How Self-Love Shepherds – Kindness Challenge Week 1

Self-Love was the topic for Week 1 of the Kindness Challenge! In my post, All You Need is Love, Sweet Love, Lionel Richie and the Commodores’ song named Sweet Love was on repeat in my head while writing my surprising and healing self-love experience.

While reviewing my notes I discovered an extra piece of essential self-love knowledge. I realized self-love is the act of sincerely listening to my personal truth; all of IT, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Respectfully listening loosens and frees the bad, accepts the ugly, and salutes the good.

This sometimes brutal, sometimes reassuring honesty reflexively aligns me with the truth of my soul. Self-love means loving my peace filled soul messages as much as loving my unhealed battered, broken parts. The self-loving causes a deliberate, meaningful, feeling of alignment. From my mind’s eye, I can almost see a golden, flexible protective cord that gently shepherds all my tender and true pieces.

The good, bad, and ugly pieces exist no matter how I treat myself but the shepherding action of self-love comforts, contains, and direct the parts toward wholeness. When I criticize, dismiss, or judge these same parts the golden safety cord isn’t activated and the parts become fragmented, hardened and dangerous like shards of glass.

The negative energy directed toward the parts causes me to feel disconnected and so I am. Until I remember to welcome self-love once again…