The Importance Of Self-Love and Self-Care Practices [Episode #448]

This week’s topic is: The Importance Of Self-Love and Self-Care Practices

This is very aptly timed as we are coming upon Valentine’s Day, which is in some ways a pretty annoying hallmark holiday, where you feel like either you need to buy a bunch of stuff or go out to dinner.

On one hand, it’s nice to spend time with a loved one. On another hand, it can be depressing if you’re single and you feel all this pressure. We want to give a different spin on this holiday and the idea of love. It all starts with self-love and you can give it to yourself. It’s anchored inside you already.

We can tap into it and it doesn’t matter if you have a partner or not this Valentine’s day. It’s a really wonderful time to focus on elevating your own health and wellbeing and happiness by loving yourself more. I think it’s a series of steps and practices to get there. It’s a lifelong journey.

Have you been wondering about this very topic? If you want to know the answer to this question and 3 more sent in by Beauties just like you, listen now to find out!

Remember you can submit your questions at https://mysolluna.com/askkimberly/

[Questions Answered]

Jenny – New York 

I have a high pressure job in marketing, I get up early and get home late. My commute is killing me as well as my boss who is constantly riding me and making me feel not good enough. How do I make time for myself when it feels like my commute and my job are consuming me?

Megan – Florida

I am single, so with Valentine’s around the corner I am feeling and the judgement from my mother…who every time I see her, asks me when I am going to find a guy and have grandkids. What do you suggest I do to feel better?

Sarah – Georgia 

I feel like everything is wrong. I have been yo-yo dieting for years. My hair is dry and I have daily hair loss, my skin is also dry. I also find I get bloated in the morning most days especially after coffee. What are your top suggestions to improve my self-care?

Simone – Melbourne

What do you think about ingesting essential oils for your health as a form of self-care?

Inspirational Thought Of The Week

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and to find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”  – Rumi

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[RESOURCES]

• Why Beauty & Self Love Are Connected!
• How to Overcome Not Feeling Good Enough and Own Your True Self
• How to Like Yourself More, And How This Improves Your Health
• Beauty Detox Self Care Tips!
• The Importance Of Self-Care With Ruth Berhe
• A Beginner’s Guide to Using Essential Oils for Wellness & Beauty!
• Winter Aromatherapy Basics with Charlynn Avery
• Change Your Energy by Using Essential Oils With Charlynn Avery
• Sleep Health With Charlynn Avery
• Probiotics
• Detoxy
• Digestive Enzymes  
• Feel Good Starter Kit
• FREE Gift: 7-Day Meditation Series (DIGITAL COURSE)
• Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life
• Be a part of the community Join the Feel Good Circle
• Kimberly Snyder’s Books
• Four Cornerstones FREE PDF: Text the word: feelgood (833) 744-0079
• Additional resources in transcript

Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:

• Advice For Feeling Your Best – Inside and Out!
• Self-Love with Grace Sylke & Natural Ways to Beat Jet Lag!
• How To Switch Your Mindset To Love Your Body More!
• On Air With Ella & Tips To Boost Your Mood!

Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly: Hey beauties and welcome back to our Thursday Q and A podcast, where our topic today is the importance of self love and self care practices. Of course this is very aptly timed as we are coming upon Valentine’s day, which is in some ways a pretty annoying hallmark holiday, where you feel like either you need to buy a bunch of stuff or go out to dinner. On one hand, it’s nice to spend time with a loved one. On another hand, it can be depressing if you’re single and you feel all this pressure, so we want to give a different spin on this holiday and the idea of love, which is where it all starts with yourself. It all starts with self love and you can give it to yourself. It’s anchored inside you already. We can tap into it and it doesn’t matter if you have a partner or not this Valentine’s day. It’s a really wonderful time to focus on elevating your own health and wellbeing and happiness by loving yourself more.

Kimberly: This is the theme, actually, of our Solluna Circle this month, which, if you don’t know, is an online program that we have. It’s our modern tribal community, which you can check out on our website and join us from anywhere in the world, but as we talk about self love is such a concept that’s thrown around a lot and I don’t think it’s like turning on a button and suddenly you love yourself. I think it’s a series of steps and practices to get there. It’s a journey. It’s a lifelong journey.

Kimberly: I know I’ve been on it for a long time and I probably will work on it for the rest of my life. Practices are important, just like anything that we’re trying to develop and elevate in our life. We want to pay attention. We want to work on it from all different angles, including from our cornerstones, our four cornerstones of true beauty, true connection with ourself, which is food. How do we nourish ourselves physically, so we feel loving to ourselves? Body; how do we take care of our bodies in a loving way? Emotionally; how do we respect our feelings and process and feel ourselves and feel good about ourselves? Fourth, spiritual growth. How do we spend time connecting with ourselves, with our true selves? That is the very important part of self love because when we feel our uniqueness, we lessen the reaction and the need to try to look like everybody else and follow everybody else like sheep because we feel a lot more connected to our true nature.

Kimberly: That’s the lens that we look at every topic at and especially self love. Before we dive in, please beauty, leave us a review on iTunes. It’s free and an easy and just takes a moment or two if you haven’t yet already. It’s a great way to support the show energetically, and while you’re at it, you can subscribe to our show, which is a great form of self love because it keeps you tuned into a positive, loving community, and we all need positivity in our life. We’re here for you. We’re here to support you. We love being here for you, for sure. When you subscribe, you don’t miss out on any shows, you don’t miss out on the positive vibe, which is a great thing to work into your life on a hopefully weekly basis.

Kimberly: Now we can dive into our show. Now we can dive into our topic. We have our amazing Katelyn over on the east coast who has put together the show. She’s been with me since the beginning of the podcast. She’s our GM of Solluna. Hi, Kay, and happy early Valentine’s Day.

Katelyn: Yes. Happy early Galentine’s. For us, we have our little love fest here on the podcast today with our community and beauties. For the guys listening too, but we’ll say for our Galentines.

Kimberly: Oh, I’ve never heard that. That’s so cute.

Katelyn: Really? I just sent my girlfriend a card and they had something on the Food Network too about Galentines and getting your girlfriends together and just celebrating your friendships as well as yourself.

Kimberly: Oh, I love that.

Katelyn: It’s pretty cool. Yeah. I thought that was a nice thing for this year, just to kind of have another angle, right? Like you were saying, from like a cheesy Hallmark holiday, to just take it to another level to even just tell your family how much you love them or your friends or just take a day for yourself. Like oh, self care, got a manicure, did self-massage. Focus on yourself.

Kimberly: Yeah, exactly. We do create our own reality, if we buy into, oh, it’s just about having a romantic partner and I don’t have one, so it’s depressing. We kind of buy into that versus oh, Valentine’s Day is really about love. Self love is primary in that way, so we can shift the narrative around Valentine’s Day and create all this spin on it, or like you said, Kay, make it be about hanging out with your friends.

Question 1: I have a high pressure job in marketing. I get up early and got home late. My commute is killing me as well as my boss who constantly rides me and makes me feel not good enough. How do I make time for myself when I feel like my commute and my job are consuming me?

Katelyn: 100%. We have a bunch of questions that have come in around this topic. Let’s dive in. We have Jenny living in New York. I have a high pressure job in marketing. I get up early and got home late. My commute is killing me as well as my boss who constantly rides me and makes me feel not good enough. How do I make time for myself when I feel like my commute and my job are consuming me?

Kimberly: Jenny, sending you a big hug in New York. My heart goes out to you. There’s a lot here in the question that I want to address. The first thing I want to address, which is present right now and in your reality right now is your commute. I think commute time should either be a time to fill or to empty. What I mean by you could fill it with a lot of nourishment, such as listening to our podcast, doing some guided meditations, listening to books on tape. Really using that time to the best of your ability with nourishment, or you could empty it. You could make it a time where you just work on presence and mindfulness and try to cut out noise, and do some breath work and not listening to anything.

Kimberly: Either way, different days could be different things, but either way you could make it be about working on a practice, so you don’t feel like you’re just wasting your time. I think that could be one step here is do you want to fill or do you want to empty in your commute time, and then what is the most nourishing to you on that day? The days you do want to fill, what’s the most positive, what’s the best things? How do you find those tools and equipment, download the podcast, download the books, the meditations, whatever it is, and really utilize that time.

Kimberly: Secondly, it sounds to me, just from your sentences here, that it may be time to look for a new job. I’m just going to be direct and not so much about the hours because I work long hours too. So does Kay, but we love what we do. It’s more about when your boss is not making you feel good enough, but if you’re not feeling good about your job, I would suggest, Jenny, you deserve the best. You deserve to feel good. You deserve to take your talent and your uniqueness and your spirit and your energy into somewhere where you do feel good.

Kimberly: In the present, there’s making things as good as can be in the present and then there’s action for the future, and I think the president, like we talked about, is the commute. Then I also think that the future is taking some steps now, whether it’s looking around, or getting your resume ready or starting to put the word out with acquaintances or friends and just energetically calling in a new job or changing things up in a way that feels really good to you, could be something on the horizon for you. Something to think about and…

Katelyn: Oh, sorry. I was going to say I really like the concept. I hadn’t thought about it that way of emptying or filling your time. I think that’s really interesting, even just for me being artsy, like I’m picturing like filling a cup, emptying a cup and just thinking about how you utilize your time in a conscious way. A lot of times we’ll be like, oh, I might just call a friend because I’m driving or I may put this music on, but we’re not really consciously saying I’m filling my time versus being like I’m consciously maybe going to turn the radio off right now, so I think that consciousness about what you’re doing was really interesting.

Kimberly: Yes, exactly. That’s time that we can use in a very constructive way. Then I’ll also say that in the present, if you’re getting up early for your job, but having some sense of a morning routine to anchor in a meditation, drinking hot water with lemon, the things we talk about, GGS, probiotics, really fortifying yourself before you go in is going to still put you in the sense of self care and self love. You’ve done something really good for yourself and you’ve grounded yourself before you go into work, so that’s something I would encourage as well. Even if it means getting up 10 minutes earlier, Meditation could just be a few minutes. Just be some time, but it’s still a practice. It’s still something you do consistently and it’s still going to nourish you and feel good to you, even if it’s brief.

Katelyn: 100%. When your job doesn’t feel good, and it’s something that we all do a majority of our life. You spend your time at your job or your career. It’s really important, as Kimberly mentioned, to evaluate how that feels and how you’re spending your time is a big chunk of your life and that can really start to trickle into your personal life and your personal care can diminish if you’re not feeling good about yourself.

Kimberly: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Exactly.

Question 2: I am the single, so with Valentine’s day around the corner, I’m feeling the judgment from my mother who every time I see her asks me when I’m going to find a guy and have grand kids. What do you suggest I do to feel better?

Katelyn: Okay, so Megan from Florida. I am the single, so with Valentine’s day around the corner, I’m feeling the judgment from my mother who every time I see her asks me when I’m going to find a guy and have grand kids. What do you suggest I do to feel better?

Kimberly: This is a big one. Megan, first of all, sending you a big hug. I get it. I feel it. I feel it in a lot of my friends that are single. I feel it energetically, societally that it sucks. This holiday can really suck if you’re single because you feel like you’re missing something even when you’re not because the truth is we don’t have to have a partner to feel love. We don’t have to have a partner to have an amazing life, but because of the way this holiday’s presented, then it kind of puts that pressure on people. I will say that your mother is coming, as we know, with the best intentions. That’s really on her. It’s her trying to fill her life.

Kimberly: For a lot of people as they get older and things fall away, they have an empty nest, maybe they stop working, grand kids becomes this idea that they get in their head as a way to feel good and to sometimes feel useful and to feel connected, but that’s really about your mother. I would just put that into perspective and have some compassion actually and be like, oh, it’s too bad that my mom feels like she needs that to feel happy because she doesn’t. She can be happy right now whether she’s grand kids or not. It doesn’t mean we don’t love our expanding family. When babies come it’s amazing, but in the meantime, if that’s not what’s happening and you’re living your life and you don’t have a child right now to put pressure on somebody around that, which is something that she really ultimately wants for herself, you don’t have to buy into that.

Kimberly: I would, first of all, just create that awareness of trying to feel some compassion for your mom and turn that into instead of feeling resentful and why does she always have to be judgy and mean with me. See the truth of it, which is it’s like your mom wanting to feel connection. Maybe she misses being a mom. Maybe she’s sad that her kids grew up. Maybe she doesn’t feel useful anymore, so feel into that. I think that’ll help change the perspective away from, so there’s something wrong with you, to there’s actually a lack feeling in your mom. I’m sorry, Kay. You want to say something about that?

Katelyn: I was just going to say…

Kimberly: [crosstalk 00:13:52] over there.

Katelyn: I’m pondering on something. No. I think that that’s just a really enlightened way of going about it. Often times we don’t stop ourselves enough and we go to that immediate gut reaction of pain. Maybe you were triggering a past pain or somebody’s picking on me or attacking me, and when you do take a moment to look where people are coming from, then I often find, for myself in my own life, that it doesn’t always make what they’re doing right, of course, but you could take a step back and empathize with maybe why they’re behaving that way or why they would say something because there is something going on within them that really has nothing to do with you. The people we’re closest with, our family, often we end up taking things out on each other, the people we love the most, not necessarily on purpose, but it does happen.

Kimberly: Exactly. Just trying to step into someone’s shoes or look at it from their perspective creates a lot of empathy. I think first of all and just getting different perspective. Secondly, because Valentine’s Day is around the corner and this is happening with your mother, Megan, I would encourage you now to reshift the focus on you and your life. This Valentine’s Day would be a beautiful time to do something good for yourself in the four cornerstones, let’s say.

Kimberly: Number one, can you have an amazing meal with a friend or can you make yourself a really yummy elixir and kind of sit with yourself and enjoy it food wise, number one. Number two, body. How about treating yourself to a massage or a self massage. I think that’s kind of an amazing thing to do on the outside, say, is a massage. I’ll keep it at that. Some kind of touch or over this weekend, if you live in Florida, there’s so many of those places there, too. I know they’re in New York. They’re all over the place. Some of the Asian massage places are much cheaper and you can even just get a foot massage or something like that. Emotionally, this is a beautiful time to process and to think about goals and to think about where you can draw up expectations for yourself. We have some amazing journal prompts this month in the Solluna Circle online, which is about self care. You want to check into that.

Kimberly: Fourth is spiritual growth, so you can give this anchoring time to yourself. You can do a little meditation, you can work with rose quartz, which is the stone for self love and compassion. It’s pink, it’s beautiful, love in general. You can give yourself a little bit of me time and in pampering, take a bath. Instead of getting caught up in this, I would just say, again, just think about it from your mom’s side. Give her, send her love. Know it’s not about you, and then refocus on yourself and love yourself.

Katelyn: Yes. Think about self care while we take the break. If you guys want to type it on your phone or if you’re on your computer, my solluna dot com, on the homepage there, you’ll see the four cornerstones PDF that we have available on the website. It takes two seconds. You just have to put in your email so we can send it to you and you could dig in a little bit more around the four cornerstones and it’ll definitely apply to putting in more self care practices and more self-love. With that, we’ll let Kimberly take a short break and then we’ll be right back.

Break

Kimberly: All right, beauties. We are back from our break and we have two more questions for you guys on this all important topic of self love and self care and highlighting this as a shift away from just external love for Valentine’s Day, which may or may not be part of your flow this year, but either way, no matter what, we definitely want to focus on the self love.

Question 3: I feel like everything is wrong. I’ve been yo-yo dieting for years. My hair is dry. I have dearly hair loss, my skin is dry. I also get bloated in the morning most days, especially after I have coffee. What are some of your top suggestions to improve myself care right away?

Katelyn: Yes. Let’s see what Sarah from Georgia has going on. I feel like everything is wrong. I’ve been yo-yo dieting for years. My hair is dry. I have dearly hair loss, my skin is dry. I also get bloated in the morning most days, especially after I have coffee. What are some of your top suggestions to improve myself care right away?

Kimberly: Well, Sarah. Thank you so much for writing in and I am happy to hear that you’re refocusing back on elevating self care. I don’t know exactly what you’re eating or what your lifestyle is or your background, so I can just speak in a general way, but I will say that dryness of hair, dryness of skin, gut issues, one of the through lines that I’m seeing here may possibly be deep cellular dehydration. Especially when our hair follicles are dehydrated, we tend to lose more hair and we feel that dryness. Right from the start, I would just nourish your self care practice with hydration from the morning up. Start the day with water and hot water with lemon before you have that coffee and then just drink room temperature water throughout the day.

Kimberly: Drink the glowing green smoothie if you haven’t tried it yet. It’s a great hair and skin moisturizer. It’s deeply nourishing. There are vegetables in it like celery and dark leafy greens, which are hydrating in a deeper way even than water in some ways because it’s enzyme charged and there’s so many antioxidants and minerals and vitamins within it that it can really, really energize the whole matrix of your body from these nature born foods. That would be wonderful thing is to really revamp your whole, say your whole morning routine, honestly.

Kimberly: If you start with water and hot water with lemon before you get that coffee and then honestly taking the SBO probiotics, very powerful. There’s info on our website on them and that’s just a really great way to nourish your gut and to create more micro biome balance, which is going to affect your skin and your hair. When our guts are out of whack and I experienced this firsthand, you can have skin issues and patchiness and acne and there’s just a clogging in your body and so your whole body doesn’t get that full effect of circulation and oxygen and nutrients. Gut health is really important when it comes to beauty, when it comes to a baiting, bloating and elevating digestion so that, and then the glowing green smoothie. I think that’s a great starting point for you, Sarah. Just nail down in the morning and then you can work from there.

Kimberly: Then as Katelyn was mentioning about the four cornerstone download, this free download with more tips and recipes, I always encourage looking at a holistic way of improving our life and our self care practices. There you will learn more recipes, food-wise, body practices, emotional wellbeing practices and spiritual practices and meditations. I think if you take that approach, you’ll see some powerful benefits as well.

Katelyn: 100%. We talk about too is even just taking a sheet of paper and splitting it into four quadrants and you can write maybe one thing in each area that you want to work on or one thing that you feel strong about in that area that you feel good about and really start working the cornerstones into your life in that way. You’ll really feel a difference within just a couple of days if you start to apply it when it’s something maybe you hadn’t thought about.

Kimberly: Yeah, exactly. Wonderful.

Question 4: What do you think about ingesting essential oils for your health as a form of self care?

Katelyn: The next question we have is from Simone living in Melbourne. What do you think about ingesting essential oils for your health as a form of self care?

Kimberly: Simone, thank you so much for this question. This is a very clear one. I do not think it’s a good idea at all.

Katelyn: There we go.

Kimberly: That would be a no. It’s really interesting. One of our podcast guests was David Crow, who is a herbalist, an acupuncturist, a teacher in all three Tibetan, Auravedic and traditional Chinese medicine. He’s been around for decades and he’s written a bunch of books and he’s very well versed in essential oils. This question actually makes him very angry because I’ve heard him talk about this quite a bit publicly. He talks about the marketing of essential oils. They’re so concentrated that you don’t need to use a lot. When you buy an essential oil, it lasts you a long, long time. Some of these marketing companies say, oh, use essential oil of lemon or whatever as self care and it makes you go through the bottle faster and they, in turn, sell you more.

Kimberly: However, essential oils were never meant to really be ingested and there’s a lot of potential harm. I do believe, correct me if I’m wrong, Kay, but he did talk about this in our podcast, which we will link to in the show notes. He talks about the esophagus damage that can happen from essential oils, which are produced with all these certain volatile compounds, and when you ingest it, over time it can create and produce permanent damage in your respiratory track and in your esophagus and in your body from putting it in your body and drinking it. Again, the popular one is a concentrated lemon and there’s companies out there and they’re usually multilevel marketing companies that tell you to do this and can be potentially very, very harmful.

Kimberly: We’ll link to that. There’s just more information you want to Google David Crow talking about ingesting essential oils. He has a lot of detail to say about the harms of it. I’ll just say right now I don’t think it’s a good idea and I definitely don’t recommend ingesting any form of essential oil.

Kimberly: Now, that being said, I think essential oils are amazing and we have Charlynn Avery who comes on here periodically and she talks about safe ways to use essential oils. Things like putting essential oils on cotton pads and putting them in your pillow and diffusers and diluting them safely into her hoba oil and carrier oils. If you’re interested in using essential oils for self care, there’s a lot of wonderful ways to do that that I do recommend. Now there’s also tinctures that are meant to be ingested. Katelyn and I talk about sometimes bach flower essences, which we both started taking and we love or making yourself elixirs. I’m a huge fan of elixirs and drinks, but I’m just not a proponent of drinking essential oils. This is a pretty straight forward question.

Katelyn: Yeah. No, this is an easy one. If anybody’s interested, the episode with David Crow is number 377 over on the podcast, so you could just look that up on iTunes or head over to My Solluna, where you can find that really easily; 377. We as well have episodes with Charlynn you can find and we can link to some notable ones in the show notes today over on my solluna dot com.

Thought of the Week

Kimberly: Amazing, Kay. Thank you so much. Thank you for gathering the questions. Thank you, beauties, for tuning in. Before we sign off, I will leave you with my quote of the day. This one comes from Rumi, great mystical poet, and he writes, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and to find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” This goes back to self power and love being our true nature and peace and joy in these really high qualities, but it’s removing the blocks. It’s not grasping for it from the outside. It’s not depending on it from a partner to make you happy. We don’t really need to put that on anyone. It comes from you, beauty.

Kimberly: As we go into Valentine’s Day, as you go into this week, just remember that you are the source of your own love. When you love others, it lights up the love in you, but it’s already inside of you, and so you can tap into it, you can expand it, you can make it flourish in your life. Please do the practices. I hope some of these resonated with you today. Again, we have tons more information over on the website and please download the cornerstone’s free ebook if you haven’t yet already because it’s all full of self care practices and yeah.

Kimberly: There we have it. Love yourself. Make it part of your daily flow. Everything will get better. All love starts within you and thank you, Kay, again for tuning in. I love you.

Katelyn: I love you.

Kimberly: And I love you, beauty. Remember how amazing you are. You are completely unique. There’s no one like you and you are enough as you are. You deserve all the love in the world just as you are. I hope you feel that this Valentine’s Day. I send you lots of love and good vibes and we will be back here Monday for our next interview podcast. Until then, take care and see you soon.