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Aloha and welcome to your Heart Magic, an illuminating space where psychology, spirituality and heart wisdom meet. Here's your host, dr Bethann Kapansky-Wright, author, psychologist and spiritual educator. Aloha everybody, this is Dr.

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Bethann Kapansky-Wright, and welcome to your Heart Magic. Happy second week of May for those of you who are listening to this the week that it comes out, and happy whatever day or month it is for anybody who is catching this. After the fact, today we are talking about the topic of cultivating self-love, how to do it, how to cultivate more nourishment inside of ourselves, and this episode was actually inspired by the upcoming holiday of Mother's Day. That is happening this coming weekend, and I always like to take what is going on in the greater collective and put some sort of twist on it or use it to inspire. What does this topic evoke in me and, I think, for a lot of people? Some people were gifted and blessed with really wonderful mothers, but a lot of people have struggled with the concept for many reasons, whether that's in their own relationship with their family and their mother, whether it's within themselves as a mother, whether it's learning how to be a good mother to oneself. So it's a word that evokes different things in different people, and an interesting journal prompt for your own exploration might be to sit down and write out that word and then write out like what are all your associations with it, without any judgment or categorization or needing to do anything with it, but just riffing off of the word and seeing what free associations come up with. So you have a sense of where you're at with this.

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For myself, I've always loved the idea of continuing to build my inner map of self and build my inner world and thinking about internal families and the internal relationships we have with ourself. Internal families and the internal relationships we have with ourself. I always felt that building the voice of compassion and building the archetype of the mother, the empress, the fairy, godmother, the cosmic mother, the nurturer inside of us is a really beautiful gift that we can give ourselves, because that can become the part of us that not only speaks to us in a very loving way but when we are feeling lost or out of sorts within ourself. If we have instilled a part of ourself that is really loving and we can tap into that and tap into that energy in some capacity, I think it helps us move through our challenges much quicker and get to space of self-forgiveness and self-compassion and holding ourselves accountable to whatever it is that we're struggling with, yet doing it in a way that is very loving and very supportive.

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So we are focusing on self-love today, and I have a passage from Small Pearl's Big Wisdom that I would like to share about self-love, and I'm going to do this a little bit differently today. I'm going to break up this passage and stop after every couple paragraphs. It's about a page and a half in its entirety, but I want to pause and use some of what I just read as my talking points for today so we can dive more deeply into it, because there's a lot in here. So this is called Cultivating Self-Love A Few How-Tos, and it is passage 97 from Small Pearl's Big Wisdom.

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What do we?

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do if we struggle to find the voice of love inside ourselves. Sometimes we haven't had loving role models in our lives and the voices of criticism, disparagement or cruelty have torn us down, so we never learned how to develop a space of compassion and warmth inside ourselves. The good news is that we can change this and learn greater self-love. Our minds are wired to create new pathways and patterns of being, and our hearts innately know how to love. That wisdom resides inside each of us. So even if this world has done its very best to make us forget how to love ourselves, our hearts still remember. Our minds can learn and we can cultivate our relationship with self-love. Pausing there for a second, I think it's interesting that it is kind of this generic wisdom right now that you have to learn to love yourself before you can love anybody else, and loving yourself is the most powerful thing that you can do, and I think that that is a wonderful concept. It is very easy to throw it around, harder to practice and harder to learn to live and to really integrate inside who we are and as somebody who will forever be a student of self-love and learning how to continue to spiral deeper into my relationship with myself and realizing that self-love it's not a one-time thing like you've achieved it and you've learned it and you're good to go now, but it's an ongoing process because we keep changing and we keep evolving and we will keep uncovering things in our life and things inside of us that evoke our shadow self and evoke traumas or challenges or unhealed areas of ourself. We will continue to develop and go through life phases and maybe see facets of ourselves that might not feel very likable or lovable. And so self-love is an ongoing journey and we can develop a foundation for it and have a grasp of the idea of what it means and be practicing it on some level. But I found we can always take it deeper and that's part of the journey and part of the evolution of that.

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But starting with the idea of what is self-love and how do we learn to love ourselves, it's a really hard concept for some people. If they haven't had role models or haven't had someone in their life who is mirrored back loving energy, then how are they supposed to know how to love themselves? How can somebody be a loving person if it was never modeled to them? And, I believe, in our hearts? Love is our natural language. It's what we know to do. It is what we know and how we know to express ourselves. Everything spiritually that I tap into and look at says it all comes back to love, and it's about the love we have inside, the love we cultivate inside of ourselves, the love we choose to give, the love that we can keep using to transform who we are and offering the world and offering ourselves. That is the nucleus, that's what it's all about, and so we have this innate capacity to do it, but sometimes that's been really blocked. For some people, their heart chakras really blocked or such horrible, critical, poor, poor behavior was modeled to them that that natural tendency is suppressed and so the relationship with the self becomes one that is not loving and oftentimes can be that critical voice that we have, that voice of judgment, that internalized voice, whether it comes from a parent or society or the collective of people along the way, that caused us harm or said something, and we internalized those words and created this interject of, this negative voice that's constantly telling us that we are not doing it right or not enough or whatever. Those messages, those core wounds are that each of us have. It just shows up a little bit differently in each of us, based on our individual journeys. Sometimes all of that stuff is blocking our innate ability to experience love and to learn to open our hearts to ourself and learn to build a stronger relationship with ourself.

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So, moving on in this passage, because I think that begs the question okay, well then, what do we do then? You know, I wrote the line that we have the ability to create new neural networks and to create new pathways and patterns, and that's the good news. This is totally learnable. There are things that we can do to grow our relationship with self-love, to cultivate that, to set an intention around it and to seek to change it. And I love that neuroplasticity and the brain says, hey, you can learn how to do something different. You can create a new pathway of being. We can shift a paradigm. We can open our hearts and do the work of the inner self and the heart work and any somatic physical work where we feel blocked. But we can also work on being mindful and bringing to our consciousness more self-loving activities and words and things that we can do to grow that.

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So, moving on with this passage don't know what self-love even means. Aim for the ballpark of developing the qualities of inner warmth, compassion and acceptance and you'll be headed in the right direction. If you seek to discover a more loving voice inside of yourself, then think of it like pulling on and building a new skill. We can draw on external resources to instill a pathway for self-love. If you need a few ideas, try these. What color is self-love? Or try these variations what color is compassion? What color is grace? What color is kindness? Take 30 seconds and imagine that color is gently swirling through your heart, so pausing there with the reading and reflecting out loud with you.

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I really like the idea that if self-love feels like this mercurial concept or something that's really amorphous, or you're like I love the idea of it, but I don't know how to apply that, I'm not even sure if I know what that means. I had wrote the line aim for the ballpark of developing the qualities of inner warmth, compassion and acceptance and you'll be headed in the right direction. And I really feel like, when we struggle with the concept of love or if we're struggling with self-love in any way, that if we reframe it and say, well, how about inner warmth? How would I learn to better self-soothe? Or to find more warmth for myself? How might I find more acceptance or compassion for myself. What might that look like? Because I feel like those qualities are absolutely part of self-love and inner nourishment part of self-love and inner nourishment, and that if we get lost in the sauce of these big words and not knowing exactly what they mean or feeling like it has to look a certain way, then let's play with the language around it, let's look at the concept and break it down and come at it from a slightly different angle. So if you can at least move in the direction of how could I be more warm to myself in this? How could I find more compassion or self-kindness or peace or at least neutrality, if we can do those things, then we're in the ballpark, we're on the field, we're in the game and you're moving in the right direction. Those are the kinds of things that help us foster that ability to be more kind, be more accepting and be more loving.

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And one of my favorite exercises to do for myself I teach other people all the time and I use a lot of variations of this is using colors as a visualization tool to connect and instill and enhance an inner resource inside of ourselves. So if I say to somebody what does compassion feel like to you? They may or may not have an answer for me, depending on where they're at in their journey with that, but if I say, what color is compassion, usually people can come up with something and a lot of times it's like oh, I don't know why, but I'm seeing purple or pink or white or whatever color comes through. For that person it can change and there's not like one color associated with compassion. I think the language of color is a beautiful language. It's its own energies, its own essences and frequencies and medicines, and so I just choose to trust whatever color comes through when we're working with these concepts.

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But people can connect with colors and I think colors are non-threatening. I think they're really playful. I think there's something about them that is a little bit like taking out our crayon heart and drawing and scribbling love graffiti on it and it lightens things. It's a joyful way of coming at some of these concepts where there can be a lot of wounding for some people. So, visualizing a color that's connected to self-love or self-compassion, or what's the color of warmth, what my inner warmth feel like, you could also use a element of nature, like maybe being by the water feels very loving to you, or maybe a deer feels really gentle and you might see like rolling meadows or something like that.

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We can use visualization to work for us and support these concepts. And then just focusing on that and practicing in your nervous system and your body, just taking 30 seconds to focus on that and allow yourself the experience of softening to yourself, and I think that this is building resources inside of ourselves. If we need to build a muscle and build a new resource, then a little bit of practice goes a long way. And when we use our imagination to intentionally tap into a quality or an energy or a resource that we want to build inside of ourselves, it gives our brains a new experience of how to think about that. And just because we're imagining it and doing meditation work and it's not happening on the physical plane doesn't mean it's not happening in our emotional world and our neural networks. It doesn't mean it's not happening on an energetic level. And so we might think about building these resources by using fun, playful elements of nature or color or visualization or music or feelings and sitting with that as a guided meditation for just a little bit and focusing on a concept like self-love or self-compassion and imagining that we are allowing that energy to be poured inside of us through the act of intentional visualization. So, moving on to the next paragraph, this is another idea for how to build self-love.

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Draw on archetypes of unconditionally loving figures, such as the proverbial fairy godmother, the goodly oracle or the wise woman who always knows just what to say. Find the characters and books, films, stories or real-life role models who represent the qualities of kindness, warmth and wisdom to you. Imagine they are part of your inner circle of support, teaching you how to be gracious and warm towards yourself. When I was younger and I needed to develop more self-compassion, I used this exercise quite a bit and I often imagined some mishmash of this fairy godmother from Cinderella archetype. Sometimes she would be a little bit more priestly in white robes and look like Galadriel from Lord of the Rings or the Oracle from the Matrix or anything that you might have read in a book or seen in a show or can imagine for yourself, where you have this sense of a very nurturing figure who's also wise and who believes in you, the kind of figure that would say hey, you've got this, I believe in you, you're going to figure it out, you are fine, you are gold. You are amazing and wonderful and beautiful. You will find your way in this. You have what you need to navigate whatever it is that's coming up in life and you have acceptance here.

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And who would help us find our inner wisdom? Not necessarily by fixing it or giving us all the answers, but giving us just enough to help us believe in ourselves and believe in our own capacity for navigating our life path and rising to the occasion of whatever it is in our life that feels challenging or feels like it's calling us at the time. So I would imagine this fairy-like, godmother-like, oracle-like character in my inner circle who was really supportive and I used this quite a bit when I was younger and I was working through some challenges around some of the things that had happened in my own life. And sometimes I would do an intentional visualization and if I was like stuck in a bad memory or stuck in something that felt challenging to think about, I would try and bring in this very godmother-like character in my own mind and imagine that she was like sitting in that memory with me and being really kind and compassionate and observing with me and just saying, yeah, that was hard, that was a hard thing that you went through, but also bringing in this wisdom, like putting her arm around me and saying like let's get out of here, because this isn't happening now. There's no life for you here anymore. There's just past stuff that you're still working through and I believe in you and your ability to work through it. But let's go do something else and focus on what's wonderful about you. I believe in you and when I look back on some of my earlier writings in poetry I really see the voice of that echoed in so many of them where those lessons that I was moving through at the time are put into words and really learning to find that kinder language for myself. So I love the idea that we all have a circle of support, a circle of archetypes, a circle of resources to draw on, and I love imagining having some sort of wise woman being in the circle and drawing on that characteristic when I need to find it for myself.

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So, going back to the reading and finishing off this passage on how to's for cultivating self-love, tune into nature. Notice how the earth manages to make space for all of us and compassionately grant us space on her land. She embodies acceptance and we can learn to cultivate a greater sense of acceptance by paying attention to what the trees, the seas, the plants, the sky, the moon and any other natural element have to teach us. Last, never forget that you are a powerful agent of change. If you set an intention to learn to love yourself, then you can absolutely trust that your heart will begin to draw into you the right resources, solutions, supports, ideas and inspirations to help you create a pathway into learning to love yourself, exactly where you're at.

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I've often thought that nature is such a beautiful inspiration for compassion and love because she allows all of us to live on her and hold space for so many of us with such diverse backgrounds and opinions and ideas. She holds space for people that don't necessarily treat her well or respect her and still allows them the gift of being on her land, being on her space. And when we go out into nature, she gifts so generously. There's always a gift there if we can tune in and listen. If I sit still and listen to nature, even if I'm out running and trying to be more intentional and appreciative on my run of what I'm seeing in my outside environment, there's always treasures at the heart, always gifts to be found. Sometimes it's a wisdom that comes through, the wisdom of the trees, maybe the wisdom of the ocean. Sometimes it's seeing a flower open and blooming. Sometimes it's observing the changing of seasons or where the light or the weather's at during the time of year and reflecting on what wisdom or lesson that is.

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She's just so rich in abundance and has so much to teach us and give so generously, and I've often found that to be a beautiful way to tap into. How can I internalize more of that for myself? How can I grow that and increase that for myself? How can I use nature as a mirror to help reflect back to me more qualities of generosity and abundance and compassion? And she's available to all of us to do that. Nobody has a corner on the market of nature. She just gives generously and freely and we can always access her. So that's a beautiful way to continue to foster those qualities within us.

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And the last piece is we are a powerful agent of change. If that is something that you want to foster in your life or want to continue to work on building for yourself and letting that concept keep evolving for you in a direction that supports you, then continue to set an intention around it and see what shows up. When we put our hearts into something and say I really want to foster and grow this in my life and maybe I don't know how, maybe I don't know exactly where to start, but the intention is there then magical things happen. It all starts with us being the agent of change and saying I intend this, I intend to grow a stronger pathway of self-love, and seeing what starts to show up and what resources and ideas and experiences you draw into you to support you on that path. So I want to close today with a poem that I wrote. It's called the Girl from Last Summer, and I wrote this back in, I think, the year 2013.

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And a lot of my poetry at that time, a lot of the writing that I did, is focused not only on self-love but empowering my relationship with myself. A lot of the pieces and ideas that I now share about this are. The origins of it all go back to this time in my life and I keep building on them. As I talked about, self-love is an ongoing journey. It's an evolution. It's evolving art. We continue to learn new things about how to bring more warmth and compassion into ourselves and then how can we extend that to others, but so much of the foundation of my work. There were just some really pivotal lessons that happened for me at that time in my life and I wrote it as this essay to myself, this poem to to myself, and when I wrote it and it was 2013, 2014,. I really have to go back and search my journals to figure out the exact timeline, but I wrote it to like the me, the summer before, and life was in a very different place when I wrote this to my slightly younger self and I feel like it embodies some of the concepts that we're talking about today, and for me it's always a pleasure to get to share something that's personal to my own journey and that was meaningful to me, so I hope it inspires you in some way as well.

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The Girlfriend Last Summer If I could go back and be with her, that girl I met one day, who sat broken in the sun, gray in heart, staring out at an empty Pacific. I would tell her my dear one, you do not deserve to be a question tripping off his lips because the sounds of your name are too big and glorious to wrap his voice around. You deserve to be the answer to a question that was met. When he met you and, with a fist pump, spoke a resounding hell yes, because that is the kind of reckless commitment it will take to weather the path of love. And besides, your beautiful name was not meant for whispered stutter but wild exclamation.

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If I could go back and sit with her and lend her my glow to help warm the cold ache she carried inside, I would tell her, my dear one, the pain you now feel is not in vain, for wise hearts are forged upon the wildfires of experience, and every piece that feels broken needed to break so your heart could find room to grow. How else are you going to free your heart if you don't crack through the walls that were holding it back in the first place? If I could go back and take her hand and give her a touch of reassurance to help steady her falling faith in this thing they call love, I would tell her my dear one, do not regret your choices, for you were quite brave to risk your heart for the sake of love, and the only foolishness that exists in having loved is the foolishness that exists when we judge our hearts for doing what hearts are meant to do. And now that you have learned your capacity for deep, massive love. You need to learn to direct that love inwards and shine it on yourself.

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If I could go back, I'd remind her that I will always be there to help her find her way to shore, no matter how lost in the oceans of life she may be. Then I would put my arm around my younger self and say my dear one, you are the answer to a question that is met when you meet you. So pick up those broken pieces and go about the work of reassembling them into something greater than they were before, and embrace yourself with a fist pump and a resounding hell yes, because that is the kind of reckless commitment it will take to weather your path of love. And besides, your beautiful name was not meant for whispered stutter but wild exclamation. Thank you so much for joining me in this episode of your Heart Magic. I will be back next week with a new podcast on psychology, creativity, spirituality, storytelling and heart wisdom. In the meantime, have a beautiful week, be good to you, be loving to you and, as always, be well, be love, be you and be magic.

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You've been listening to your Heart Magic with Dr Bethann Kapansky-Wright. Tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your light.