Here I am again! I found I loved blogging so much that I’ve set myself a personal challenge to keep reporting in on my psychic life. Finding my passion for writing once again has been wonderful so I want to keep my daily notes & observations going. It’s a way of sharing the love in my life. So here goes with today’s snippets.

I was certainly sharing the love this morning with a group of amazing women. I am a member of Damsels in Success and we meet once a month to support each other in all of our endeavors. Our theme today was to consider how we filled ourselves up with positivity especially in a month that tends to send stress levels soaring. One of the themes that emerged was how much appreciation we actually give to ourselves. It’s often the last thing we think of doing. Most of us turn away the compliments & thank yous with ‘it was nothing’, ‘it’s ok’, ‘don’t mention it’. We are also slow to tell ourselves how well we are doing. It seems we prefer to focus on the things we feel or think we aren’t doing right. Yet we give out lots and lots of compliments, thank you’s and well done’s to other people. Why is there such a mismatch between giving and receiving?

I can’t speak for what it is like from a man’s perspective. From my point of view I am caught in the dilemma that faces many women. We have spent years being told, in subtle and sometimes very unsubtle ways, that our role is to be the care givers, the nurturers, the safety blanket for everyone else’s emotional turmoil. It is somehow our job to make everyone else happy. Our conditioning sets us up to give, give and keep on giving, long past the point of wanting to give or being able to give any more. At the same time we are encouraged not to think of our own needs. Doing so is selfish since it takes us away from giving to others and, after all, isn’t that the point of our existence?

Of course you may feel that I’m painting an extreme picture. I am not. People comment positively about my ability to nurture others. If I have to stop the nurturing, practice tough love instead, people tell me I am being harsh or unloving. You see I can’t win. I can never do enough. And somewhere in the middle of all this is me believing that it’s not alright to receive love and nurturing for myself. At the heart of this is finding a balance. Giving myself the permission to both give and receive, to and from others and to and from myself. Inside me I have all the skills, wisdom, strength and talent I need to remind me I am both a giver and receiver of loving energy. That what goes around comes around. That in the company of some awesome women we could share the giving and receiving of love, praise, respect and wisdom.

One of the prompts for our discussion was a song called Put a Little Love in Your Heart from the movie Scrooged. I wonder how often we put a little love in our hearts for ourselves? Probably not often enough. The movie is based on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens; a tale of a lonely, bitter man who has let even his own self-love shrivel up and die. Through a series of visitations from ghosts he gradually sees the struggles of other people alongside his own and comes to recognise that his life experiences could have been much worse. He redeems himself as he starts to reawaken the love for himself, for life and for the people around him. I love that there is the possibility of redemption for all of us. We can always choose to change. To get our lives flowing in a positive way all we need is to learn to love ourselves enough.

What is also clear from our meeting is that we also need to feel the love from other people to kick start the changes we want to make. Because we don’t listen to the positive feedback as it comes in, because we dismiss it in case we end up full of ego, we are trying to rekindle self-love without all the vital sparks of light that make us glow. All the gains that our affirmations to self, our re-writing of inner self talk and our counting our blessings make can be lost if we feel that we are somehow the only one who thinks we are a valuable person. In a world where so many people are devalued because of their race, gender, sexuality, spiritual beliefs or age finding a way back to a sense of loving self-worth is hard. Finding a group or tribe who share the love with you becomes a vital part of making the loving changes within yourself.

Today we shared the love. We talked about what we loved and valued in each person. We put a little love in our hearts so that all of us could share and be empowered by that feeling. Take a few moments to put a little love in your heart. Try to love every part of yourself (even the grungy, grotty little bits). When you feel the love for yourself try sending a loving thought out to the people around you. What is it your love them for? Why are you glad and joyful they are in your life? Even better, write down or say to yourself what you love about yourself. Practice saying it again and again. Then write down or say to others what you love about another person. And another and another. Share the love. If we could all do that the world really would be a better place for you and me!