Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 63
How have you been treating yourself lately? Have you been speaking to yourself? How have you been listening into what your body needs? And where have you been railroading it into deciding that actually, you should ignore it all and just plough on because your head knows better than your body needs?
Does that sound like internalised capitalism to anyone?
This week, I wanted to speak about self-love. Valentine's Day and all of that. The great big Hallmark festival that we have come to have an awful lot of stories about and be tied with a whole load of obligation, occasional bits of joy, but mostly a huge amount of anxiety, stress, and quite often a lot of people just going through the motions of what they think they should be doing.
And so I wanted just to make a really short episode thinking about how your relationship with yourself might work out if you treated yourself like you were trying to win yourself over like you were trying to court yourself like you were going to seduce yourself.
How would you behave differently if you were someone who you thought was a fantastic prospect on the horizon that you wanted to flirt with? Or you wanted to build a life with? Because, in truth, when we say things like "self-love", it can feel a bit like a wishy-washy Instagram meme. But the reality is that the relationship that we have with ourselves is the longest relationship of our lives. Quite often, we dismiss the relationship that we have with ourselves, our time, and our body as something to be overcome rather than something to nurture and nourish and build upon. And I think, frankly, if we treated other relationships in our lives the way that we treat ourselves, they'd fall apart pretty quickly.
And I wonder where bits of you and yourself and your identity might feel like they might be falling apart a little bit more than you would like, just because you're not stopping to give yourself the amount of care that you know, that you need, that you want, and quite frankly, that you deserve.
Where could you give yourself the kind of love and respect and honour and compassion that you believe people around you who you love deserve and that you want to give them? Where could you think about a little bit of yourself that could just do with a little bit more noticing? How can you listen to yourself a little bit louder this week? If there's anything that we could take from Valentine's Day, maybe showing up for ourselves as being the best relationship of our lives is going to ultimately improve all of the relationships and all of the connections and all of the community around us exponentially.
When we become an example of where love is possible, that radiates out from all of us. I hope these are some little sparks flying in ways that you could put into practical use in your daytime and in your life; over the next week, I'm wishing you a happy Valentine's Day and all of the self-love. I look forward to speaking to you next week.
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