i didn't love myself yesterday

After years of promoting self-love to others, quite some time ago I discovered that I didn't actually love myself because I had fallen down and found myself knocked down to a very low place.

I didn't love my body... nothing superfluous like I didn't like the growing number of wrinkles that age was honouring me with or the impact gravity was having, drawing my less muscly skin closer to the ground. No, the focus of my ill-will was directed to inside my body.

You see I had received an email from my doctor, an email I didn't like the sound of. She wanted me to go for further investigations and possible biopsies because there were cells in my body which were described as "changing and progressing". Reading that email frightened me.

Suddenly the world I created in my mind was dark, unknown, and scary. So I didn't sleep. However, I did cry. A lot.

In fact I found I couldn't stop crying, fearing the unknown and wondering "what more does my body have to endure?" You see for many years, since 2006, I have lived with Crohn's/Colitis. Then a couple of summers previous, the skin on my feet and lower legs had become red, dry, flaky and itchy... possible eczema/psoriasis which I'm still treating to this day. And then I was dignosed with Diabetes which I controlled with tablets for about a year until my change in diet finally kicked in and my sugar levels returned to normal.

So you can imagine my reaction "what more does my body have to endure?". And, no doubt, you can imagine my level of fear. For years my immune system had been lowered in order to keep my Crohn's/Colitis at bay so anytime I contract an illness or infection, my body struggles to fight it. An infection that should have cleared up by itself had resulted in cells that were "changing and progressing".

When I received the email from my doctor, I didn't deal with it too well. Rather, I went into freak-out mode and shut myself off... almost completely.

I remember I still contacted my mindset/spritual mentor (and friend) for advice on what I should do until the pending investigation and, as hard as it was to do, I also stuck to my morning routine of that time, of EFT (tapping), meditating, talking with the angels, writing my gratitude from the day before, and pulling an oracle card for myself for the day ahead. All of which helped pick my vibration up from off the floor.

One piece of advice that I remember my mentor giving me was to stop doing things I didn't love, to only focus on the things that brought me joy and happiness. It was that piece of advice that stayed prominent in my mind right up until the further investigations and beyond.

Every day as I lay in the strange limbo of not knowing what was round the corner, I followed my mentor's advice and only did things that brought me joy and happiness. And so, I diligently stuck to my morning routine as I knew I always felt better afterwards.

During one such morning as I reached for the Angel Prayers oracle card deck by Kyle Gray that I had been drawn to, I asked the angels for guidance in my personal life during that period of unknown and I received the card: "Honour Your Beauty: Thank you Archangel Jophiel for helping me discover my inner and outer beauty"

Since receiving that email from my doctor, I hadn't been able to find any beauty inside of my body. To me my body felt like a burden holding down my soul, failing more and more as the years went by, attracting one imbalance and dis-ease after the next.

However, after receiving that card, I felt I was being encouraged to thank my body for being strong enough that it was still present, still able to fight any challenges that came its way. As strange and far-fetched as it may sound, in that moment (and since) I felt incredibly grateful for my body. In a strange turn of events I started to feel grateful for the illnesses and dis-eases I had accumulated over the years because each and every one had, in its own way, taught me a new and valuable lesson. And, as a result, I had grown as a person.

Still today, my body, inside, may not be picture-perfect. It has bruises, it has many faults, it may (at times) be completely out of whack and causing me pain, discomfort and sleepless nights. However, it's my body. If I claim to love myself (or, at least be working towards self-love) then I have to love not only my outer-self, I have to love my inner-self too.

For too many years I had thought that loving your inner self was only about your spirituality and honesty, how you treat those around you both human and non-human, your integrity and ethics, all about your non-physical heart. However now, thanks to that experience, another piece was slotted into my personal self-love jigsaw and that piece continues to guide me to love my physical inner-self too.