Thank you for accepting these invitations to love you more. May you know that self-love is something you choose, practice, protect, and enjoy. It is not selfish to love yourself.
This is a place to pause, breathe easy, and consider what you want next. You’re welcome to read, listen, watch, click around, or simply take another calm moment before moving on with your day.
There are no expectations here. There is nothing you need to join, subscribe to, purchase, or feign interest in. There is no political or religious agenda. The purpose is freedom of choice, both here and in your life.
If you'd like to linger, perhaps start with what started Wild Joy Wisdom: the article below titled, “Invitations to Love YOU More.” There are other complimentary offerings under above tab 'Words that Move'. More are added regularly, so you're invited to return if you want.
The main message of Wild Joy Wisdom is simple: Allow the personal freedom you have to try to be kind, especially to yourself, and to do as you please. Take what works. Leave the rest. Live your life. Love YOU more.
Here's the article:
Invitations to Love YOU More
by JW McKeeth
Most of us have heard the notion that you can't love another until you love yourself, but what does it mean to love yourself?
There may be as many ways to love, or not, as there are people on the planet. My own learning, understanding, and acknowledgment that I love myself has emerged over time and often through unexpected ways: a desire for a better life, a comment from a stranger, a deep loss, a quiet whisper from someone who truly sees us.
Years ago, I told a friend that I felt trapped in a bad relationship. Their reply was eye-opening, "I know you do…but you aren't." Turns out, a feeling is not a fact, but it can motivate.
Is love hard-wired? Is it a feeling, a thought, an action?
A combined force? Perhaps love can be experienced as a willingness to go above and beyond for the people in our family or circle, a soldier's willingness to die for one's country, or in a mother's instinct to protect her young. Are these acts of love or simply part of the survival instinct?
Researching love and self-love returned me to the fact that everyone has to define love for themselves. We are all free to love ourselves but may pay dearly until we forge our own self-love definition. What I share here is merely an opportunity to consider and clarify your own personal definitions of what love looks and feels like. For YOU.
My own understanding has evolved to seeing love as an ongoing education, both of self and others. Love returns as a practice; we may need to learn to treat ourselves with the same tenderness, care, and loving behavior we extend to others.
I share my self-love behavior as invitations that hold their own threshold to relief. They're not linear or complete, more a detailed breakdown of ways I learned to tend to my personhood. Established boundaries reminding me how I treat and trust myself.
My hope is that they might serve as touchstones for anyone needing support in their own self-discovery. These are invitations to love you more:
Self-Care
The daily tending of basics: Hygiene, nourishment, rest, movement. Only you know the exact degree of your hunger, urgency, or discomfort. Your ability to respond to your needs is an inside job.
Even when we behave lovingly toward ourselves, we may not feel it as love, but love is also an action, especially when making sure our own needs are met before we try to support another capable human.
Self-Soothing
This internal care is often heard in the kind, inner voice; a guard that keeps us from shaming ourselves. Real soothing begins when we realize that just as no one else can feel when our bladder is full, only we know what truly works for us as we move in and out of clarity. We have to have our own back.
And because we're creatures of habit, we're served by periodically checking with ourselves to see if we still align with our chosen careers, relationships, religions, intoxications, and indulgences. Not in judgment, but in alignment. We are always entitled to self-do-overs without beating ourselves up when we need to try again.
Self-Acceptance
Admitting to myself not just what I did, but the impact my choices had on my life caused me to scrutinize the things I tried to pin on others. Acknowledging dark thoughts. Embracing feelings of embarrassment.
Owning it all in spite of discomfort. To know we are worthy of our own unconditional love, no matter what. Consider that a mistake is merely a stake placed in a spot that doesn't serve us and that the ancient Greek word for 'sin' was an archery term meaning 'to fall short of the mark.' These don't mean we're wrong or bad. We don't need to criticize lessons that taught us well. They're opportunities to re-stake and re-aim, not give up in failure and condemnation.
Acceptance lets us stand without collapsing under perfectionism or the fiction that we should've known better sooner.
Self-Awareness
Seeing ourselves from a 10,000-foot view with compassion, honesty, and instruction. Becoming our own best friend and guide, adjusting course without shame. Get curious about what triggers strong emotions and recognize that rage can be an internal counselor revealing where we've been wounded, or when we need to leave a room, temporarily or permanently.
Awareness belongs in the mirror and in the spaces around us. We can speak up for ourselves, and we get to decide if it's appropriate to make others, especially those who may be impacted by us, aware of the changes and new directions we're choosing for ourselves.
Self-Validation
Tell yourself with absolute conviction that you are good enough. Years ago, I caught my reflection in the mirror and said, 'You're just not good enough!' And before the next breath, I heard that compassionate voice in my head announce, 'Oh well!'
I laughed out loud, realizing how ridiculous it was for me to believe that I wasn't good enough. It was not my truth but a bad habit I needed to break. I am good enough to be me right where I'm at. It is so important to be yourself simply because “everyone else is taken.”
Self-Nurturing
Acts that say, 'I matter.' They can be as peaceful as a day to do nothing or a solo vacation, or as fierce as standing up for yourself and resisting oppressive behavior. We're not going to matter to everyone just as not everyone matters to us.
Nurturing ourselves can show up in our routines, meditation practices, or holding ourselves, arms wrapped around us tight while we cry. It means knowing whose table to go to; surrounding ourselves with people who help thin our grief or fatten our rewards. Nurturing is self-described and may include the release of ideas and people that no longer align with our ever-evolving values.
Self-Reliance
We may discover that relying on others can come with crushing blows, so I often remind myself that "everything is going to be okay in the end and if it's not okay, then it's not the end." Self-reliance is remembering we're on a planet that has continued to rotate around the sun. Change, unpredictability, and the fact that we may suffer, sometimes unnecessarily are simply a part of life.
Relying on yourself is trusting you have the capacity to press on through adversity, just as you have up to now. It includes knowing when to ask for help, including from 9-1-1 or 9-8-8. We still have our own back when we know to ask for help to protect it.
Self-Resilience
The quiet strength that whispers, 'This too shall pass.' We've survived every 24-hour day we've ever lived; that proof of endurance is a resource. I elected natural childbirth and was very grateful for my sister-in-law's advice from her own self-resilience, 'When it gets to the point you can't stand it anymore, it doesn't get any worse.'
Years later, I still draw on that strength. Self-resilience is staying in our moments while the air moves in and out of our lungs. It's understanding this is the only time we're truly alive.
I've come to believe my worry and anxiety occur when I relocate my thoughts to the past or future, where there is no oxygen, ability to make changes, or knowledge of the resources that will be available when we need them.
Self-Honoring
Respecting and celebrating our preferences, quirks, and boundaries whether big or small. I love to sleep on flannel sheets so much I pack them when I travel, and I'll always choose quiet over loud. Self-honoring allows us to renegotiate commitments, or the terms we made that no longer align with us as we've grown and matured.
When renegotiation fails, honoring who you currently are must prevail. There is a vast difference between being kind and being nice. How many times have you agreed to do something and then kicked yourself while you were doing it?
That's when you were being 'nice.' Being kind includes you. Fawning is a fear response that has us 'setting ourselves on fire to keep others warm.'
Self-honoring supports us in declining certain invitations and avoiding burnout.
Self-Expression
The right to speak, create, sing, dance, write, or simply say 'No!' without apology. Give yourself absolute permission to have a good life and to take up space on the planet with your unique presence; we all have contributions to make. I was the third child born into a 'complete' family, who joked that I was an accident.
After I became a mother, I told my parents my being unplanned did not make me an accident; I was on purpose! When they lovingly apologized, I realized I didn't need an apology, I just needed to stand up for myself! Expression is how the love of our own life and selves becomes visible in the world.
That visibility requires us to hold firmly to what I believe is not selfishness, but an enlightened self-interest.
Self-Pleasure
From small indulgences like a whimsical purchase or reading away a rainy afternoon all the way to sensual and sexual satisfaction on your own terms, self-pleasure is giving ourselves permission to feel good. Pleasure isn't proof of selfishness; it's evidence of aliveness. We remind our precious body that it's safe to feel, to soften, to receive from within.
And yes, sometimes pleasure is derived from our own thoughts, imperfect, and private. Private honesty and what you do alone is just that, private.
Self-Responsibility
It's important to learn and accept our personal responsibility to the life we have, whether we create it by design, it happens by default, or it unfolds through some unproven combination of the two. It is not about what happens or what happened. What happened can't be changed; it happened.
Life is all about what we do with what happens, regardless of who caused it. When something unexpected pulls the rug out from underneath us, such as an accident, a break-up, getting fired, or learning of a loved one's death, we may feel like victims of circumstance, like things are out of our control.
But self-responsibility comes in knowing you are here, now, and each moment to show up is a choice. Raise your right hand and claim, 'I choose to do this life, come what may.' And let self-love lead.
I know my own self-love was missing in some past relationships. I loved them, and they loved them; there was no one left loving me. I had to learn who was really responsible for my life.
In honest reflection of the choices I made, the only person who had ever really betrayed or trusted me was me. Where I am in my life is the result of a number of free choices for which I alone am responsible.
More Invitations
There are many more invitations to love you more for YOU to discover on your own. I found one when Helen Schucman brought forth a powerful message with the words, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." That line changed my life.
Accepting these invitations is how we claim power over our lives. When we care for, soothe, nurture, rely on, honor, express, and accept ourselves, we stop outsourcing our worth. We become the ultimate authority on what we need and who we are.
None of us know what will happen next, so anticipate a great life over doom.
Self-love isn't isolation or arrogance; it's the foundation for genuine connection. With love comes the witnessing of our own and others' humanness. We don't have to earn self-love; we have to cultivate and claim it.
We do this by putting our stakes where they serve us, then raising our own flag of personal sovereignty. And always continue on from where you are.
JW McKeeth is a writer who is currently loving and living in the Pacific Northwest. In support of everyone’s individual right to personal freedom, she offers empowerment through "Gatherings that Move" which are often in nature or at retreats and venues wherever inspiration or invitations lead.