38 ~ How the Journey of Self-Love Fuels Desire

Have you ever considered that the toughest love to master might just be your own?  What if you loved yourself the way you love others? In this episode, we're taking you with us on a journey to the heart of self-love. It's not just about the pampering, adventures or time ; it's an honest acceptance of where you are right now.

In a series that's as rich in perspective as it is in personal revelation, we've been joined by others like Katie Henricks (ep 34) and Madison Storm (ep 35), who help us navigate the intricate landscape of body image, and with Karen Fitzgerald's wisdom on aging (ep 36), we've explored how self-love is the diesel fuel powering our deepest desires.

Are you ready to let go of the harsh voice of self-judgment and embrace the healing voice of self-acceptance?  This episode peels away the layers of our inner critics, perfectionists, revealing the loving possibility underneath. We discuss how extending compassion towards ourselves can transform our interactions with ourselves, others, and ultimately, how we experience self love overall. 

As we delve into the transformative power of desire, we invite our community to join in a conversation about honesty, self love, and creating deep intimacy within and around us. Tune in for an episode that promises to be as nurturing to your soul as it is expansive to your mind.

Chapters

• 0:08 Exploring Self-Love and Acceptance
• 12:56 Practicing Self-Love and Inner Healing
• 19:26 Exploring Self-Love Through Desire

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Welcome to Desire is Medicine. We are two very different women living a life led by desire, inviting you into our world.

Speaker 2: 0:16

I'm Brenda. I'm a devoted practitioner to being my fully expressed true self in my daily life. Motherhood, relationships and my business Desire has taken me on quite a ride and every day I practice listening to and following the voice within.

Speaker 1: 0:32

I'm a middle school teacher turned coach and guide of the feminine, and I'm Catherine, devoted to living my life as the truest and hopefully the highest version of me. I don't have children. I've never been married. I've spent equal parts of my life in corporate, as in some down and low shady spaces. I was the epitome of tired and wired and my path led me to explore desire. I'm a coach, guide, energy worker and a forever student, even after decades of inner work.

Speaker 2: 1:00

We are humble beginners on the mat, still exploring, always curious. We believe that listening to and following the nudge of desire is a deep spiritual practice that helps us grow.

Speaker 1: 1:12

On the Desires Medicine podcast. We talk to each other, we interview people we know and love about the practice of desire, bringing in a very important piece that is often overlooked being responsible for our desire. Hey, friends, so happy to have you back. Hey, brenda, good to see you. Great to be here with you, catherine, as always. Thank you, the self-love series is really going well it's.

Speaker 1: 1:43

We have had the privilege of interviewing Katie Hendricks, madison Storm. That has been a lot of like body, body image, and then Karen started to sort of lean into aging. But the overarching or the umbrella of it all is really self-love. If you caught our episode on what is self-love and we were sort of kicking this off, we really sat with what is self-love Like. What is love? Is self-love the same as love for another? Can we love other without loving ourselves fully? If we landed on the question of do I love myself and treat myself with exquisite care? Ouch, I can honestly say that I do not always love myself with exquisite care. But when I look at the dictionary, the dictionary says love is an intense feeling of deep affection and not that long ago, when we were chatting on one of the episodes, brenda said hating ourselves to the point that our society or the powers that be profit. It's like wow ouch, when we really really look at that. There are so many industries, especially catering to women, where they really profit in the areas that we don't feel air quotes enough. There are so many different ways to look at self-love. One of the things that we spoke about at that kickoff, that kickoff episode, was self-love being the diesel fuel, like the power that powers that backpack, that powers our desire. It's self-love is one of the things that helps us back ourselves. It helps us choose ourselves. We have to.

Speaker 1: 3:42

Brenda was talking about how we have to be willing to disappoint people, to put ourselves first. Often it's like a reorientation from perfection to I'm not willing to people, please. I'm not willing to do things because of obligation. I'm going to know my yes or no. What is my capacity, where are my boundaries. All of this to say like, how can we be in more acceptance of where we are, where our body is, where we are in our life, where we are in the aging process? Can we really really reorient ourselves from perfection to loving our growing human journey? And we're still with the question like is self-love hard to define? Why is it still considered in many spaces going to the spa, getting a manicure, massage, what I would now call like adorning the vessel. Or when I think of self-love, sometimes I'm thinking a walk in nature, walk on the beach, going to the gym, taking a nap, which can really be looked at as moving and restoring the vessel.

Speaker 1: 5:02

When I think about loving someone, I about I want to spend time with them, I miss them. How often do we just send a text like I miss you, I want to see you. Or we have love languages, oh, words of affirmation. Or I want cuddles, or I want the best for them, or, better yet, I want to leave them better than I found them. Like it's so hot, it's so nice, so romantic.

Speaker 1: 5:29

But what about the moments that we are actually abandoning ourselves to meet others? Like, well, we say, oh, I want to be with them. I was going to go to the gym, but I want to spend time with them, so I'm just going to go spend time with them. Aka I am abandoning myself because did I really reschedule myself for the gym or did I just go hang out with them because that felt like so much more fun?

Speaker 1: 5:58

Sometimes we, in our attempt to love another person in our attempt to back them up. It's at the cost of us and often we're backing them and we don't even agree with them with what they're actually doing. So I wanted to kind of come back on the starting line here with Brenda and talk about, like what has come up in these episodes and we want to invite you friends, like let's sit with. Like what is love? Is it based on a cost? Can we invite ourselves and others to be with? What does it mean to really love yourself and can we really love others if we don't really love ourselves? Is it really loving someone if we abandon ourselves in order to meet them? You know how sometimes, brenda, we're dating somebody and we would love them more if they just X, y or Z. Have you ever been there like trying to change your partner?

Speaker 2: 7:08

Oh, I've never heard of that. Oh, I've been the president of that club.

Speaker 1: 7:16

Yes, you were the president, the president of change for me club. Okay.

Speaker 1: 7:24

I know that there's a popular topic, a subject or not subject, popular phrase that says hey, if you really love someone, that means that you don't require them to change at all, like if everything stayed the same, right, you're really in love with this person, like everything that they do is just fine, like you don't need it to be different. But how often do we say we love ourselves, but yet we want to change so many things about us? We potentially wish we were younger, we could do it over. We look different in our skin, our hair, all these places where we just want to create a completely different cutout. I mean, I really feel this pull with the series, the self-love series, especially with the three lovely women that we have interviewed thus far, to really come back to the definition of it all. Like, what does it mean to love ourselves? What would it really be if we could do an amazing job at loving ourselves as a baseline? And I wanted to ask you, brenda, when you think about loving someone else, what are the things that you, what is?

Speaker 1: 8:44

I guess, your love language, for example.

Speaker 2: 8:48

Hmm, such a good question. My love language is words of appreciation. I love that, so communication is really important to me. It's important for me to have good communication and be on the same page and understand each other.

Speaker 1: 9:06

When I think about love, languages or a lot of. I had a client ask me one time, not that long ago does this mean that my needs, the things that I want from other people it's in some way shape or form is related back to my wounds and I said yeah. I think so, I think the things that we need is places where we fall short. Right, and so I would totally like. How often, brenda, do you give yourself words of affirmation?

Speaker 2: 9:35

Such a great question, I think. I think it's not something I've ever done my whole life, but since I've been on this journey of a spiritual journey that's included a lot of embodiment work and eventually led me to realize how much I was hating on myself over the years and I've been shifting that I've learned to do that more and more. I've learned to be gentle and kind with my words. We just dropped a toolbox episode on neutrality, a beautiful practice on where you've learned to, instead of being judgmental of your body, actually just shift that into neutrality, and that has been a huge game changer for me. Instead of looking in the mirror and not really sometimes liking what I see, I can just be neutral about it, and that just takes the sting out of it. It takes the sting out of it Because, let's face it and Madison said this in her episode she doesn't always love her body. I don't always love what I see.

Speaker 2: 10:49

That's not what we're talking about when we're talking about self-love. This isn't like a utopia or somewhere to get where it's all perfect. It's really just being with yourself wherever you are. And can I appreciate my body, can I just? Sometimes it's just like, oh, I appreciate my body, and then sometimes I just love the fact I love myself where I am like, oh, I'm being really critical today. Can I just love the part of me that's critical today, love her.

Speaker 2: 11:20

You know, maybe I just can't get to self-love and just say, oh, I'm having trouble being kind to myself today. Can I just love myself there, instead of trying to change it? Just can I love myself today. Can I just love myself there, instead of trying to change it? Just can I love myself here. I ask myself that all the time that's my practice is just coming back to where I actually am not trying to make it any different than what it is whether it's with another person or with myself it's the same practice and just accept myself where I am, right here, right now, being in reality, being present with what is.

Speaker 2: 12:00

Which is what I love about that practice that we dropped the neutrality practice, because the judgment puts so many layers on top of it and adds a lot of drama and it's just this hamster wheel of self-hate and it's really hard to get out of that and I don't think we feel good about ourselves when we're doing that. And those of us that are mothers and you don't want to pass it on to your children I hear mothers saying that all the time. They don't want to pass it on to your children, but they also don't know how to stop. How do you stop the cycle of hating on yourself? Well, you have to make some kind of a choice to do something differently and that practice has really helped me, not only with my body, but just stopping judgmental all over the place and drama filled all over the place, just being more neutral in general.

Speaker 1: 12:56

So when you say practice, you're referring to wherever you catch yourself hating on yourself, pausing and saying how can I just love where I am and appreciate where I am and be okay with where I am versus? Being judgmental automatically, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 2: 13:14

And that comes from judging myself for past choices as well. Uh, judging myself for past choices as well. Sometimes I could get into a real pit of a cycle of self-judgment about something and you know, I'll pop out and I'll be like, ooh, like awareness, like, oh, I'm in this cycle, I'm going to pause this, I'm going to, I'm going to choose something different right here. And the times that I haven't been able to, the way that I've been able to shift that on a larger scale is just notice it and accept myself. Oh, I'm so critical of myself, I'm so judgmental of myself, I'm so judgmental of myself and don't judge that, don't judge. It's like, stop judging that and just accept. Oh, I have this persona in here who is really critical and is a perfectionist and punishes. And just being aware of those inner parts has been a really huge shift for me, because now I can notice when they're happening and then say, oh, that's my perfectionist voice, oh, that's my critical voice, oh, that's my judgmental voice. And then I can notice it and shift it.

Speaker 1: 14:42

Thank you for that. Yeah, it has me think about my own voice. I think my voice that voice for me used to be a lot louder in the past. I don't think the neutrality practice helped as much as me really being really honest with myself, like I did the best I could and even if I messed up, like I messed up and I did the best I could, I used to run things in my mind and say, oh, how could I have done this better? How could I have done that better? I still do that, and the practice is sort of how can I just do this better next time, like this wasn't the last time, how can I do it better next time? And just being proud that I did the best I could? I think for a long time I used to pause, and I think for a long time I used to pause and potentially feel like I could have done that better. But when I became more honest with myself, the truth is that if I could have done that better, I would have done that better. The fact that I did not do that better is because I could not do it better, right, and so thank you so much for bringing that in.

Speaker 1: 16:05

There are voices that we have, that have, yeah, just judgy, judgy and perfectionist and all the places where we sort of squeeze the life out of ourselves because of the idea or the ideal in our minds wasn't achieved, and so, therefore, now we're going to take all this energy and punish ourselves for what wasn't created. I really love that we took some time here, brenda, to just kind of pause and be with what is self-love. And even today, today, as we're talking, I think a lot of self-love has been looked at from the lens of potential body, right, and I want to invite us to just kind of be with. I mean, what would it be like? How am I when I'm just loving someone else? Am I when I'm just loving someone else, and am I that way with myself? I think that's a great inquiry. What do you think when you think of that?

Speaker 2: 17:09

I think it's such a beautiful question because I think we do get foggy when it comes to ourselves and we're, especially as women, used to putting ourselves last. But we're so good at loving on other people. We're so good, we're just natural givers as women and that's beautiful. But it can also be detrimental to us as well if we don't have boundaries around that. So if we reframe the question to well, how would I love on this other person? How would I love on this newborn baby? What do I want my child to grow up thinking? How would I love on this newborn baby? What do I want my child to grow up thinking? What would I say to my friend who was thinking these thoughts?

Speaker 2: 17:49

It's amazing how kind we are when it comes to other people and how cruel we can be when it comes to ourselves. Something that really helped me once was I don't even remember who said it, but it landed for me If I had a friend who talked to me the way I talked to me, I would be friends with that person and I was like Ooh, wow, you know, and it's just a voice that's in there.

Speaker 2: 18:18

It's not your true self. Like I believe that our true, the essence of ourselves is love. Any other thoughts that are coming in are not us. They're conditioned beliefs, they're things that we picked up from our society, from our culture. They're not us. So that's how I distinguish the voices. That's how I distinguish the voices. That's how I distinguish what's my true self and what's the wounds on top. Is it love and is it loving, and is it supporting and is it going yeah, that's a great idea. Or is it saying you suck, you're never going to be able to do that? Remember, you failed at that last time. You're ugly at that last time you're ugly, then no, that's wounding, and that we can work on right With a coach, with a teacher. But I know not to follow those voices anymore and it can get really confusing. But I think, if we think of it in terms of we're meant to have a beautiful life, so we are love and follow the loving voices, that helps me a lot.

Speaker 1: 19:26

I love that distinction. Follow the loving voices. That is it. That is the wrap for today. I love that it is Brenda's invite ourselves and everyone else to follow the loving voice we're gonna. I want to kind of leave that open-ended question for everyone what is self-love to you? Do you treat yourself the way that you would treat someone that you love? And please write in any questions that you may have or any thoughts we'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker 2: 20:09

Thank you for joining us on the Desire is Medicine podcast.

Speaker 1: 20:13

Desire invites us to be honest, loving and deeply intimate with ourselves and others. You can find our handles in the show notes.

Speaker 2: 20:21

We'd love to hear from you.