self-acceptance
The Life-Long Journey Of Self-Love
Self-love is essential for mental, physical, and emotional well-being. It is vital to have a positive, loving attitude towards yourself and take care of your own needs. Not only is this essential for living a happy and healthy life, but it also empowers you to be more loving and caring towards others.
Self-love is often misunderstood. Many people think that self-love is only about pampering oneself, indulging in extravagance, or buying yourself expensive things. It is much more than that. It is not about being selfish, self-indulgent, or narcissistic. Instead, it is about accepting yourself, taking care of yourself and understanding your true worth.
Truly loving yourself is therefore about knowing your worth, appreciating your unique strengths and abilities, and treating yourself with compassion and kindness. It is also about taking personal responsibility for your life, making choices and decisions that serve your highest good, and letting go of negative thoughts and self-destructive behaviors.
It is also important to realize that self-love is a journey, not a destination. It is a life-long process that is part of our soul purpose in this lifetime. It is a state of being that requires patience, dedication, commitment and effort.
Cultivating self-love begins with understanding yourself, accepting your flaws, and learning to forgive yourself. It involves setting boundaries and taking responsibility for your own needs and happiness. It is also about cultivating positive relationships and learning to trust yourself.
You Don’t Have To Be Perfect
Whenever we are focused on a task at hand, whether it is career, business or personal, we tend to focus on our mistakes and worry about what we may be doing wrong. Will it meet expectations? Are we good enough? The loud voice of perfectionism in our ego mind is often saying, “You did not do it right, you did not do enough…you are not enough.”
But constantly striving for perfection and beating ourselves up when we cannot meet those impossible expectations, sabotages the very thing we are trying to achieve. It impacts every part of our lives and also affects people around us, including our friends, coworkers, family and life partners.
Setting unrealistic standards for ourselves and others leaves us constantly feeling disappointed in ourselves and let down by others, over and over again. The perfectionism we are striving for becomes front and center in our in relationships, our careers, our health and our overall well-being. The result is anxiety, low self-esteem, fear of failure, depression, and broken relationships.
Failed perfectionism leads us to constantly measuring our worth against others, and vulnerable to the opinions, criticisms, and judgments of others. Perfectionists are very concerned about what others will think or say.
Striving for perfection is also about a need for control, so that our lives and those we care about will work out perfectly as we had planned. But contrary to popular belief, perfectionism does not lead to lasting success and fulfillment.
The Ideal Starting Crystals For Beginners
Crystals and gemstones are a popular resource in modern metaphysical practices, mysticism, and alternative spirituality. It can be used in various powerful ways, including healing, energy protection, meditation, prayer, manifesting, divination, psychic reading, and channeling.
Crystals are versatile and useful in enhancing one’s spiritual practice or energy work, but there are so many to choose from that it can difficult to know where to start.
Three of my favorite crystals that I recommend for beginners to get started with are amethyst, rose quartz and black tourmaline. These three crystals are affordable and easy to find, so they are ideal to start with if you wish to explore using crystals to expand your spiritual practice.
Amethyst
Amethyst is the ideal stone to start with because it has a gentle energy that almost anyone can tolerate without being overwhelmed by its influence. It is a fantastic stone to help you get in touch with your intuition and find your calm center. Amethyst’s calming energy especially enhances meditation and dreamwork.
Amethyst is associated with the crown chakra. It heightens our spiritual and personal awareness, which in turn helps us to self-reflect and evaluate more honestly where we need to make adjustments in our beliefs, behavior, and perspectives. Amethyst thus supports us in maintaining clarity in our self-reflection, which is a vital first step in a spiritual journey of higher consciousness and personal enlightenment.
True Love Is Never-Ending
I love you. I love you, and you, and you! No matter what happened yesterday. No matter what was said, what was done, how we hurt one another, I still love you.
Three simple words. Really, love shouldn’t be so hard. Since my childhood my goal in life was always to show love. Before money, before “common sense”, before logical reasoning of life, my heart always took the lead. Believe me, this trait has led to much criticism over the years. Many people have considered me eccentric, crazy, even downright stupid. Yet, throughout the years, I learned to like myself and to accept others.
Perhaps I’m not the wealthiest woman in the world, with diamonds dripping off my neck. Perhaps I give away more than I keep. Yet, each night I go to sleep soundly, liking who I am. I can dance in the moonlight with the fairies under the kisses of Venus, with Lady Moon shining her soft glowing light through the country rural trees, the shadows of leaving dancing around creating the sense of those long gone flitting in and out of the corners of our eyes.
The answer is love.
Today is a new day, where spirit sends to me more people to love. It’s just that easy. I simply let the problems and failed actions of yesterday go, remembering the lessons I had to learn in how to treat others. We are all human who make mistakes in how we express ourselves, in how we react, but we can always choose restore the love. All we need is unconditional love, and forgiveness.
For many of us there is the constant hope of one day meeting a life partner who ‘gets’ us, with all our flaws, all our doubts, all our insecurities. This task of finding just the right one is not easy. Some seek advice from us seers, who give answers, but sometimes the bottom falls out. One of us, or both of us do something really stupid, and the love ends. This is what we believe. But love doesn’t end.
Free Yourself From The Fear Of Rejection
A close friend and college, who is also a psychic medium, had a blind date set up by a friend a while ago. “I think the two of you would hit it off,” the match-making friend promised. Well, my friend and the mystery man initially texted for a couple of weeks and then decided to meet in person.
Due to Covid-19 recommendations at the time, they arranged to meet outside and ended up going for a three hour walk. The date went great! When it was time to part, the gentleman said he hoped they can meet again soon. He clearly seemed to like her a lot.
She agreed as they both seemed to enjoy each other’s company, but on the way home, her old fear of rejection resurfaced. She called me the next day to tell me how it went.
The first thing she said was that he seemed a great person. It was the first time, in a long time, that she had such a good time. But I could sense that something was not quite right. So, I asked her what was the matter?
“I think he is out of my league,” she bluntly said.
“What do you mean,” I exclaimed in surprise.
“Well, he arrived in a brand-new luxury car, while mine is an old jalopy! He is a medical professional, and I just do readings. I am also not smart enough, or pretty enough for a guy like him. My middle-aged body is certainly not what it used to be.
Finding Peace In Your Natural State
While doing a nature hike the other day, the thought occurred to me that we all come from nature, and we eventually also return to nature. This may be why we tend to feel so calm and peaceful when we are out in nature. When we smell a flower, hug a tree, or put our feet in the dirt, it reconnects us to our natural state and brings us back into balance.
It has been scientifically proven that we essentially consist of ‘stardust.’ Our physical body is made of elements that were formed in the stars over the course of billions of years. Our bodies have about 97 percent of the same kind of atoms as that found in the galaxy. As the rock band Kansas so aptly proclaims, “Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky. It slips away and all your money won’t another minute buy. Dust in the wind. All we are is dust in the wind.”
When you look up at the stars in a clear night sky, especially if you’re in a place where the air is clean and at a higher altitude, one can sometimes see the milky way. In such a moment of awe and wonder, it seems to me as if all time stands still. One’s everyday worries seem miniscule and trivial in comparison to the magnificent vastness and endless beauty of the cosmos.
Our connection to nature further brings to mind the classical elements of earth, water, air, fire, and aether that is still observed in various spiritual traditions, such as Ayurveda, Wicca and Gnosticism. Our existence in this life is essentially a magical alchemy of these elements.
In today’s world we tend to focus so much on how things should be, instead of how they actually are. Maybe much of our modern discontent stems from straying so far away from our natural state of being?
Learning To Accept Yourself (Warts And All)
A consistent trend I have noticed doing psychic readings and metaphysical counseling for many years. This trend relates to rejection, and our reaction to being rejected by our human family. It is not natural to abandon or reject loved ones, but in my experience as a pastoral counselor and psychic healer, I have noticed that it is a challenge that many have faced in this life.
Recently, as I was doing a channeling session with one of my clients, this came up and we both had a revelation about our own experiences of rejection. The discussion we had was not only about rejection and how we as humans experience it, but also about how we perceive acceptance. Our experience of rejection comes from only one source, namely our expectation, and also how we resonate with the acceptance we receive from others.
When we are children it is natural for us to allow our parents to be our source. They were the picture of God in our lives, and in ideal situations they were our source of acceptance, providing nurture and stability. Many times, when you see a religious group adopting a vengeful and cruel depiction of the Divine, it stems from a refusal to remove the archetypal depiction from God they experienced with their parents.
Many times, the search for source extends itself outward, and the responsibility of our fulfillment is put on other people or organizations. In some cases, fulfillment is found in substances and can also lead to addictive behaviors. We look to these external ‘sources’ to provide us comfort and satisfaction.
It is natural for us to live in community and relationships, so our endeavors toward fulfillment are often projected outward in our relationships. Unfortunately, since we all have an intrinsic need to identify with and live from Source, we find ourselves continually reaching for fulfillment that we rarely find. This leads to heartache, loss, and broken relationships within the human family.