Loving yourself with hearts
One of the best ways to feel better and get those good things in life coming your way is to love yourself more. Once you do that you will increase your capacity to draw and accept more love from others because you can only feel worthy of and accept as much love from others as you give to yourself. Once you get used to loving yourself, that becomes your default state of being – your status quo – and you wont have to work so hard at it anymore. You status quo is also what you tend to create more of in your life. Make love your default state and you will create more love in your life on a regular basis, in many different, and often unexpected, ways.
The other day I came a cross something in an e-book which lead me to what I felt was a very useful exercise to increase self love. The e-book mentioned the final scene in the movie ‘What the Bleep Do We Know’, where Amanda, an unhappy woman who tends to focus on unhappy scenes from her past, moves to a place of self love and acceptance and draws hearts all over her body while in the bath with a makeup pencil. The movie is a type of new-agey and scientific look at how we create our reality at every moment by the choices we make, which are often influenced by our gut-level reactions to events in our lives, which in turn are influenced by similar events we have experienced in the past. One message of the movie is to get ourselves to be spectators of our own patterns and consciously choose what we focus on and how we act. Act, not react, being the keyword in that sentence.
So, to get back to the hearts I mentioned before, I decided to do a mental exercise where I take several minutes to imagine myself drawing hearts all over my body with a tube of lipstick. I mentally visualized myself drawing hearts at each of my chakras, all over my arms and legs, stomach, chest, and face. I took my time with the exercise, actually feeling the metal tube of lipstick in my hand and the texture and pressure of the lipstick as I slowly and deliberately drew each heart. It felt incredibly good.
Once I finished that mental and emotional visualization, I decided to do a variation of it where many of our self love issues originate, our first encounter with other people – our parents. They are often well meaning but can pass their own fears and self worth issues on to us or simply not know how to create a feeling of worthiness in us. I took my time imagining my parents drawing lipstick hearts on me. It was a sort of catharsis and felt like an affirmation of my own value.
The next heart-drawers were ex-boyfriends, and any addresses of unrequited love, misplaced love, regret, and abandonment – basically any men in my life that had left me with less-than-good feelings.
It was all pretty powerful. I literally felt a shift within me from these visualization exercises. So much so in fact, that today I went out and bought a tube of lipstick (which I don’t usually wear) so that I could draw some real hearts on myself.
I only got around to actually doing it a few days later, but what was surprising was that I found that the visualizations had been so powerful that while the real thing was good, I had already cleared many of the issues with the previous mental and emotional work. Which confirms that having an imaginary emotional experience is not all that different than having what we call an ‘actual one’. An psychologist of mine used to encourage me to spend time envisioning the type of life I wanted to create, repeatedly telling me that the only way the mind knows the difference between reality and fantasy is that it attaches a tag ‘fantasy’ to a fantasy.
