Self-Love #BEYOURFIRSTLOVE

Hello and a warm welcome to our Facebook Live event with myself, Ashok Gupta. And today we're going to be talking about self love and relationships with my friend here, Tina the ballerina. So I hope you're ready for a very exciting Facebook Live today. And of course, please remember that straight after this event, we'll be having a live discussion on the Irise app as part of the Meaning of Life show and discussion. And you can join the discussion straight afterwards on iriseapp.com click on live events and you'll see the zoom link there. And we're going to have an interactive discussion. So if you like what you see here, it's such an amazing experience that we've all been having to actually start discussing this in an intimate group, sharing ideas and really going deeper into the subjects that we're covering each week on the Meaning of Life show. So why are we bringing up this this week? Well, as you know, Irise is celebrating Self Love Awareness Week for Valentine's. Now, why is that? Now, so many different speakers and experts in relationships focus on the interrelational aspect between couples. And here we're actually going deeper and saying how we perceive ourselves and our sense of self love impacts on our relationships. Not only our relationships, but actually so many aspects of life. And here today in our live event, we're here to go deeper into understanding what causes that lack of self love and five key tools that we can employ to increase our sense of self esteem, self love, and the things that can really make a difference in our lives. And these are important things. You know, we might dismiss this idea of self love. Oh yeah. So many books talk about self love, authors talk about self love, poets and singers talk about self love. And yet many of us don't really understand what it means, let alone how we can increase it in our lives. And that's why we're here. And this may be one of the most important Facebook Live events we do because I truly believe that our sense of self worth, our self love, is one of the most important personal transformation aspects of our lives. It's something that we all could benefit from and that's what we'll be going deeper into today. So how do we start off this subject? Well, let's start with Tina the ballerina. Now imagine that Tina the ballerina is somebody who experiences this low self esteem, this lack of self love, and it's what we call a core fear. It was a fear of rejection. And how does this manifest itself? Well, in her romantic relationship, she may always question, you know, did that person text me, do they really care about me? Do they really love me? What happens if they don't? It can be a manifestation of that lack of self love. There can be a dependency, a deep dependency on what other people are doing and how they're treating Tina. In work situations it can come across as have I really done the work correctly? You know, it can contribute to imposter syndrome where you think that actually you shouldn't be there because you're not good enough, everyone else is better, but I'm no good. It can be with friends and colleagues even thinking, you know, how do they treat me, how do they speak to me? And sometimes this lack of self love can create quite a lot of sensitivity in both our emotional reactions to the people and situations around us. As well as creating this sense of fear, it can create this sense of hyper vigilance on people in situations. What are they saying? Are you the kind of person that perhaps replays conversations in their minds and thinks, yeah, I said that, but I should have said that, and I wonder what that person thought of me saying it in that way. That's a little clue that there may be some lack of self love or a constant sense of reassurance that you've got to give to yourself. And let's explore where that comes from and what we can do about it. And as we've said, that continual hyper vigilance on what people are saying, how they're treating you, or a sense of lack of self worth is massively impactful on our mental, physical and emotional health. And in fact, an amazing study that I regularly quotes from the University of Liverpool in association with the BBC talked about how there are two main components to anxiety and depression. One of them is ruminating on our negative thoughts, constantly allowing these negative thoughts to fester in our minds. So it wasn't so much that people and situations that actually occurred in our lives or the challenges we face, but actually, number one, rumination on our negative thoughts. How much do we ruminate and allow them to fester? Number two, self blame. Putting ourselves down, that's the second most important component of our levels of happiness and well being. And so the first one, rumination, that often is what we use mindfulness and regular meditation for. But that second important factor is what we're going to cover today. It's incredibly important. So how did Tina developed this sense of lack of self love? Now many people ask me, what's the difference between self esteem and self love? Self esteem is how we evaluate ourselves. Like what perception do we have of our abilities or who we are. Self love is something much deeper than that. It's actually the sense of how much do we deeply nurture and appreciate ourselves and how much do we have a good feeling towards ourselves. And the easiest and quickest way to test this is to look in the mirror. Are you the kind of person that looks in the mirror and thinks, oh God, look at me, that really needs to tidy up that bit of hair. And oh gosh, you know, do you put yourself down when you look in the mirror or do you have an uplifting positive feeling when you look at yourself in the mirror? These can be little clues. Obviously it's not scientific fact, but it's a little clue as to how we perceive ourselves and how we feel about ourselves. So how does this lack of self love suddenly come up within a person? It often happens in our childhoods. And I know what you're going to say. Oh yes, if in doubt, blame your parents. Well, the truth is that our parents are one component of the influence of our lives and how we develop and who we become. But they're not the only component. And secondly, often our parents were doing the best that they could given their own resources, given their own challenges that they've been facing in their lives. So the number one most important factor for a child is survival and is being connected to the tribe. And that tribe is not only your parents, but your siblings and the community. Because a child can't survive by itself. So a child has to make sure that it's being nurtured and cared for by the tribe. So once again, from a scientific perspective, the ultimate fear is separation from the tribe. And if the child perceives a lack of love or a lack of nurture, that survival starts getting threatened. So this is where we link both psychology and evolutionary biology. That child then thinks, look, this person is treating me badly. Maybe they're being bullied, maybe they're being put down by parents or siblings. And it can be anything from put downs or criticism right through to abuse of some kind, which can create trauma perhaps. And this often happens in families. Tina was constantly compared to her siblings or her cousins, which created this sense of I'm not truly loved for who I am. I'm not unconditionally loved. I'm now conditionally loved. My parents only love me if I do xyz. And this starts creating this hyper vigilance in the child. How are people responding to me? What are they thinking of me? And those then childhood patterns continue into adulthood. But for Tina, this first aspect of the learning effect is what are people? How are people treating me? Are they loving me? And children are acutely sensitive to that if they start experiencing regular put downs or bullying. Often this happens in survivors of parents with addictions or illness or their own challenges in life. This can create adverse childhood experiences or ACEs. And then the second aspect is conditioning. So it's fine if that happens once or twice. But if Tina experiences this regularly, day by day, week by week, month by month, it starts creating conditioning in the brain or learning in the brain. Tina learns that she isn't good enough. She's not loved just the way she is. The love is conditional. And therefore that repetition, repetition creates grooves in the mind. And the sand of a child's mind is very sensitive and soft. So belief stops being created. I'm only lovable if I do this, or I'm not worthy just the way I am, or I'm not allowed to feel good about myself because if my parents don't love me, how can I love me? So number one, a perception of a lack of love, or indeed a real sense of a real sense of lack of love. Number two, conditioning, learning that this is the norm and the truth. And then thirdly, to overcome those particular patterns and that particular learning, Tina developed strategies, strategies to offset that feeling of a lack of love. And these strategies, for those of you who know a lot of my work, we often represent with different puppets. So one example of a strategy is sometimes if as a young person and we knew that if we achieved well at school or we got good marks at school, that we would be seen as worthy and we'd get rewards or we'd get support. So we have a little part of us called Leo the lion, the achiever that says, right, if we achieve things, we do really well at school, then we're loved by our parents or it can be helper. Yep. So this is Anita, the doctor that if I'm really helpful and be a good little girl or a good little boy and really take care of everybody else and put my needs last, then I'm seen as lovable and worthy. So that's the strategy I must employ to avoid a lack of love. Is this making sense now? That a lot of our adult strategies like overachieving or over helping at the sacrifice of our own health, a lot of that is down to a strategy to try and regain the love from our caregivers that wasn't there when we were younger. Isn't that totally fascinating? And so when we become an adult, we hold on to what we call these ego shells, these strategies. And what are these strategies? Well, if the core part of us feels a lack of self love, feels rejected by people around us, then that soft wounding, that soft core inside needs to be protected. So it's almost like Leo the lion is the ego shell. You know, just like a tortoise has a shell to protect its soft inner core. So we start developing these outer shells where we want to look really strong and powerful on the outside, but inside we feel really low about ourselves. And that is something endemic in society. This kind of lack of authenticity around how we truly feel. Covering up with strategies so that we don't look weak. And this is not only the cause of our neuroses, our anxieties, our depressions, wars have started, civilizations have fallen over these ego shells, these ego shells that men generally, but also create to be the hard man. You know, often in life now in politics, we've started respecting the hard man. In politics, you know, they're the person that can get us through, but actually behind that is a huge amount of insecurity. And even people with narcissism or narcissistic traits or narcissistic disorder, you know, personality disorder, often are covering up from a deep wound inside that they cannot face. Therefore they have to create this very powerful shell on the outside. And so what does Tina do about this? Well, as she goes into her adult life, even though these experiences happened as a child, she now founds that her relationships are challenged. She feels upset and regularly drained from her relationships because she's hyper vigilant on how she's being treated, causing lots of arguments. And once again at work she may feel that imposter syndrome or feel that she's not good enough in those situations and start emotionally reacting to these people and situations. And that emotional reaction she thinks is because that person is to blame. Look how they're treating me. And sometimes it is, of course it's a two way street. But the energy, the emotion, the energy in motion that's coming up is actually a reflection of our past. And maybe up to 80, 90, 100% the emotion which is generated is actually coming from our past. And each time we generate that emotion, that anxiety, that sadness, that anger, yeah, we feel it in the center of our bodies that is going to impact on our mental, physical and emotional health. So what we're talking about today and what we're going to discuss afterwards is incredibly important for our well being. So what I'd love for you to do, please do share this Facebook live on your Social media feeds and other groups. We'd love to get the message out there, and this is the message of irise, that we're here to empower humanity and uplift a billion lives. So please do share this on your social media and please do join us just in 10 to 15 minutes or so live on the irise app, on the zoom link in irise, where we'll be discussing this in a small, intimate group. And it's a very, very enjoyable experience. So many people have given me lovely feedback on our little discussion group and I'd love for you to join us. So what are the consequences of this? Tina now starts seeing all the people around her as a proxy for one of her parents or caregivers or a sibling. And this can create abandonment issues. I'm afraid that someone will leave me to become hyper vigilant and hypersensitive as to whether someone is treating us in an appropriate way. It will create trust issues. We may feel a lack of safety in certain situations, fear. We may get angry because that child feels angry. Why are people not showing me that love and care? And finally, one of the most potent and toxic emotions we can feel is guilt and shame. So if we've had someone who's been criticising and putting us down a lot in our childhoods, that can create a sense of no good. There's something wrong with me. I'm a shameful person, which is a very, very low feeling and drains the energy from our system and leads on to illness. Now, what then happens in our relationships is we get that temporary salvation when somebody is showing us that love and that care and we think, oh, this is great. Which is why at the beginning of our relationships, you know, that feeling, that euphoric feeling, wow, finally someone is here who appreciates me because we get that dedicated attention and we think, wow, I am lovable because this person is showing me love, therefore that means I'm lovable. But then it becomes a dependency. As beautiful as relationships can be, and that euphoria at the beginning, we then become dependent on that to fill that gaping hole within. But it's only temporary. It's like a bucket that's got a hole in it. We fill it full of love. When we get a success in life or someone shows us a good feeling, we think, yes, I am good enough, I am worthy, I am loved. But the water soon seeps out of the bucket and we're left with an empty bucket trying to fill it again. And the truth is that love is an inside job, as they say. Don't know where that quote is from. It's not my quote, but I've heard it before, that actually that love can only come from within. And when we feel love from the outside, from people, situations, work, colleagues, it gives us permission to love ourselves. So all love is actually self love. Isn't that an intriguing concept that actually they give us permission to feel good about ourselves? Someone on the outside doesn't inject us with love, right? They don't inject us with oxytocin to feel love. All of the feelings all happen in here. It's just that somebody on the outside gives us permission on the inside to feel loved and feel good about ourselves. And so the only way that we can truly feel that sense of self love, which helps us feel relaxed, mature in our react, in our interactions with people, to feel a sense of, I am good enough, I can achieve these things, is by learning how to love ourselves and to let go of these negativities. And these negativities are like a triple whammy. Not only are they lies that we tell each other or tell ourselves each day, they're lies that we're not loved. It makes us feel bad. As a second whammy and as a triple whammy, we start manifesting people and situations in our lives that help us recognize this unconscious feeling within. Let me repeat that, because that's so important. Everyone thinks about manifestation of, oh, I want to manifest a million dollars. I want to manifest, you know, that shiny red sports car. But what we fail to realize is that all of these unconscious, learned, conditioned patterns within us are also constantly manifesting to bring it to conscious awareness. And so we may find we're attracting the wrong kind of relationship regularly where someone doesn't show us that love and attention, or we keep getting rejected in some way, or our work situations don't go the way that we want because they're designed to help trigger that button within, that wound within that makes us realize, oh, there's the feeling. And normally we stay in that unconscious state where we're overwhelmed with that negative feeling. But instead we want to retrain the mind to feel awareness of this and how to break this pattern. So what are five ways that we can increase our sense of self love? Well, the irony, the supreme irony, you may remember we did the analogy of the bowl and the sunlight. The supreme irony of all of this is that we talked about in the Meaning of Life experiment that everything is love. So even we are made up of love because everything is love. So imagine there's love everywhere. And then the bowl comes into the light, into the sunlight, creating a separate person, a separate individual consciousness as we talked about. And that individual consciousness then gets filled with water which represents our minds, the thoughts and emotions, the swirling water, the thoughts and emotions in our minds. We start blocking out some of the light, the light of love that we truly are. And then that love becomes even more blocked because there's now dirt inside the water. And that dirt represents our conditionings, our habits, our worries. Can you see that? Starts blocking the light of consciousness, of love that we truly are. So the mind, the swirling minds, the conditionings in the mind, the learnt habits now block the light. And the irony, as I said, is that we are made up of this thing called blue bliss, love, unity and eternal existence. Blue. And yet it becomes blocked like a diamond getting covered with dust, like this water blocking the light within the bowl. We forget that we are love. And ironically, we start searching for it from the outside. So the number one awareness that we can have is that, wow, I'm searching for love. I'm trying to get love, I'm trying to fill my bucket. And yet it is the very essence and core of who I truly am. So let's go through the abcde of self Love. A stands for awareness. And then retraining those patterns so we become aware of of these unconscious software programs running within us. Oh, I'm not loved. People don't really like me, they're judging me, they're going to reject me and abandon me. I'm not good enough. All of these patterns which come up, we become aware of them and we can use something called the New Groove technique. Now, the New Groove technique isn't a dance move. It should be. I think the New Groove Technique is a process, a four step process which enables us to retrain these patterns. And it's available in the Irise app. Okay, so the new Groove technique is available@iriseapp.com we can download Irise app from the app Store or Play Store. And the New Groove technique is a regular audio tool that you can use to retrain these negative patterns. And you teach yourself how to retrain them and you become aware. Wow, I'm made up of love and yet I'm living this illusion that I'm not loved. And that New Groove technique can help us shift those perspectives. B stands for be kind to your inner child. And we need to talk to ourselves kindly with self compassion. Self compassion is the antidote to all of these negativities. And one of the puppets we Use is Sheena, the cheerleader who represents our inner critic. How much are we putting ourselves down during the day? Speaking down to ourselves and negatively to ourselves. Instead we want to be kind to our inner child. So regularly speak to this frightened part of you. So when you feel that lack of self love, just imagine it's a child in your mind, a childlike version of yourself, and speak how you would to your own niece or nephew or child or peter where they need soothing and calming. Speak with those words of love and you might say, oh, I don't know how to do that. We all are made up of the essence of love. We simply need to go inwards and express it. C stands for care in self care. Having regular activities that we engage in to really take time for ourselves. Sometimes we're so thrown in the outside world, our phones, our families, everything that we don't take care for that nurture, that self care time. And that really tells yourself that you are worth it. That's a really important practical thing to engage in self love. So A stands for awareness and retraining your mind. B stands for be kind to your inner child. C stands for care in self care. D stands for daily practices of meditation. Now how does that help our self love? This feeling of a lack of self love is because we are associating with the water, the swirling, dirty water in the bowl. And actually when we meditate, we come out of association here. So imagine this is you, your identity. You're in the bowl, you're being carried away with the swirling tides, the gushing tides of your emotional mind. You can't help but being thrown about and being passive, victim of your own mind. But when we meditate, literally, we levitate out of the dirty water and we become more associated with the blue consciousness, the bliss and love that we truly are. And so regular meditation strengthens our connection to the loving self, not just about relaxing the mind. And finally, E stands for evaluate yourself positively. This means regularly praising yourself. Now we often don't do that because we're told as a child, oh, you're being big headed, yeah. Oh, you really love yourself, don't you? And so we feel embarrassed about that. We even feel embarrassed when someone gives us a compliment. We can't even take it because there's a, there's kind of incongruence, right? So Tina the ballerina feels this sense of inner turmoil and incongruence when someone gives her a compliment because it doesn't fit with how she feels inside. So regularly praising ourselves, giving ourselves that love and nurture is a really important part of self love. So A for awareness let's really practice this this week being aware of when we're looking for love on the outside and become aware of how many interactions, how many times are feelings coming up within you where you're looking for something from other people or situations to justify your sense of self worth and your self image. Be aware of it and break it. We can retrain this B stands for that be kind to your inner child. So let's talk to ourselves kindly this week when we're feeling upset or we feel like we're not good enough to do something or unworthy or unloved, let's talk to that inner child. With self compassion. We can all do it. C let's this week for self awareness Self love awareness week. Indulge in some self care, some time to ourselves. Perhaps it's meditating, a massage, some deep self reflection or journaling. D stands for daily practice of meditation. Yeah, that goes without saying. And finally E evaluate yourself positively. You know sometimes a gratitude journal can really help. So being grateful for three things every day and make one of those things something that you're grateful for about you. This is such a powerful exercise because normally we feel grateful for external things, but what are you grateful for about who you are and how you positively impact on the world around you. So let's practice the ABCDE of self love and right now we're going to go onto our Zoom link. So all we have to do now is go to iriseapp.com the website or if you've already downloaded the app you just click on Live Events tab. So go to iriseapp.com click on live events and there you will see today's Zoom link for our interactive discussion on how we can increase the sense of self love. So all I want to say is thank you for watching. Please do share this on your social media. Different groups want to spread this message of self love awareness week on Irise and let's get people feeling good about themselves because it is such an important factor to our health and happiness and it's remembering in that E for evaluation, evaluating yourself positively that you truly are an amazing, incredible human being. You are unique as your thumbprint now like every snowflake is unique, you truly are unique and you've come to this planet to give a beautiful gift to this planet. So just revel in the awareness of that that you are made up of bliss and love and you're here to express it and share your gifts with this planet. Keep going, Keep going. You're doing great. And you're full of that love. So thank you for watching and we'll see you next time. Thank you and goodbye.