Selling People on Themselves: Self-Love in a Strange New World

One of the hardest yet most rewarding tasks I find myself accepting every day is that of selling people on themselves. It may sound sort of strange, yet in my career it is a simple reality that I have come to humbly face: Most of us need encouragement and guidance to learn how to show up for ourselves.

This paradigm of Self-Love—of actually doing the things that serve our mind-body-spirit while allowing the self-sabotaging patterns to fall away—is a foreign arena for many. It is a belief system that loving yourself is the same as healing yourself, and that there are real, practical steps that all of us can take to become more open-hearted. You see, none of the knowledge and tools really make a difference if you’re not going to show up for yourself. If we are not open to actually receiving these self-healing inputs, then I’m afraid the battle will be largely uphill.

It can be so hard to break through the subconscious programming of conditional emotions (having to earn our way into feelings of worthiness, love, and grace). Culturally, the West has developed an overwhelming emphasis on productivity, competence, competition, and human achievement. We’re a little passionate and also a little nutty. Most of our ancestors had to be a little crazy to jump on a boat to cross the Atlantic (in which survival and success were not guaranteed) and in doing so take a leap of faith and start over from scratch in a “New World.”

A Strange New World

Meanwhile, the Native Americans were living, finding harmony via an advanced exploration of attunement with Mother Earth, until the Europeans came barging in on their great mission. Instead of understanding the Native American way of life—which would entail actually starting anew—the colonizers kept manipulating and controlling the new environment, for the sake of creating more of the same, albeit on a different continent. There’s a deep part of me that really wonders what we are missing.

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