-related behaviour inevitably means being self-absorbed. This is often something which it's very difficult to witness without judgement, so people who are embroiled in a negative cycle choose not to witness it at all. Now that I am fully healed, I am comfortable with telling people how small my life was back then. I lacked perspective, I was constantly protecting my ego, I was manipulative, secretive, deceptive and constantly jealous. I needed a soul connection. I needed to refuse to see my body and my my mind as enemies but to see them simply as two halves of an incredible vehicle which enabled me to experience this unique ride through the intense and profound gift of human consciousness.
Every card will arrive at the right time with the right message because, even by shuffling and cutting the deck, you are committing to helping yourself, discovering yourself and working alongside yourself.