A Creative Path to Self-Love
Your relationships with other people largely determine whether you live a life you are truly happy with. This isn’t just something I say – decades of socio-psychological research show the same. When we feel good and connected with just 2-3 other people, we live longer, healthier lives, and experience fewer physical and mental challenges. Most crises are triggered by problems in our relationships with others.
Our relationships are vital. But we often forget the relationship that underpins all others: the relationship with ourselves. We’re constantly told that we need to learn to love ourselves to love others – and to allow others to love us. But what does that really mean? Is it self-love to put my own needs first, go to yoga, or spend time alone watching Netflix?
Your own natural, inner creativity and imagination can help you. In imagination, you transcend time and space and can give yourself what you may have needed most as a child: to be seen, heard, loved, supported, given space, and understood.
Before thinking that you’ve done all the inner child work you can handle and now need others to give you love, try this exercise. I learned it from Katherine Woodward Thomas, author of Calling in the One, a beautiful book about finding your soulmate. In her book, she teaches how to use imagination to create and nurture a loving relationship – a method I also use in my own practice and in art therapy exercises.
The next time you feel pain or distress:
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Place your hand on your heart.
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Close your eyes and feel the feeling, its energy, and presence in your body. Notice its size, weight, color, and shape.
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Ask yourself: How old is this part of me?
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Visualize or feel yourself as a child at that age.
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Roleplay as the most loving parent in the world to this child. Send care and love through your hand as best you can. Hold the child until they calm down. Show and say that you see them.
There is such a great need for love and care – for ourselves and for each other – right now. Isn’t there always?
Love,
Karin
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