A Letter for Self-Love

In case you have not used self-reflecting methods to practise self-love, there's a high chance that the swallowed seed found the right soil to grow into a limiting conviction like

I don't deserve to be happy / loved / succesful / ...

Your perception is limited. Some convictions are obvious, while others are hidden in the maze of your subconscious.

Some come up everyday and others just in stressful situations.

The obvious and the hidden, the self-loving and self-sabotaging convictions, all have in common to have an deeming impact on your life-perception, thus wellbeing.

Limits are subjective. Your limits are the horizon of your imagination. Imagination is depending on the interaction of perception and experiences (current life-knowledge).

So in order to challenge your own limiting convictions which reveal themselves in destructive thoughts, you could shift and expand your perception with new perspectives.

1. Fold an empty piece of paper.
2. On the left side - list your limiting thoughts briefly, beginning with the most destrucive one. Leave enough space between each thought, no details and no more than there's space.
3. On the (b)right side - pretend to be someone you really trust. List parallelly how these chosen person perceives you and argue reasonably from her/his perspective, why your limiting thoughts are inadequate.
4. Tear the paper into its two halfes. Keep the right and the left you crush into a paper ball, burn it safely or fold a paperplane and let it fly from your favourite lookout.
5. Let it go.

The left side - is sent back to its origin, your past.

The right side just arrived its destination, your consciousness.

You can't rip out a limiting conviction in the garden of your mind without planting a better one. The chance of limiting regrowth is too high. So how to take care of that hole?

Right before bed-time

1. Write down one thing - why you are grateful to be yourself. How would it feel, if that one thing was missing in your life? Focus on the feeling, when you overcome the challenge of getting this one thing back.
2. Write down - what the happiest thing was, you experienced today. How did you feel in that moment, when it happened? Remember what you saw, heard, smelled, touched and tasted?

The more destructive your past experiences have been, the bigger the seed of self-sabotage has grown, because it was fed with every information aligning its origin/cause (confirmation bias).

Currently there're no broadly available quick-fixes for self-sabotage. So be compassionate with yourself (like with someone you love), if your mind has set-back-thoughts. These thoughts occure progressively less over the time of your self-compassionate practice.

My partner and me have experienced a lot of hardships in the past. In stressful situations our minds can bring up self-sabotaging thoughts originating subconsciously from bad experiences. To change that, I tried to create an exercise debunking these thoughts rationally with arguments from another perspective and emotionally by the bond of trust with that loved person. I wanted that anyone is able to do it independently on their own.

The goal is to become more self-compassionate to increase self-worth and self-love, because - We all deserve Wellbeing.