What does Self-Love have to do with if my body hurts or expresses disease?

The answer is EVERYTHING!

Let’s start with Love.  What is Love?  Unconditional acceptance of what is.  What is the opposite of Love?  Fear/Hate, which is resistance or rejection of what is.

We can see by looking at the world around us as a macrocosm that love brings things together into harmony and connection and hate/fear separate and create chaos and destruction.  Look at any relationship and you will see the proof.

The relationship between you and your body (microcosm of the macrocosm) follows the same rules.  Having thoughts and feelings towards yourself that are not loving with affect your body’s biochemistry and thus its expression of health or disease.

When there is love and kindness to yourself your cells dance up and down with vital energy and express health.  When there is hatred and fear your cells quit communicating with each other, they start working independent of the whole  system of your body and express malfunction or disease.

Ok sounds good in theory…

but how do I love myself more?

Ah yes the infamous how.  There are billions of books, programs, retreats, services, and healing modalities all based around the concept of Self-Love and how to have more of it for yourself.  I’m going to share 2 important secrets with you here today.

Secret 1. Pain is a secret source for generating more Self-Love.  Yep you heard me right.  The more pain you have (physical, emotional, mental or spiritual) the greater resource you have available to love yourself like crazy.  The catch is you must feel pain and use it to explode your heart open.

Our tendency is shut down and out when we feel pain in order to protect ourselves from feeling the full intensity of it. The key however is to stay open even when we hurt.  This allows us to transform pain into Self-love, which is ultimately the purpose of all pain.

Secret 2.  Loving what you don’t like about yourself.  Its easy to love the things about ourselves that we approve of or see as important and valuable, but what about the rest, the things we judge as not acceptable or lovable about ourselves.

This may be a physical condition where we feel useless or ugly, or feeling shy and lacking confidence, or the part of us that yelled at our kid or partner this week.

That’s right, we’ve got to love it all!  When we can love the parts we also hate we reclaim our wholeness and explode into Self-Love.  This creates cohesion, coherence, health and well-being in our body-mind

Dr. Amanda Hessel, DC