I’ve been thinking a lot lately about self-love, about how little we’re taught this, and how different life would be if we expressed more self-love.

There’s an interesting thing that comes up often in healing and spiritual sayings, about how we need to love ourselves before we can love another.

We don’t.

Self-love isn’t in a vacuum.

It doesn’t happen on its own.

And often, because of the judgements we hold against ourselves, because of the disconnect we have with so many parts of ourselves, because of the suppression of so many parts of ourselves, self-love doesn’t only happen within us.

It’s in connection with life, with the world, with others.

It’s all happening at the same time.

When another loves us, expresses and shows that love, whatever the context of that is, it opens a possibility of us loving ourselves. Because the feeling of love is present.

When we do something that we enjoy, without a judgement of how we’re doing it, simply enjoy doing it, that’s an expression of self-love.

When we feel something inside of us, really feel it, and allow the feeling, whatever it is, that’s an expression of self-love.

When we’re expressing something authentically, that’s self-love.

Looking at these things can help us see how many ways there are for us to love ourselves more.

Because so much of my work is about the body, about touch in so many ways, this is an amazing path to experience self-love, and to heal the disconnect, the separation, the judgement, the suppression that keeps us from our beautiful selves.

Touch is a language, a conversation with our bodies, with parts of us that have no words, they simply know.

They know feeling, and they know what’s in the feeling.

When we’re touched with love, when we’re touched with tenderness, when we’re touched with presence, we feel it.

Sometimes so deep inside that we have no conscious awareness of it, and yet we feel it.

A part of us knows that.

And with time, with repetition, that comes to awareness, comes to the surface, comes to our consciousness.

So much of the resistance to self-love is in the mind.

So many of the reasons why we shouldn’t, why we’re not worthy enough, why we’re not good enough, why we’re not deserving, are in the mind.

And as much as we work with these, our judgements are deep. In time they shift, they move, they change.

And in the meantime the body opens, softens, feels.

And releases.

Because it’s all held in the body, in tension, in rigidity, in stiffness.

In feelings.

And when we feel something different, we open.

We release, we let go.

And we create the space for something else to flow, to move within us.

Touch does this.

Our own touch, the touch of another.

‘I’m just crying and crying and crying. And the tears are coming from very deep inside me.

I feel waves of energy welling up each time the tears well up.

I haven’t felt tears like these before.’

This was shared with me after some releasing bodywork.

And the next day, ‘I’m feeling a lot more open today and it feels very centred. I feel grown up.Like there’s a gentle and quiet wisdom.’

It’s in the body.

We look for so much outside of ourselves.

One of the greatest wisdom sayings, ‘It’s all within us,’ shows us the way.

It’s within the body.

Over time, more than 25 years on this journey, teaching body meditation, teaching touch, sharing touch, it’s within us.

I talk about pleasure as a path of healing.

It’s also a path of self-love.

Conscious Pleasure, deep pleasure, orgasmic energy in the body.

Changes things within us.

Touches these deep parts of us.

Sometimes the pleasure brings the tears, the anger, the guilt, to awareness.

And the same pleasure releases it, transforms it.

And it becomes love.

Self-love is that we make love with ourselves.

We allow ourselves to experience the love of life through our sensuality.

We allow ourselves to experience the love of touch, the touch of love.

To learn to touch our own bodies is to develop a relationship with ourselves, which becomes an intimacy, becomes love.

The limitless possibility of touch.

To learn to touch another, from our hearts, allows us to feel love. And as well as expressing that outwards, we learn to feel it inside of us, thus the giving becomes the receiving, becomes the love.

To learn what’s within our bodies, in our sensuality, in our touch is a pathway to self-love.

Many of the practices I teach are body meditations, touches of love, for ourselves.

Learning to touch another in the massage and touch events, to give and receive, are pathways to love.

So much within us.

A while ago I taught a series of workshops called The Body of Possibility, today I talk about the Body of Self-Love.