How to Love Yourself

Okay, so here's the deal. I want to talk about how to love yourself. I actually, um, it's, it's, there's so many different ways you can learn how to love you. I want to talk about one specific way, um, today, and this is how to love the part of you that feels, because often we aren't good at that. We are good at loving other people. We are good at paying attention to the way other people feel. We look at their emotional signals, and if we care about them, we want them to be okay. We want them not to be sad. We're not so good at doing that for ourselves. But can I just tell you that if you are going to love other people well and read other people's signals well and understand emotion well and being able to serve people well, you have to know how to love yourself the same way, which means You have to know what your soul needs. And so when your soul is giving you emotions as a way to communicate, you have to listen. Most of us don't do so good listening. We actually wait until our bodies or our brains are screaming so loudly for a need that our soul has. And by then, while it may not be too late, we have a lot of work to do. That's the reason why so many of us need really good friends, but we wear our friends' ears out, or we have our mothers that we talk to, or We wear our husbands out or our boyfriends out because we wanna give them all the things. And y'all, everybody, not, you know, everybody's not built for all the things all the time. That's why sometimes it is great to talk to a pastor. It's great to get a therapist or counselor because you have not been taking care of you. When you allow something to fester for a long period of time, it does damage. Loving you means paying attention when you are talking to you. And that's what emotions actually do. It gives you the state of the union in addressing yourself. Loving yourself means paying attention, knowing what you need, not waiting too long where damage has been done because you've waited so long. And it's— if you've done it, there is, there is help for that. That's why we go to the doctor, we go to the hospital when something is a little out of control. We go and we get help. And I always say, go and get help if you need it. But I do think we can learn how to love ourselves and get better at it with practice. So if you are watching this video the week of Valentine's Day, or even the day of Valentine's Day, Valentine's Day has all the things associated with it, and you're supposed to have the love of your life, whether that be a boyfriend or a husband, share with you their love for you. Now, I don't know how many girls, what the ratio is of Valentine love from girls to boys and boys to girls. I do know that it is definitely more of a girls' holiday in terms of receiving than the boys' holiday because the stores prove it. The flowers and all the things, they all look like girl. Now I'm not saying that if you've got a guy that you don't ever do anything for him. What I am saying is that it's geared for girls. I mean, this is the whole situation. When the holiday comes, honestly, my husband and I just use it as an excuse to go out and eat or eat in or whatever we want to do. It's like, what do we want to do? And Valentine's Day is a good excuse to do it. I do know that I have been very intentional about teaching my boys, uh, what it means to celebrate, um, someone that you care about. And I looked at my husband and said, you got to help me, because at some point it's not going to be so good for me as the mom to tell my boys to do things for me. It's not about the candy and it's not about the flowers. If my children actually know me well, They'll know that I'm not really that interested in a ton of flowers. But what they can do is know me, pay attention to me, and say, "What would my mom like?" And take the holidays an opportunity to say, "Hey, we see you, we value you, and we actually have paid attention to what matters to you." And a kid is calling me. This is my life. I forgot that we had to sign a paper today. So you said you'd see us before we leave? Yep. Mhm. Okay. Okay. Just making sure. Thank you. Uh-huh. Bye-bye. This is my life. So I told my husband, you've got to help me out because I want them to hear this more from you. And because I don't require this of you, like it's not a big deal to me, I still want them to understand how to treat a woman. I want them to know that it's not about running out at the last minute and getting flowers and signing their name on some random card. I want— and I told him, I want words. Like, they need to understand how you have to love somebody with their love language and how my love language is words of affirmation. And I want my husband and my sons to tell me with their mouths or with the written— with the written word, with a pen, how they love me, why they love me. I want to know. This means something to me. And so he's taken on the responsibility of training the boys so that mommy is not training the boys to train them for herself. When you decide that love is worth sharing for someone else, have you ever measured that against how much you've decided that love for you is worth sharing too? If you're a words of affirmation person, do you give yourself words of affirmation? If you're a person who likes gifts, do you get yourself gifts every now and then? If you're a person who likes quality time, do you even know what it means to spend quality time with you? When my husband and I got married, we bought a house together. We closed on it before we got married. We slept in it our honeymoon night. He had a friend of ours who's super creative come into the house before we got there, and she set the stage. There were rose petals from the doorway into the foyer area, on into the bedroom. The bath water was already drawn. Very, very beautiful. And the mood was set as it should have been, right? For our honeymoon night. It totally makes sense to do that. I just got married. So I wanted to celebrate with my new husband and our girlfriend, my girlfriend, his friend too. She came in and did the work to make sure the environment was right. Sometimes you can do that for special occasions. You make sure the environment is right. When I write, as in write books, write words, there is a certain environment that I like. I like a certain kind of type of music. I like a certain type of atmosphere, a certain type of lighting. I also like a certain smell, certain drink. I like hot tea or maybe a special coffee. The candle, my favorite candles are burning. I set the stage to create the mood where the kind of emotions that I wanna share when I write a book, that they're primed to come out. Sometimes you have to know for yourself how to set the stage for love. Now, let me tell you upfront what the problem is with loving yourself, especially if you are a Christian, you love Jesus, you've grown up in church. Loving yourself is devilish and demonic because you don't wanna be selfish and you're supposed to love Jesus first. And you're supposed to love other people first, and you don't want to think about yourself because then that would not be pleasing to God, and all this stuff. Let me tell you something, it's very clear in the Bible. Matthew 22:39 and then Mark 12:31, they, they say the same thing. First you got to love God, then it says love others as you love yourself. So if you are a girl out here who loves Jesus And you struggle because you've had this messaging all of your life that you're supposed to love God, that you're supposed to be humble, that you're supposed to be, you know, self-sacrificing and all these things. And those things are a part. They are a part of loving God well and loving people well and all that. But it's not only. It's not only. It is loving God and loving others as you love yourself. There's an assumption there. That you know how to love you. There's an assumption that you know how to celebrate you. There's an assumption that you will probably put yourself first. And so this verse is given not to say love God and love others to the extent that you are not loving yourself. It's just doing this in a way that provides a, a foundation for you doing this well for other people. How can you even know how to celebrate other people if you actually don't ever celebrate you? Let's take a little pressure off. If you are the person who likes to serve, you are the mom who serves your family, the person at work who always makes sure everybody's okay, um, you're the person who throws the party, you're the person who, who listens when somebody else needs to talk. Okay, that's great. You're the person who invites people over to your home as you feel comfortable to do that because you're hosting something, or you're always the one that people can depend on. You're the one who always takes care of stuff. You're the one who serves, and God can depend on you. But if you are not taking care of you, then are you really doing the best job? Are you really providing the best example? Are you really going to be healthy enough physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually to be able to do all that God requires of you? And I'm here to tell you that when we burn ourselves out and we're not paying attention to what our emotions are trying to tell us, we're not loving ourselves very well. So let's talk in some very practical ways about how you can love yourself, because it's Valentine's Week, y'all, as this recording is released. And some of y'all are single and some of y'all are married, and you will need to go into this weekend, in any weekend as you deem to be the case, knowing how to set the stage for love of you. Why do you need to take the time to have honest emotions? If you don't make room in your life to feel the broad spectrum, the sadness, the joy, the excitement, um, the happiness, uh, the anger— if you don't make room to feel it, you are shortcutting yourself from the full experience of living. Life was meant to be lived. Ecclesiastes says there's a time for all of these different things. A time to live, a time to die, time to be glad, a time to be sad, a time for harvest, a time for bareness. There's a time for all of these things. And if you don't experience the full spectrum of how you are interacting with the world, you're actually not living. One of the reasons why many people want to travel, want to experience other places, other cultures, other scenes. I've told my husband for years, we live in Texas by default. I love Texas because my family lives here, but ultimately, if I could pick anywhere to live, it would be a coastal city, East Coast, West Coast, no matter, or I'll take Colorado or Nashville because I love the seasons. I love the beautiful environment. I love outside, and those two cities would give me an opportunity to experience seasons and do the thing, right? But I also love water, so a coast will do. We never moved out of Texas. When he was working his old job, I would tell him, you know, if you ever need to transfer, I'm good for 5 years and then I got to come back home. My family's here. I got to be in Texas. Where I live, North Texas, is very flat. It's not as exciting. There's no mountains. There's no snow. There's no ocean water. And because I love those things, what I have found is that getting on a plane and going to California makes me happy. I love Chrystal Cove, the Newport Beach area. Love it, love it, love it, like a million times love it. And I would get off the plane, text my mom, show her a picture and say, "Hey mom, I've touched down." And she would say, "Enjoy your happy place." That sunshine in California boosted my vitamin D, made me a happier person. Me knowing that a change in the weather outside of me affected the emotion inside of me was me engaging in a little self-care whenever I could do that. The temperature, the changes, the full spectrum. Me going skiing with my husband— neither one of us had been skiing on our first anniversary and again on our fifth anniversary— experiencing that. It was cold. Skiing is hard work. I was sore. But experiencing the sun of one state and the snow of another state gave me the spectrum of living. Travel was fun. It helped me to feel like, man, I was doing the thing. Your emotions are the same way. Experiencing the highs and the lows is how you get to live fully in your own skin. The problem is we don't make room for that. And if you don't release your emotions, all of them, it's a problem. Let's talk about all the feelings real quick. All the feels. If you only find yourself squealing with delight Or you can't remember the last time you squealed with delight. You only find yourself doing it at rare times or for other people, but you have nothing happening in your life that makes you just go, "Ah!" Makes you yell a little bit. If you're a football person, you watched the Super Bowl and you probably had your team and you were externally, emotionally, visibly engaged in the game. The reason why we enjoy certain sports so much is because we allow ourselves the full spectrum of emotion in those games. We yell, we scream, we holler, we cheer the high end of that. And when our team is losing or they miss a pass or the other team catches and, uh, you know, intercepts a ball, they catch the ball and our team loses, or they have a field run back for another touchdown, we, we get quiet, we get within ourselves, we get frustrated. We're, ugh. I was watching my son play a video game the other day and something blew up. I don't know, he stormed out of the room and I was just looking at him thinking, Oh my gosh, this is too much. So if it's really exciting, he gets nervous and he gets jittery and he, he gets all, you know, wound up and he's always bouncing on his toes. And if it's not good, he's slamming things down. I mean, he's just totally emotionally external. Watching that is so much fun. Think about the last time you experienced the high end of your emotional scale and the low end, though the lower end of your emotional on a scale? And I bet you it's probably been too long. You need to set the stage. You need to figure out what to do to make room for you to experience the full throttle version of you. What makes you really happy? When's the last time you did that for yourself? And this does not have to involve spending a whole lot of money or doing everything. It could mean that you have a table, like a church table that you bought from Walmart or, or Costco, and you set it up in the, in a back room in your house, or in your bedroom, or in a guest room, or even in the dining room if y'all don't use it. Or maybe you use your existing dining room table. And let's say you're a crafter. Just bring your stuff in, set it up, maybe have a neat way to put it away for when you have guests. And during the week, leave it out. And during the week, because you love crafting or scrapbooking or sewing or whatever it is that you love, you bring it out and you indulge in it. Some of y'all have not spent time with your girlfriends for too long, too long. So you've done Zoom for work, you've done Zoom for church, plan a party. You're an extrovert and you're missing people, plan a party. I had a friend that planned a party. She sent us hot chocolate and hot tea in, you know, those bags are a little small. She put them in an envelope and put them in the mail and then said, okay, everybody make your tea, we're starting in 15 minutes, or make your hot chocolate. And it was so much fun. But I'm saying, like, what makes you— we spend our lives learning to put a cap on it, to not be too much. Let me tell you something, you only have one life to live, ma'am. If loving yourself and if being yourself means being too much, by all means, be too much. Be excited, have a great time, watch the movies that make you want to dance, watch the movies that make you laugh. Out loud by yourself. When you need adventure in your life, find things that a tourist would do if they came to your city, the adventurous things, and do those things. You got one life to live. Take care of you, love you, experience the high end of this spectrum and then the low end of the spectrum too. You know you need a good cry? Burn the candles, put on the movie, write in your journal, cuddle up with your blanket, think the sad thoughts and cry it out. Do you want to know sometimes why you're so pent up and angry? Do you know anger is just a form of grief? When there's a sadness, a deep sadness at something that's not the way you want it, you can cry about it or you can be angry about it. And that is why when we have loss, we're going to cry about it, and then we may be angry with God about it. We're mad at God. That spectrum of sadness to anger is a spectrum of, of grieving. Of wanting something you don't have. And that part of the spectrum is human. A part of life is loss, just like laughter and levity is. A part of life is loss. And when you allow yourself to experience the sadness for the job that you didn't get, the sadness for the, the relationship that didn't pan out, the sadness for the house you bid on that didn't become yours, the sadness and the disappointment in yourself because of the goal that you have not met— when you allow yourself to feel the spectrum, happy, happy, and sad, sad, that is loving you. It was totally normal for my husband and I on our wedding night to celebrate, to have a table set with china and rose petals on the floor. It was a moment, an evening to be celebrated. Nobody chided us for going the extra mile to mark that day. And to say that our marriage mattered. When you decide to love you well and to be attentive to the emotions that are inside of you, when you decide to say, this is who I am, this is what I need, this is what I haven't had in a long time, this is what makes me feel alive, this is what gives me joy, this is the cry that I need to have, this is the thing that I need to express and I need to work on it. Maybe I talk to somebody about it, write it down, but because I'm having these issues, I need to express them. And I don't even know what the words are. So I need to give myself some time to give myself the words. That is loving you, making room to feel and to know where you are, where you're standing and what you need. In order to make room to love yourself, it means you need to be vulnerable and allow people to see— safe people to see the extremes of you. If you find yourself holding back the tears and you're doing all kinds of things so that they don't see you cry, why, why, why are you doing that? Why are you holding back? And again, in appropriate, safe places, because you can't cry all the time at work, all the time, and be totally emotional unstable. When there's something to cry about, That's you. You don't have to tell everybody everything, but if there's something to cry about, that's you. If you are so stinking excited but you think they're going to think I'm over the top, who cares? A part of loving you is being you wherever you go. So if your laugh is a little loud and boisterous Who cares if you cry? Because you're an emotional feeler. You feel things. You're compassionate. You deeply care. People will say, what's wrong? Are you okay? Okay, you know, just— I'm broken about what's happening in the news. I'm broken that my coworker lost her mother. I'm broken about that. Do you know why we're all pent up? Because somewhere along the line, we were told that it's weak to be emotional, or that something's wrong with us if we have exuberant joy, that you just can't be that— you're always so happy. What's wrong with that? Setting the stage means doing what you know will put you in that space. Happy, happy. Sad, sad. Anger, grief, loss. So what do you need to do to do that? If I need joy, and you, you may have said this, if I need joy, I'll say, "Ugh, I just need to watch a funny movie. I need to laugh." We need to laugh. We all have heard the saying, "Laughter is good medicine." It's true. There are all kinds of chemical reactions and things that go off in your body when you laugh. The same is true of sunlight. We understand that people who live in Seattle that there's a higher suicide rate in Seattle because of the weather, the cloudiness, the overcast. Doesn't happen as much in other sunny places in the world, statistically speaking, because sun matters. Get your vitamin D supplemented if you need it, but get outside. I went riding last week with my boys on an 8-mile bike ride, and they were like, are you kidding me? We're gonna ride all the way there and back? And I was like, yes. Why? Because you need it. Because I need it. We're gonna go and experience this. We live close enough to a place that has this great riding trail, this walking trail. We haven't used it. We're gonna get bikes and go use it. I was so frustrated. It took 15 minutes because the bikes were— they needed to be aired up. And then one of the boys was like, Mommy, can you show me? What do you mean, can I show you? Figure it out. Point was, I was like, by hook or by crook, we are going to do this thing because I love it. And riding the bike down the pathway with the wind whistling past my ears, I was just excited. My oldest son was like, why do you just get so excited about this? Because I do. And I'm being intentional about putting something that I love in my life because I need to love my life. And this is something I enjoy. And how I will teach you to get up from the table, to stop, to put down the pens. You got to do homework, but at some point you have to play. You have to play. And play brings out the best of you, the excitement of you, because you have joy when you do the things that you love. Setting the stage means making room for the things that make you laugh, that make you happy, that make you smile. And setting the stage also means, you know, this weekend is not a good weekend, so you set the stage. If you know you need a good cry, set the stage. Sometimes I'm known for being the friend who, when you're on the verge of tears, I will rub your back, and my friends say, "Stop it, you're trying to push it out of me." And I'm like, "Yes, because you're holding it back." Why are you holding it back? When you have a weekend coming up and you know it's not a good weekend, just like you would take a personal day for work, take a personal day for your personal life. I know I'm supposed to show up at this function. I know I'm supposed to be at this birthday party. I know my kids have XYZ, but today I need a personal day. And set the stage, light the candle, turn on the music, stay in the bed, think of the sad story and cry. The shower is a great place to cry. The water's already running. You're in there by yourself. Think all the sad thoughts. You feel so much better. Making room for what makes you exuberantly happy and making room when there is sadness that needs to flow, those two things are an act of self-love. And you have to tell people in your life, "I need some space." I need some space. I need room to react to what my body, my brain, my soul is telling me. The reason why we struggle sometimes, and we struggle with the commandment of loving God and loving others, is because we've been bamboozled into thinking that if we don't take care of ourselves, if we don't pay attention to what we love, what we enjoy, what we want to do with our time, that we're horrible people. And then we wonder why when it's time to do things for other people, to serve in the church, to be available for God, to be be available for other people, we just can't because we never actually invested enough here. Now I believe the joy of the Lord is your strength, and there are some things that are an overflow of what you allow God to do in your heart. It's just the way that it works. But I also know our brains and our bodies, we are physical creatures, and when we don't take care of ourselves, it doesn't work out well. I wanna challenge you to make a note of the things that you love. Do more of those things. I wanna challenge you to make evident in your life the things that are hurtful, that have been harmful, that have run, run ruckshod over your heart. And I want you to make room to grieve them, to be sad, to be angry about them. I was going through the checkout at the doctor the other day, and there's a lady I've become familiar with. It's a doctor I have to go to once or twice a year. And she said to me, She said, "Have a good week." I said, "I will." I said, "You do too." She said, "Do you have any plans for Valentine's Day?" I said, "Nah, my husband and I will figure out something kind of boring to do." She said, "Well, I have great plans for my Valentine's Day." I said, "Well, that's great." She said, "Oh yeah, I learned the hard way that I had to do that. Now I can even call my ex-husband on Valentine's Day and wish him a happy Valentine's Day." She said, I'm not, I'm not calling The Woman though. I said, no, you don't, you don't have to call The Woman. And she went into this whole tangent about how she's learned to forgive, how she's learned to free herself of her anger and her frustration and her grief of a husband who left her, how she's even learned out of loving herself, how to have overflow, to still be honest that after 20-some-odd years of being with him, she cared about him. She didn't wanna be married to him. Him. She cared about him. She said, it's so funny. Once I forgave, freed myself up to feel, then gave myself permission to love me, while I'm sad that my marriage of more than 20 years dissolved, I actually had room in my heart to be kind to him. Now I've learned how to make plans for me and to know that some of the love that I was looking to receive from him that I didn't get, I actually never needed from him in the first place. So what are you gonna do with your weekend? Whether it's Valentine's Day or any other weekend, loving yourself means making time to feel and knowing what you need, creating the right environment for yourself. It means giving someone else the opportunity to love you. It means taking the blinders down, letting them see your excitement, letting them see you cry, letting them know what you need, communicating those things, making room for what you need to fill you up. Michelle, my friend, if you've read She's Still There, her name is Shelley, and she was a nurse, traveling nurse. She settled in Dallas because her family's here. She felt like that was the right thing to do. And then she found herself saying, "Ugh, this is why I didn't want to live in Dallas because of weather and the environment here." She said, "People in California are always walking and riding their bikes and climbing a mountain and doing this and doing that. And nobody here wants to do any of that stuff." She said, "You know what? I'm planning a weekend. I'm committed to being here. I need to be around family for a variety of reasons." but I love California. And so while tickets are cheap, I'm going to California. She spent 5 days in California by herself. She hiked, she ate at vegan food restaurants, she met up with a couple of coworkers for coffee. She did all the things she wanted to do that she was missing here. And when she came back, she said, I'm so refreshed and I'm so glad I took that time away from me to do the things that nobody wants to do with me. And I don't care. This is my life. Some of us need to do the same. Here's the thing. How do you know if you're loving yourself well? One of the girls in the office, as we were talking, asked me this question. I said, this is a good question. Communicate what makes you feel loved, cared for, and full. You ought to be able to say what gives you all the feels. You ought to be able to say what makes you feel loved. You ought to be able to say what makes you feel covered, seen, valued. If you cannot communicate that, that means you actually don't know because you don't have a full awareness of it. That's where I'd start investigating, paying attention, knowing what it looks like for you to feel loved and for you to be cared for. You cannot expect other people to love you well when you can't even communicate to them what you need. Can you articulate what makes you feel loved, seen, heard, cared for, whether you do it for you or someone else does it for you? What makes you feel exuberantly excited and happy? What makes you feel sad? Can you communicate that? Do you know? If you cannot, that is your assignment. Every person that comes to work, uh, at any job needs a job description. Without that job description, how are you supposed to know what you're supposed to do? You should be able to describe the job of loving you. You should be able to put words to it. I know when I leave one of my children, if I leave them in the care of someone else, what they need to do, right? When they were babies, I had a list. Feed them at this time, change this, she's teething, he's teething, they need this. I left them instruction because care of my child meant specific things. So does care and love of you. Intimacy is crucial to your self-care. How are you supposed to be intimate with another person, intimate with God, intimate with friends, vulnerable, available, if you can't even do it for yourself? It's saying, I'm willing to be seen. And a lot of times, y'all, we're not willing to be seen because we're not even being seen by ourselves. We're not even taking time to look in the mirror and know You know me. Unless you have been intimately known by God and intimately knowledgeable and knowing of yourself, it's going to be really difficult to enjoy good intimacy with anybody else. It's just not possible to do a good job of connecting at the deepest levels with other people when you don't even know or love you. What do you do if you feel guilty about self-care? You tell yourself this: I'm God's daughter too. It's that simple. I am God's daughter too. Because when you starve yourself of time loving yourself, time with God, there's actually less of you to go around. Loving yourself means making room for all the feelings, setting the stage for all the feelings to know you, and being able to articulate what it is that gives you a feeling and a sense of being loved, being seen, being cared for. When you know what the highs and the lows are, when you know how to set the stage, when you know how to communicate, this frees you to love others well, to love God better, and to operate as the most authentic version of you possible. So here's what I'd love to know. What are the practical things that you can do in the next 7 days to make room for love for you, for full spectrum joy, and even if there's sadness, to make room for that too? In doing so, you will be at the beginning of knowing how to love you. If God sent his son to die on the cross for humanity, He didn't just do that for everybody else. He did that for you. And if he loved you enough to do that, why would he expect you to love you any less? Do you know how wonderful and awesome he thinks you are? And how sad it must make him that you don't see the same? If he thought you were worth that price tag, Then I think paying the price for you. A movie, a card, a book, time alone, some tears, time with a friend, what you enjoy eating, a walk outside, laughing hysterically, crafting, writing, reading, adventures. Living life full. I think he'd be okay with that. He didn't just put you here to pass through. Oh yeah, we have a Great Commission. We gotta tell people about God, tell people about Jesus, make sure that they know there's more to life than this. But when he put you here, he also puts you here with mountains and snow and oceans and rivers and weather and sun and trees and grass. And sunsets and sunrises because he said, "I want you to live, and I love you so much, I'm giving you lots of ways to do that." So here's to loving you.