What is self-love?
Self Love. What is it? What does it mean to you? What stops you from having it in your life?
And how can you really start fostering self love so that:
- you feel it and
- know it and
- it’s an integrated part of your daily life?
What is self-love
When you try to answer the question what is self-love? It can be described as:
- This deep feeling of contentment and acceptance,
- of having patience with yourself, even when you make mistakes,
- a feeling of wholeness and completeness,
- a sense of relief in knowing that you can just be you.
- A feeling of permission to be yourself, and then knowing that you have something unique to offer in this life and having the courage and the strength to be able to stand up and actually offer this to the world.
what does self-love mean to you?

,Yet when we start to contemplate individually for ourselves, what does self-love mean to you? It’s really important to spend some time investigating it for yourself.
- How will you know that there’s self-love in your life and what would it look like to you?
- If you could describe how it would feel – what would that look like?
- And if someone had to come to you and say, “Can you give me some evidence that there is self-love in your life?” What would you be able to give to them?
Yes, we can look at the outside world as a starting place. Depending on where you are on your journey. You may be so far away from self-love that you don’t even know where to start.
Places you may we want to start is looking at examples of where you see other people practicing self-love. And knowing that when you are able to recognize that in someone else, that it already exists within you, and there is just a journey for yourself to come to a place to know that it’s within you and to be able to see it yourself.
What stops us from having self-love in our lives?
Judgements and Comparisons
The judgments and comparison game has got to be one of the biggest culprits where we are constantly comparing and judging ourselves against the standards that we set for ourselves the standards that the outside world sets in terms of how we are meant to look, how we are meant love, what a relationship is meant to be like and if we at any point feel as if we are not meeting that level, or that standard….what usually ensues is berating and punishment.
Berating and Punishing
We berate or punish ourselves with our thoughts and our deeds. Now a lot of this can be unconscious and we don’t even we’re not always aware of it and this can be a huge problem if we don’t know what we can’t see what we’re doing. How do we change it?
Toxic People
Having toxic people in our life can really stop us from having self-love because there’s a sense of being surrounded by something that is a mirror of unhealthiness, dis-ease, of the opposite of self-love and we can almost absorb that and start living in that way.
Unhealthy Choices
This can lead us to making unhealthy choices, choices that really deep inside ourselves we know are not good for us. We know they will not lead to good outcomes for us.

Feeling you have nothing to offer
We can also start having feelings that we have nothing to offer in this life. There is no value that we can give to anything else. That we have no value. There is no meaning and no point to our existence.
Working hard to prove your worth
We can also work really, really hard almost killing ourselves try to prove our worthiness.
Controting ourselves
We can contort ourselves into something that we are not, just to make other people happy.
Rushing into things
We can rush into things because we’re afraid, because there’s pressure from the world around us. Because we feel anxious about things and we don’t take an action incase x y z might happen.
Ignoring inner widsom
We stop trusting ourselves and we stop trusting our inner wisdom. We actually ignore that inner wisdom.
All of these things pull us further and further and further away from what true self love is.
How can you then foster self-love in your life?
100 self-love practices
One of the practices that I’ve encouraged my clients with, is to make a list of 100 things that you could do that would make you feel more self-love in your life.
Some of those things might just take one minute and others might take a whole day.
The idea is to dedicate some time to this exercise because coming up with 100 Things can be quite challenging.

But I’d encourage you to persist and to persevere with it. Because once you have your list of 100 things the idea is to choose one thing from that list each day or each week and to just do it and start watching how self-love becomes evident in your life through these practices.
For example, just pausing and taking five deep breaths really to centre yourself. Get yourself out of out of your mind and into your truth. Into who you are, into your physical form, into your body, into the present moment. And this can often free us from a lot of those things that actually stop us from connecting to self-love.
Other examples would be to spend an entire day doing things just for you. Things that bring you joy, things that light you up from the inside out. Things that make you feel worthwhile and feel meaningful. Surround yourself in nature has a lot of power to reconnect us to ourselves because it helps us to disconnect from the falseness or the untruths that most of us are surrounded by every day and are kind of immersed in.
Be selective
When you can get really selective about who you have in your life and who you spend time with. This can really foster a healthier environment for you. More healthy energy, vibrations, conversations, thought patterns, perspectives, and all of this can help empower you to connect with self-love yourself.
Where do you sit in the hierachy?
I would also encourage you to notice where you put yourself in the hierarchy of life. Are you at the bottom of the ladder and if you are start putting yourself at the top. Start thinking of yourself first and not from a selfish perspective like “me first” but from the sense of when I’m energetically, spiritually, emotionally and mentally aligned and feeling really connected to the core of who I am. To what really empowers me in this life, my cup can overflow from that place, and I can be extremely empowering and transformative in other people’s lives. Rather than constantly putting yourself last you start with yourself first from this perspective.
Mirror Work
Another practice that has been extremely powerful in my own life and I know many people have practiced this.
When you look at yourself in the mirror, really noticing how you look at yourself and what you say to yourself.
When we really start to bring attention and awareness to this, we begin to see that we are actually our own worst enemies, and we speak to ourselves in our minds in a way that we would never speak to anybody else.

We are our harshest critics and the most punishing to ourselves. And as you start noticing this conversation that you have with yourself, this way that you look at yourself how critical and judgmental you are of your physical body, of how you look – you can begin to shift things.
I’d encourage you to look deep into your eyes deep into your soul and say the words without blinking without looking away. “I love you. I really, really love you”. Notice how this makes you feel. If you’ve never done something like this before, initially what you might find is that it feels uncomfortable, it feels unnatural. And you may even start squirming underneath your skin, trying to get away from it, not wanting to do it. But I’d encourage you to practice this daily and start watching as each day you say it it’s almost as if with every out breath that your capacity to truly see yourself and your inherent beauty and the gifts that you have to offer begin to expand and the ability to see and accept yourself expands with that.
Know your inner wisdow
Spend some time anchoring into your inner wisdom. What is that? What does that look like? And where is it leading you and can you follow it? Can you trust it? Can you surrender to your inner wisdom, even when your mind makes up a big story about why you should be doing something different?
Trust in life
When you can foster a trust that life will unfold in a way that only you can rise up to. It’s not really about negatives and positives as we tend to create this these judgments and comparisons from. But how is life showing up for me and how do I respond to it? How can I rise up with my strengths and my gifts and my talents and meet life and enjoy the journey that has been laid out for me?
What is healthy and correct for you?
Understanding what is healthy and correct for you is important because when you make decisions that are aligned to what is correct and healthy for you, everything becomes more in flow. You get to experience this ease and flow to your life rather than this constant meeting of resistance and this feeling as if you don’t belong or you’re not worthy. You start to feel like you’re in the right place at the right time, doing the right things, meeting the right people and life starts to have this really magical quality to it.
Return to the innocence of self

Out of everything and any practice I would say that self-love is most crucial when we can return to the innocence of self to that sense of awe and wonder at how amazing, brilliant, genius, beautiful, authentic we are. The individuality that we have, are here to bring. Noticing that a lot of the problems that we’ve perceived about ourselves in this life are really not the truth of who we are. These are the layers of the onion that we have accumulated along the way, that we have come to a place of thinking that this is who we are and thinking that we need to fix it or change it. If we can just drop that. If we can just let that go.
What remains is the truth of who you are. It is the universal love, this great capacity for the inner innocence of the self. This true amazement at how limitless and how connected you are to the oneness of everything.
When you can return to that even if it’s just a glimmer of moments at first, and then over the days of your practices you begin to feel it and see it more. You begin to have this vigilance of anything that tries to shield this truth from you. Tries to hide this truth from you, Tries to pull you away from this truth and you can just say stop. I’m not going down that path anymore. I’m not following this mental story that I’ve told myself for years and I can just drop it and I can just let it go and know that I am enough. That I am amazing. That I am a magnificent being and trust that life will give you exactly what you need, to not only survive, but to thrive.
If you would prefer to listen to the audio of this blog post:
Listen Now – Lynda Gaiao – Sharing Wisdom
Human Design and BG5 (Human Design for Business) both bring awareness into your life. They help you sift through what you are holding onto - your shadow - and enable you to let go.
With the letting go comes the ability to embrace the truth of who you are with wide open arms.
As a guide I can help you on this journey. I can guide you to know and trust yourself.
If you are would like to explore whether Human Design or BG5 are for you, then please book in a strategy session and we can invesitage how to move you from where you are to living aligned with success.
Aliging you to success.
BG5 Business & Career, Cycles and OC16 Consultant & Human Design Guide