How to Cultivate Self Love on Your Acne Healing Journey

Happy Valentine’s Day!! Valentine’s Day is a beautiful day to celebrate LOVE! Love for yourself, your significant other and all of the important people in your life. It's a wonderful day to remember your own magic, for feeling love not just for others but also for yourself! 

Wisdom of The Heart  

We feel the emotions of love come from our hearts, and over the last 40 years researchers have been learning and revealing the powerful wisdom of our hearts. The heart has an electromagnetic field that is 100x stronger than that of the brain. Our thoughts and emotions can affect the heart’s magnetic field, which can affect our surrounding environment whether we are aware of it or not. This electromagnetic field can emanate out from the body as far as 3-4 feet.

There is a beautiful intelligence held within the heart. The heart is our portal to inner knowing and intuition. If we take the time to listen and tune inwards, we can access this powerful intuitive inner guidance and wisdom from the heart space.

“Feel your intentions in your heart. Feel not what your mind tells you, but what your heart tells you.” – Gary Zukav

Self-Love

How we feel about ourselves and how we treat ourselves is critical in determining our mental health and wellbeing. We are all on this earth for a reason and you matter. You are a beautiful and unique creation on this planet, and you are so deserving of loving and accepting yourself.

Allow yourself permission to give yourself love the same way that you give love to others. It’s okay if you are still learning to love yourself. As humans we can all find it a difficult process to give love to ourselves. We are our own worst critics and can say things to ourselves that we would never say to a best friend or a loved one.

It is a valuable lesson to learn how to cultivate self-love on our journey in this lifetime. Cultivating self-love takes time especially if you are used to thinking self-deprecating thoughts about yourself for years. It may not feel natural in the beginning but overtime you can begin to rewire your brain’s networking and programming to truly learn to love yourself.

To love ourselves fully means to accept all parts of ourselves that we want to hide from the world. To learn how to love and accept yourself, you must first start to get to know yourself. To face yourself and these parts you keep hidden in the shadows. Reclaim your inner power to love yourself instead of leaving it up to others to do for you. Not everyone has the capacity or in a place to give you what you want and need when it comes to love. So why not give that love to yourself? To support and nourish yourself? That’s where your inner power lies, in validating and loving yourself instead of giving your power away to others who may not be able to love you if they do not love themselves. Be courageous to step into the light and be the fullest expression of your authentic self. By loving your light and your shadow aspects, you can step into your full authentic self. This allows you to come home to your true nature and state of being, which is LOVE. 

Self-Love for Your Skin

You’re here to live in your skin, in your physical body, every day for the rest of your life. Love your skin for its beautiful imperfection as well as your whole being while you’re here on this planet. How can you nourish your skin more? How can you learn to love every inch of your skin just a little bit more every day? 

As someone who has personally dealt with acne on and off for about 10 years, I have felt the emotional burden that acne causes. Acne is a skin condition that is so visible for everyone to see and because of this, acne had really affected my self-esteem and mental health. Having acne flare-ups and cystic acne, I felt low in self-confidence, self-love, self-worth and I felt insecure about myself. I would hyper focus on my acne that I would perceive as flaws presented on my skin. It made me feel as if I was showing up as not good enough and not perfect, even though perfection was an unattainable goal I was always striving for. It took me a long time to change my mindset and to start loving my skin and myself exactly as I am, even when I was having acne breakouts. You are worthy even when you have acne. Your worth does not change whether you have acne or not. You are always worthy at the core of who you are. You are good enough exactly as you are. No matter what you may be dealing with or what you think is shameful and you need to hide about yourself. If you are dealing with acne breakouts right now, ask yourself how are you showing up for yourself? Is your acne is showing up for you to help you start learning how to love yourself?

It takes time to uncover limiting beliefs about oneself that are just not true like I am not good enough or I am not loveable. It takes courage to fully take responsibility and accept how you are talking to yourself and treating yourself. How are you letting your inner voice to run the show and hold you back from your true potential and from truly loving yourself? It takes time to learn and be aware of how we are truely treating ourselves. Doing the work to love yourself is very rewarding and empowering. How can you limit and release old patterns that are no longer serving you to move into a space of loving yourself more?

We are here to always move towards love. It seems easier to love others than ourselves. But why are you not worthy and deserving of love? A lot of times we forget that feeling love for ourselves is just as important as the love we extend to our friends, family, partners, children etc. Why must we focus on our flaws and be our own worst critics when loving ourselves can bring us so many riches.

We can easily reject parts of ourselves that we deem unworthy, not good enough, not acceptable. Loving ourselves starts with accepting all aspects that we deem as unworthy or not good enough. That includes starting with your skin and how you are deciding and choosing to show up in the world.

We are our own worst critics especially when it comes to picking on our flaws and insecurities. We can also be our own inner cheerleaders if we allow this inner voice to enter into the conversation. How can you provide yourself with more kindness and love? You get to choose how you want to treat yourself. Please choose loving yourself, as you deserve it!   

How to Cultivate Self-Love

1. How do You Speak to Yourself? Get in tune with the inner voice in your head and notice what thoughts are occurring and notice the repetitive ones. Know that you always have the choice to change any thoughts that are critical and unkind towards yourself. Talk to yourself in your inner world like you would to a loved one with kindness, love and compassion.
2. Identify Limiting Beliefs. As a child we may not have learnt the importance of how to love ourselves. We may have picked up limiting beliefs in our environment from our peers, friends, family and society that we are not worthy of love or not good enough. When these limiting beliefs are imprinted during our childhood years, these beliefs can still remain in our subconscious mind and be carried with us throughout our lives. We become unaware that these beliefs are participating under the surface during events and situations later on in our lives. It can take time and patience to uncover these limiting beliefs and notice the ways that you have been unconsciously treating yourself since childhood.
3. Mirror Work. Louise Hay’s has a beautiful self-love exercise from her book “You Can Heal Your Life”. This exercise involves looking at yourself in the eyes in the mirror and saying out loud or to yourself “I love you (insert your name here).” It may be difficult and uncomfortable at first. If emotions arise just let them. Notice any thoughts that may arise and how long you are able to complete this exercise. This exercise starts the process of planting the seed into the ground and for you to nurture that seed to allow love for yourself to grow. The feeling of love for yourself may not feel true yet but it will grow overtime with consistent practice. 
4. Nourish Your Body to Nourish Your Mind. Loving yourself and changing your thoughts can become easier once the physical foundations are addressed such as diet, nutrition, supplementation, stress awareness, sleep and exercise.
5.  Meditation. Check out my Guided Heart Meditations Here.