Self-love, even though I’ve been working on this myself, my inner skeptic, having grown up in the UK where pessimism is way too normalised, thinks it’s total shit, but it’s not.
Self Love is the one thing you need to be able to be resilient while life is throwing shit at you and you don’t want to, but you must keep going.
You may think that talking to yourself more hashly or being more strict with yourself is how you’ll get out of this funky mood.
It simply isn’t, the best thing you can do is to cultivate self compassion, through self love.
Self love isn’t being thinner, or more toned, or smarter or any sort of improvement, it’s got nothing to do with attaining something to gain it.
When I briefly worked a 9 – 5 job, back while living at my parents house post uni (yes I felt great shame about this but now realise I’m lucky to have had this privilege), I met a colleague who had lost a lot of weight.
She’s a lovely lady, good at her job, but you look at her posture and she told me how, she had lost that weight after months and months.
She thought that losing weight would help her feel better, we are always sold this idea that the promotion, or the car or the bigger house will give us more happiness.
However like my colleague, she had her goal, she’d lost the weight, she looked great, but she still wasn’t happy.
Had she worked on her self-esteem, on why she wanted to lose the weight perhaps she’d would have lost weight and felt content with that?
In a world where your productivity is akin to that of a machine, when you’re just a human being. Who needs to rest, who needs to enjoy life and who needs a freaking break.
This may all sound like toxic positivity? Well that’s not what I’m aiming for by talking about Self Love.
Self love is knowing you may feel down again, you may struggle again, but that you won’t let that monkey mind of yours talk shit at you while you’re literally just trying to survive the day.
So when you catch yourself, this does take quite a bit of practice, as we’re not usually told to praise ourselves for little achievements, like catching your mind when you’re in a negative self hate loop.
Also use some of the tools in this yoga lesson off of the mat.
This is the beauty of yoga, that peace, that sense of calm that you feel, you can implement it into your daily life with a little bit of self awareness.
When you feel anxious, or your mind won’t let something go and you’re beating yourself up:
Another thing you can do is add some affirmations, affirmation as described by the Cambridge (UK) dictionary means to “to state something as true”.
My favourite affirmations when I’m feeling very low are:
Feel free to screenshot and save this affirmation for your phone screen.
Feel free to screenshot and save this affirmation for your phone screen.
As mentioned above, we live in a society that tells us with daily adverts, depending on who you follow on social media or even people who you look up to.
That you need to lose weight, get more tone, get more muscly or earn more money, or drive a fancy car.
None of these things will give you the lasting joy and resilience that practicing self love will give you.
Yes I call self love a practice because like Yoga or meditation or anything be that snowboarding or skateboarding or running, you will not learn much about it doing it just a handful of times.
Self love may not come up first when you’re criticising yourself and feeling super shit, but self love and creating self compassion for yourself will seriously help you as you keep practicing this.
Feel free to come back to this Self Love yoga class anytime you’re in crappy mindset and want to shift into self love.
Because you are worthy and you are enough and you really do matter.
Lots of love
Nanaco
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