On Loving Yourself

Join me on this gentle invitation to think about how you love and relate to your own self. What do you value? What do you hold sacred when venturing outside of yourself to love another? If self-love is ultimately about the choices we make, do you love your choices?

Discover:
- The process of processing grief
- Why checking in with yourself is important
- Nurturing mental and emotional health
- What is self-love?
- Sitting with yourself and asking, "What is this pain asking of you?"
- Betrayal of self
- How to have reverence for yourself
- What does sacredness mean to you?

Transcript

Hello to you and welcome to the Mark Groves podcast.

I was sitting earlier today and I was thinking to myself,

How am I?

How are you?

How's your heart?

You know,

Sometimes Kylie asks me that,

How's your heart?

In a way at first I feel a bit defensive sometimes.

Fine,

You know,

I don't want to answer that right now.

And I know if I often don't want to answer it or I don't want to explore it then.

There's something I don't want to touch in there.

And we often do that,

Right?

We don't take the time to ask ourselves.

So I want to ask you,

How are you?

How is your heart?

How are you doing?

I had someone ask me a little while ago,

How do you always stay so positive?

I'm like,

I don't.

That's how I actually keep some level of regulated mental health is I don't try to stay positive.

I don't try to negate my feelings that might be coded as negative.

You know,

When we check in with ourselves and we give ourselves this moment to just,

How am I?

It can be rare.

It might be rare for you right now.

It might be uncomfortable and that's okay to breathe into that.

Why don't I want to answer?

What is in there?

When's the last time I took a moment to ask myself that,

To check in on myself in?

And then just notice feelings that come up even asking that because there might be grief that you haven't,

That you might miss yourself.

That's a weird feeling,

Isn't it?

That I miss me,

But I'm always here.

But we're not always here.

We're not always in our bodies.

We're not always here.

Because being here in your heart,

In your body right now,

You breathe into that.

It can be a lot sometimes.

If we make our lives about other people and maybe we have kids and we care for other people,

You know,

Like take care of them,

Then it's so easy to be the last thing on the list.

And it does take a concerted effort to put yourself first on the list.

To know that you need to fill your own cup to pour into anyone else's,

That,

But so many of us are running on empty.

So many of us are just giving,

Giving,

Giving.

Even if we're not giving,

Maybe we're,

Maybe we're not over givers.

Maybe we feel like we have some sense balance in that,

In that exchange,

But we just haven't built the habit of checking in with ourselves.

I have to remind myself,

I have to remind myself that I'm important,

That I have to do the things that nurture my mental and emotional health,

That the emotions that come up when I check in are informing where I need boundaries,

Where I need to reclaim me,

Where I need to draw a line around what I'm okay with now and what I'm not.

And that stuff changes.

And it's not like you just come up with boundaries in one moment or come up with the self,

Who you are,

And then you're stagnant and you're in stasis for the rest of your life.

That's certainly not true.

You're going to grow.

You're going to change.

You are doing that even in this podcast episode,

Even as you listen to this,

You are changing and you are being invited to change always.

And I think the real question becomes,

Will we listen to ourselves?

Will we answer the call?

Will we sit with ourselves?

So much of our conversation is about being in relationship with other people,

Being a good partner,

Being whatever it may be.

We don't often think about being in great relationship with ourselves,

Do we?

I remember reading a book,

When Things Fall Apart by Hema Chodron,

Which is an incredible book.

And in it,

She talks about the principle of maitri,

You know,

Where we might mostly speak about self-love,

To be in love with oneself,

You know,

Which is beyond bubble bath,

Beyond just self-care.

I don't mean just self-care to minimize it,

But it is beyond that,

It is more than that.

Self-love is choices.

It's to be in love with one's choices,

Right?

To love what I choose is to love who I am.

And that is about making choices that are in alignment with who I want to be,

Because we can get there in one moment,

I can make a choice and become everything.

Isn't that amazing?

And I might make a choice that isn't in alignment,

And then I am informed by the pain of that choice.

And then I make another different choice next time.

And that is what keeps me in the integrity of who I am.

So to sit with that,

Right?

To sit with,

Am I in alignment with who I want to be?

What information is being brought into my life that I'm not listening to?

What's it asking of me?

How can I change?

And that principle of Maitri that Pima talks about,

I talk about her like I know her.

Yo,

My homie,

Pima.

Sup,

P-dog?

She talks about Maitri being to become best friends with oneself,

To have reverence for oneself,

To admire oneself.

And that involves a kind of intimacy that is rare,

I think.

You know,

If you had said to me in my early 20s,

My late 20s,

Mid 20s,

Do I love who I am?

I wouldn't have.

I might have had the outward occurrence of having my poop in a group,

But I didn't love my choices.

I didn't love that I was afraid of love.

I didn't love that I drank to numb.

I didn't love that I was performative in order to gain the approval and love of other people.

I didn't love that I betrayed myself for connection.

I didn't love that I betrayed my partner.

I didn't love that by not being in my own integrity with myself,

I am betraying the sacredness of the relationship with myself and the relationship with the people around me.

And I don't mean to say that to sound heavy,

But the weight of it is actually heavy.

I was speaking with my men's group last week and one of the members asked,

Who have you betrayed and who has betrayed you?

And then the follow-up question was,

What is betrayal?

And I thought,

Well,

Betrayal to me is to go against or to damage the sacredness of a connection,

The sacredness of a relationship.

And I say that relationship because relationship to anything,

Self or other,

Even an item,

Computer,

Your phone,

The phone must be treated as sacred.

And if we overuse it,

It is not then being treated as sacred.

And when we don't treat something else as sacred,

We are actually in that moment not treating ourselves as sacred.

So this is an invitation to the return of the sacred,

Which might be totally foreign.

It was certainly foreign for me.

And if you had said in my twenties,

Are you treating yourself as sacred and the people around you?

I certainly operated with some level of integrity,

But I was not fully bloomed.

I wasn't fully there.

I wasn't fully ripened.

And I'd say I'm always ripening now.

I get that.

I'm always growing.

I'm always expanding.

But what I knew,

You know,

The difference is now I learn something and I change it.

I ripen into it.

Then I knew I wasn't in integrity.

I knew that I wasn't living in my highest level of knowledge.

I knew things that I hadn't changed in my life.

So to get into sacred relationship with yourself,

You can't be in sacred relationship with other if you're not in sacred relationship with yourself.

So to do that is to first ask yourself,

What is sacredness mean to you?

What does it mean?

If you were to treat something as sacred,

I like to think of like how you might treat a puppy or a kitten.

You know,

You can hold it in your hand with reverence,

With adoration.

You wouldn't speak too loud.

You wouldn't throw it around.

You might ask,

How could I do that with myself?

Tenderly,

With emotion,

With if I was to be if I was to be listening to the life I kind of want to live,

If I was to be listening to the life I want to live,

If I was operating highest level of what I know,

If I was to take all the pain I've been through and I was to treat that as sacred,

Not to minimize it,

But to treat it as sacred.

And if I was treating my pain as sacred,

I would say,

What can you teach me?

How can you change me?

How can I grow?

Who can I become?

What would make it so I treated you as sacred?

What would my life look like when my choices look like?

Sort of feel that,

You know,

As I say it,

That there's sort of a divine feeling to looking at yourself through the eyes of maybe Christ.

You know,

I remember doing an exercise from a book where it said,

Spend the day today looking at everybody as if you were Christ.

And no matter your religious belief,

I'm certainly not religious,

But I'm spiritual.

And to be able to look at everyone in your world today,

Through that,

It was amazing.

I was getting on a plane and I remember thinking to myself,

And this is hard because,

You know,

When you get off a plane,

There's those people behind you that run forward and jump a couple rows.

And you're like,

Yo,

You don't know how this works.

Maybe because I'm Canadian,

You know,

We have like rules and all the things.

And I was like,

Real hard to look through the eyes of Christ at some of this.

And then I did.

And it was profound because all of a sudden I had so much compassion for someone who's in a rush or someone who's speaking more loudly or someone,

Because I think about what they've been through to get to the place.

It doesn't mean I tolerate inappropriate behavior.

It just means that I have compassion.

I'm walking around compassionately.

And if we can't find that compassion or empathy for other,

How do we find it for self?

Right?

So it starts through this journey of respecting what is sacred.

And then think about that spilling into your romantic relationships.

To look at your partnership as sacred.

If it was sacred,

How would I speak?

What would I be like when I'm not around them?

How would I speak about them?

To be in sacred relationship.

To know that there is a vessel runs between you and the other.

There's a vessel that runs between you and the other.

And it is imperative that you treat it with sacredness.

That you honor it,

That you treat it as that puppy or that kitten,

Which again,

Doesn't mean you don't have boundaries or rules or communicated expectations,

Not uncommunicated ones.

It doesn't mean there's not assertiveness or directness,

Or there's no anger.

And we forget that there is a such thing as clean anger.

And we often confuse that with aggression because we've experienced it.

And so we don't know how to touch anger,

But anger is transformative.

It changes worlds.

It draws lines.

It draws a line around who you are.

And if thinking about how you might've treated your relationship to self or other up until this moment,

And if that brings any anger that can be alchemized and used to transform,

To draw the line that says,

This is what I value.

And I will no longer operate or compromise my values for you or for relationship.

Because if I do that,

I'm not treating the relationship as sacred.

I was speaking to my friend,

John Morrow,

Who's working on a short film called The Opening.

And I did an Instagram live with him the other day.

And he's just an incredible artist.

Definitely check out.

He's doing a fundraiser for the short film.

He's an incredible artist.

You can look up him on Instagram.

He said something that stirred me.

He said,

If you want to find what matters to you,

Find what breaks your heart.

If you want to find your passions.

And I thought,

Isn't that so true?

And what birthed my passion around relating was literally a broken heart in that,

You know,

I've redefined that now though,

You know,

Because I say,

As I've said,

You know,

If your heart is hurting,

It's not broken,

It's open.

But in a lot of ways,

It was broken because I wasn't open.

And so when my relationship ended in my late 20s,

I was not operating.

Even before when I was in that relationship,

I was so void of so much of my totality.

You know,

I'd turned that off years before from heartbreak.

The world can't touch all of the world.

It hurts too much.

And that ending of that relationship taught me so much.

It opened me up.

It made me ask questions.

It was so important,

But it also directed my passions.

It directed in towards what I love,

What mattered to me,

That I pretended didn't matter to me.

Relating,

Love,

Depth,

Connection,

Another,

Intimacy.

It showed me what I cared about.

And so if you want to find where your passion lies,

Find what breaks your heart and thereby opens it,

Right?

Because it walks you towards something that matters to you so much.

And that's what all of this is about,

To make,

To treat something as sacred.

You have to let go of old bullshit behaviors.

You have to let go of things that get in the way.

And often the things that we do in relationship to protect ourselves are actually,

Right,

They're the things that also block us from intimacy because what we need to put in the place of protection is boundaries.

So if I'm reactive or defensive or I withdraw or I'm critical,

The four horsemen,

As the Gottmans call them,

Which when in high order are the greatest predictors of relational ending.

But if I could replace those behaviors with constructive behaviors and boundaries,

Then I could curate what I allow into my life,

Right?

Become the person who's responsible for how I connect,

What I allow.

I live what I speak.

I stand in the truth of my integrity,

Of my values,

Of what does relationship mean to me?

What does a sacred relationship mean to me?

I will show up with that.

I will show up as that.

And I'm committed to that.

And if you want a relationship with me,

I'm committed to bringing that to you.

If you're committed to that and you're committed to bringing it to and we commit to these agreements and agreements can be discussions,

But you'll know your values because you won't want to compromise them.

You won't want to negotiate respect or kindness or transformation.

So I'm so excited to have shared this thought process,

This conversation.

I've been stewing in this and it came at the perfect time.

And I hope you find this helpful.

I hope you find this,

That it meets you in the moment that you needed it.

And,

You know,

I often hear people say,

I wish I had discovered that thing six years ago,

Three months ago,

Last week,

One month,

You wouldn't have heard it.

And you might hear the same thing twice and hear different things.

That's the beauty of perspective.

That's the beauty of transformation.

That's the beauty of evolution that you have changed in this moment,

In the last 20 minutes,

And you will continue to change.

Will you do with the information you are given in the transformation?

Will you transform?

Will you become?

Much love.

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