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The place you need to start in might come as a surprise to you. You might not even WANT to start here. It’s certainly not where I wanted to start, and I resisted this thing for a really long time (like, years), hoping that it would come after, on its own. It didn’t. When I decided I was serious about this spiritual thing, I had to go back and start there anyway.

[Tweet “If you want to tap into your spiritual gifts, you need to start with self-love.”]

Seriously, this is a biggie. The thing about spirituality is that you need to be able to trust yourself. If you’re looking to connect to something bigger, to access guidance at a higher level, to open up to more, you need to be able to trust yourself. Otherwise, you’ll never believe that what you’re getting is the real deal. You’ll spend all your time second-guessing your choices.

It’s not enough to have intuition, right? You need to be able to trust it so that you can act on what you’re feeling. Otherwise it’s just thoughts, and nothing in your life changes.

So, how do you work on self- love? You keep at it. It’s a process and it’s kind of never-ending, there will always be another belief to bust through or something more to improve on.

For me, the journey has been really rocky. The full story deserves its own blog post, but here it is in a nutshell. I pretty much hated myself for most of my life. I was into cutting myself as a teen, into all kinds of destructive behaviors well into my twenties (including alcohol and other drugs), and ended up in an abusive relationship that reinforced my view of myself. I hit rock bottom big time, and then had to pick myself up again.

The first step was to get to know myself. You can’t really love what you don’t know. I needed to spend time with myself, and figure out what I liked, what I didn’t like, what I’d been doing because I thought I had to but secretly hated. And then I started liking the cool things about me – I’m passionate, kind, a good singer, an interesting person. Which left the things about me that weren’t so cool – I get angry too often, I procrastinate, I’ve done some really shitty things in the past. I didn’t start liking these things, but I did learn to accept them and forgive myself. Which paved the way for self-love.

And you know what happened next? I had to start all over again on another round. And then again. And again. Because self-love is a process, a journey. And it’s only when I started dealing with all my crap that I made space for the spiritual connection to appear in my life. Because I was finally in a place where I could hear the guidance and trust my gut.

Here’s what you can do next to journey towards self-love and a connection with your inner wisdom:

• decide to commit to the self-love journey and be open to seeing where it takes you (it will always be somewhere better… but you won’t always love the shit the process stirs up)
• get to know the person you are underneath all the ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ (hint: it’s the things that make you feel happy, joyful, at peace that are at your core – stuff that makes you feel like crap doesn’t belong in your life or anywhere near your version of yourself)
• let go of what you don’t need anymore, leave behind another layer, forgive your younger self for something you feel ashamed of or guilty for. The easiest way to do this is to write it down and physically release it – burn it, bury it, scatter it in the wind. Let it go.

If you’re ready to take a step towards self-love now, check out this e-book. I created it to support you on your self-love journey. ♥

Lots of love,