What is love..??
I feel not a lot of us are taught what it means to love, what is healthy love and how to have love for ourselves and the people around us. For the most part I’m not really going to touch on some areas. But the biggest area is loving yourself.
Loving yourself, for me is having a good relationship with yourself, owning who you are and what you do and to a point moving to the beat of your own drum. My perspective like many things I talk about is from my own lived experiences.
It took me A LOT of years to really accept myself for who I am - and when I say A LOT - I am talking about being in my 30’s. A chronic people pleaser, not fully understanding myself and my personality and my introvert-ism made for a lot of awkward. Wondering for a long time why I wasn’t quite like other people, enjoying what a lot of the extroverts around me did. It was painful. There was even a year I didn’t go to my own (albeit a joint one) birthday party. That year once I accepted I wasn’t going to make it, I got in my comfy’s on that Saturday night, with snacks and movies and couldn’t be happier - apart from the side of guilt on how I’d deal with it all the next day.
This stuff about me isn’t unique, many people are very much the same and have those same traits - SO MANY people around me feel very much the same. Some own it and some are still in the people pleasing stage. Now don’t get me wrong - I will absolutely make efforts for those important and special occasions and then spend a couple days in my own space or outside hitting some nature. The two big parts of my life which are my current main job and my sport (Brazilian Jiu Jitsu) are working with people and training with people. So I naturally crave quietness and as my mate Jade phrases it - ‘I’m just needing a shush’. I’ll happily not spend time with people. And will happily tell people I’m not available because I’ve been with people all day every day for the last X amount of days and need a day with myself.
My point and where I am going with this is - the habits, The Pillars habits they hold a place as part of my life, a part I own. Doesn’t matter where I am, who I’m with there are habits I will take with me. My morning and evening routines are part of who I am and who help me to be the absolute best version of me, that I can be regardless of what is happening in my life. They’re my Pillars - my structure, that creates stability.
When I first met my partner - I told him from day dot about my morning and evening routines, sure there are times where it isn’t maybe practical to do the 10minute morning yoga, but the tea and the journals remain. It’s also okay to miss an evening routine because maybe there was an event where it was going to be a late night, I’ll still clean my teeth, clean my face and journal but it will be a quick version of my routine as it’s part of my winding down to sleep.
I have owned this part of me, my need for quite, to be in nature, to hit my routines. I don’t honestly care if someone thinks it’s nerdy, weird, boring or whatever other feelings a person has about it. They are for me and impact no one else around me.
The other part about having that love for yourself is the commitment to do the things that you know serve you in a positive way even when they take a little effort to do on occasion. As I said in my pervious blog post - putting in the effort when it’s always easier in the short term to just not - that’s discipline but it’s also having love for yourself both now and in the future. Future you will always be grateful and happy you put in the work/effort when you didn’t feel like it.
You may be surprised by the number of highly successful people in many fields from athletes , actors, business people, etc etc who have some form of morning and/or evening routine. Those routines have likely helped them to achieve much of their success or helped them to maintain their success. I will reference once again the book Atomic Habit by James Clear.
Once you accept yourself and all your weird, own who you are and what you do and you’ll find all the love you can have for yourself. You will very likely also find that people who are a lot more like you are drawn to you but also….you might be surprised to find out some of the people around you have some similar habits and routines but just haven’t talked about them yet. You also might just inspire others around you too.