A Creative Path to Self-Love
Your relationship with other people determines whether you have a life you are happy to live. It’s not just something I’m saying. Decades of socio-psychological research says so, too.
When we feel good and close with just 2-3 other people, we live better and longer and have fewer physical AND mental problems. When we are in crisis it is mostly triggered by problems in our relationships with others.
Our relationships are vital. But we forget the relationship that is the foundation of all the others: the relationship with ourselves.
We are also told over and over again that we must learn to love ourselves so that we can love others and that they can love us. But what does that really mean? Is it perhaps self-love to put my own needs first, to go to yoga, or to spend time by myself in front of Netflix?
Your own natural, inner and inherent creativity and imagination can help you. In imagination you are beyond time and space, and you can actually learn to give yourself what you probably needed the most when you were a child: to be seen, heard, loved, supported, space, and understood.
Before you think that you’ve done all the inner child work you can handle and that you need others to give you love, try this. I learned it from Katherine Woodward Thomas, who wrote the book Calling in the One – a beautiful book about finding your soulmate. In this book she teaches us to use imagination to find and create a beautiful relationship. I use it for myself and in my therapy practice as an art therapy exercise.
The next time you feel bad and in pain, put your hand on your heart, close your eyes, and feel the feeling and its energy and life in your body.
How big is it, how heavy / light, what color and shape? Ask yourself? How old is this part of me? See or feel yourself as a child at that age.
Roleplay that you are now 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 he or she calms down, show and say that you see them
There is such a need for love and care for ourselves and each other right now. Isn’t there always?
Love,
Karin