Many of us come to the self love path because we really want to change ourselves.
We are tired of our self sabotaging behaviors.
We are tired of the ways that we let others walk all over us.
We don’t know what our purpose or passion is, and we want to figure out ‘who we are’ so we can start living a life that actually works for us.
We want to change our personality to be more confident, more self assured, more lovable and more likable.
We want to get rid of our laziness, be more productive, and be more organized.
We have a vision for who we think we ‘really are’ and what our lives are SUPPOSED to look like - or at the very least we know that our current life isn’t ‘it.’ We know that our job isn’t right, our relationships aren’t right, our body isn’t right, the way we spend our time isn’t right.
And we want to fix it.
We want to get rid of the things about ourselves that we perceive to be our ‘problem’ and we want to BE DIFFERENT.
We are deeply convinced that if we could just change these external things - if we could get it together to get a new job, to leave the relationship, to stop watching hours of Netflix and become the motivated, self assured, productive, passionate fully expressed being we know we SHOULD be that everything in our lives would be better.
So we work really hard to change what we think is ‘wrong’ with us.
We try over and over again to get rid of those bad habits, to BE the ‘new’ person.
We do all the self help/spirituality/personal growth work to try to figure out ‘who we are’ - constantly questioning every move we make, all of our motivations, challenging our belief systems with new ways of thinking and attempting to find our ‘truth’.
We find that in the beginning, we are always able to maintain change for a while. We are able to use discipline and the ‘high’ of feeling like we’re doing something new/figuring something out as motivation to get to the gym, to start on our resume, to state a boundary or two.
We are excited by the possibility that if we just practice ‘thinking positively enough’ or journal about what we really want long enough or force ourselves into hours and hours of introspection that THIS TIME we are going to find it, we’re going to figure it out and we’re going to come to the revelation that will lead to a life we love.
But eventually we always find that we ‘fall off the wagon.’
The motivation wears off, and we end up going back into old habits.
We experience a bump in the road - we get an injury that messes up our workout schedule, we discover that there are many more steps we have to take to get to a goal we have that we didn’t expect and don’t know how to face, we find out that what we thought our path was going to be is actually different from what it is in real life.
We experience a trigger or a deeply emotional day and all of a sudden all we want to do is curl up in front of our phones and scroll for hours instead of sticking to our new cleaning routine or moving forward with pursuing our side hustle.
We do all the introspection and still feel like we are living someone else's life and like we’re no closer to understanding who we are or what we want - we’re now just more aware of all the things we ‘should’ be thinking and being aware of and it’s overwhelming.
This my friends, is essentially the self improvement path in a nutshell.
It doesn’t work, and there are some really solid reasons WHY it doesn’t work - mainly because approaching our ‘self help’ from this perspective of working from the outside in is always going to lead to failure because it’s like trying to redecorate a house that has a rotten foundation.
Let’s look a little more at this, so we can gather some clarity on why it’s ineffective, why it’s not YOU that is failing the path but rather the path that’s failing you, and what we can do instead that will actually work.
The Cart Before The Horse
Long story short - the self improvement path is putting the cart before the horse.
The self improvement path is based upon the fundamental assumption that you KNOW who and what you should be/shouldn’t be doing, that your external behaviors are a result of you not trying hard enough to be better/different, that there is an ‘ideal you’ that you are supposed to be striving for and that it is your external circumstances or behaviors that are CAUSING you to feel unhappy.
The self improvement path says that there is some ultimate revelation that we can come to that will allow us to see who we ‘really are’ and that when we come to this ultimate revelation we will then be able to simply walk into a life that works for us with clarity and confidence.
The self improvement path says that if we try hard enough, white knuckle it hard enough and put in enough effort that we can force ourselves to be different and in so doing, that we will fix all of our pain.
It’s a path that always looks and sounds SO promising, and it tends to make logical/intuitive sense to us.
Most of us look at our lives and think that the things that are causing us pain are the externalities of our experience.
It makes sense to us that the time we spend on social media, the time we waste in front of the T.V, the fact that we aren’t being more productive, the fact that we are working the wrong jobs or are in the wrong relationships IS the problem.
We really feel like we have all the evidence in the world to support the belief that it’s our personality that is the reason we don’t have the safety, love and support we need.
We are convinced that the reason we don’t know ourselves or aren’t living ‘authentically’ is simply because we haven’t TRIED hard enough.
We believe that the solution to our pain is to change these things, because again it appears SO OBVIOUS that these are the things that are the CAUSE of our pain.
Then we go out into the world and this idea is reinforced over and over again all around us.
We are continually sold books, retreats, therapy programs, mastermind groups, meditation techniques, manifestation techniques and long selfie sermons all telling us that we just need to CHANGE ourselves using our will, using our minds, using our ‘spirituality’ - because this is the answer to all freedom and happiness.
We need to re-arrange the furniture of our houses. We need to redecorate. We need to take this house we’re living in that we don’t love and we need to give it a paint job and a few twinkle lights and in doing so, we are going to figure out how to be happy.
We are shown magical before and after photos of people who ‘got their lives’ together and now have their dream bodies and therefore dream lives.
People who left their 9-5 to pursue their passion and are happier now than ever.
People who realized that no one was coming to save them, so they saved themselves by leaving their jobs, leaving their spouses, selling all their things and going on that plant medicine retreat where they healed all their childhood trauma and now travel around the world blogging and making a million dollars a minute.
Which then makes us feel WORSE - because we are trying SO HARD to do this. We are trying SO HARD to change. So hard to find ourselves. So hard to ‘wake up’ or process - and it seems like we must just be bad at it because no matter how hard we try, we can’t make it stick.
I am here to tell you today that this is not your fault.
You’re not failing.
You’re not doing it wrong.
You’re not weak, lazy or incompetent.
Rather, the self improvement path has it all backwards.
IT doesn’t work - not long term - and even if you are the most dedicated, disciplined person on the planet - you’re going to eventually come to see that just because you can push yourself to do the new things and think the new thoughts and be the new person, that at the end of the day this way of trying to improve our lives just leaves us feeling worse rather than better in the end.
Why It Doesn’t Work
The self improvement path misses the fundamental first step of a true transformation, thereby making it essentially impossible to get from where we are to where we want to go.
The reality is, your external habits are not the CAUSE of how you feel - rather that are largely the RESULT of how you feel.
Your lack of self awareness and capacity to live a life that feels good for you is not due to you not trying hard enough - it’s due to you never being given the space to be WHO YOU ARE right here, right now, and never being given the space to explore what happened to you that shut you down in the first place.
Your lack of capacity to ‘be that person’ you want to be is not the cause of your pain - rather it’s very possible that you trying to be that idealized version of yourself is actually making you feel WORSE rather than better.
The self improvement path is a path that totally bypassess the step of actually slowing down, and figuring out WHY you behave how you do, where your thoughts and feelings are actually coming from right now, what you actually need, what actually feels good for you, what your emotions are telling you and therefore it bypassess all of your innate knowing and wisdom.
It relies upon theories of what a ‘good life is’ and it tries to shape you to fit that mold or box - rather than actually helping you to figure out who YOU are.
It doesn’t address where our limiting beliefs come from. It doesn’t address where our ideals have come from. It doesn’t address our conditioning and the fact that many of us are striving to become someone we think we ‘should be’ that isn’t at all in alignment with who we really are.
It doesn’t address the fact that our culture has some pretty messed up value systems and ideas about who and what we ‘should be’ and that perhaps the reason we are struggling to remain committed to our path is due to the fact that we are chasing something that is NEVER going to feel good for us.
It doesn’t give us time and space to process the often dark, heavy and painful emotions we have about the things that we went through that are DRIVING our current behaviors - thus never giving us a real chance to CHANGE our behaviors.
It doesn’t address the foundations. It doesn’t address where our beliefs came from. It doesn’t address our emotions. It doesn’t address our authentic self as we are right now - it’s a path of projection, expectation and externalized ideas - and thus - it’s never going to help us feel how we want to feel.
Why The Self Love Path Is Different
On the self love path, we flip the whole journey on its head.
On the self love path we begin by letting GO of all the external changes, all the external striving, all the trying to ‘figure it out’ and all the trying to become - so that we can fist focus on where we ACTUALLY are in this moment, what we are ACTUALLY feeling, where our beliefs systems came from and what we are expecting of ourselves that may not be in alignment with reality.
On the self love path we let ourselves off the hook of making all these changes to our external world, so that we can first investigate into who we are in THIS moment, why we are the way we are and most importantly we start to show up for this version of ourselves with the intention of getting to know what we NEED right now and how we can start to meet those needs in a practical way.
We shift from fixing ourselves, to supporting the version of ourselves that actually exists, right here, right now.
We realize that in order to grow into who we really are, we first need SAFETY. That we aren’t going to become a new version of ourselves through force, through trying to just think or believe different things or through continually ‘searching for’ ourselves.
The self love path is about learning how to STOP all the external ‘doing’ for a while, so that we can take some time to go inwards.
Which is hard, uncomfortable and can feel like a waste of time when we first start.
You see, the reason most people really struggle to get on the self love path and to stay on the self love path, is because in the beginning especially, it’s NOT going to ‘look’ like anything is happening.
It’s not going to lead to massive changes that we can point to and say ‘see look! It’s working! I’m doing it!’
It’s not going to lead to us being able to clearly see our patterns, why we do what we do and then automatically being able to then CHANGE in some massive way.
It’s not going to lead to clarity on who we are and what we want right away.
It’s not a quick fix, and it’s not something that we can simply use willpower to force.
Rather, it's going to be a journey that at first glance is going to look and feel like stagnation. It’s going to look like we aren’t doing anything and aren’t getting anywhere.
We are going to doubt the path because of this. There will be days and times when this path feels like a big mistake, like we are ‘falling behind’ and like we aren’t doing what we ‘should’ be doing because we aren’t making OBVIOUS changes to the external world.
This is normal.
The self love path is FIRST about slowing down all the external movement, all the expectation, all the pre-judgement of who we think we are and what we think we should be - so that we can FEEL INTO our bodies. Feel into our emotions. So that we can take the time to process through the conditioning we’ve been handed that is telling us who and what we are vs. the actual true self that is waiting to be discovered.
It’s about learning how to see our blame, shame and guilt stories for the lies that they are - so we can go PAST those stories into what we are actually FEELING and what we are actually WANTING and NEEDING.
It’s about taking time to grieve the past, the pain that we’ve been through, the experiences that deeply harmed us and the mindsets we’ve created about ourselves and life that are deeply painful DUE to those experiences.
It’s about coming into the reality of the circumstances we’re actually in, what’s available to us, what we need and what we want - and figuring out how we can best support ourselves WITHIN the reality that actually exists - no more convincing ourselves that things are ‘fine’ when they aren’t or blaming ourselves for circumstances that are outside of our control.
It’s about learning how to actually BE with our emotions so that we can investigate into them rather than denying them or reacting to them.
It’s about learning how to question our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us so we can start to see more clearly.
It’s about building that compassion muscle so that when we engage in the ‘bad’ habits we have or express in a way that we think we shouldn’t be - we can actually figure out what we NEED and what we WANT.
THEN we start taking small, subtle steps towards the things that are actually true for us.
THEN we can start to have the true awareness we need around what’s ‘ours’ and what’s conditioning.
THEN we can start to SUPPORT ourselves in getting our needs met vs. trying to FIX ourselves when we are doing things we perceive to be harmful.
THEN we can start to move from a place of going towards what is TRULY wanted at a pace that actually works for us, rather than rushing towards what we think will make us happy or constantly moving away from what we don’t want with no clear direction.
THIS is what the path does for us.
It stops us at first.
It slows us down.
It draws us into processing.
It’s not about action right away.
We must take the time to get to know who we are in this moment, not who we want ourselves to be or who we are projecting onto ourselves.
Then we must process what’s HERE right NOW.
THEN we can start to move forward.
You see?
The path looks totally different because it is totally different.
It’s about getting rid of the fictitious you, so we can connect with the you that actually exists - and in so doing we can then design a life of SUPPORT for THIS version of you.
One step at a time, adjusting as you go and as you grow.
<3
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