I’ve been cleaning up my life, and part of that is email. I’ve been furiously unsubscribing to the junk advertising that poses as things I need to know.

And yet, occasionally, some of my subscriptions bear fruit. Take the newsletter I recently received from Clementine.

Clementine, for those not in the know, is a hypnotherapy/mediation app designed primarily for women. It’s kind of awesome: it’s one of the few that regularly survives my app purges. I even bared all to them in a recent email entry to win a workbook. I no longer feel awkward sharing my reality with strangers. Between the doctors and the blog, privacy has started to feel pointless. Though I still relate to Truman: you never had a camera in my head.

The app comes with newsletters. Not many, which is a nice change from the daily multiples one sometimes gets. They’re so infrequent, in fact, that I usually read them. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. The last one had a link to a lovely piece on self-love by Brain and Behaviour. I’d have loved it even if it was average because they used “healthily” instead of “healthy” as the modifier that follows “eating.”

They’ve a good definition for self-love, a challenge considering the myriad of barely adequate pop-culture attempts that float by.

“Self-love is a state of appreciation for oneself that grows from actions that support our physical, psychological, and spiritual growth.”

Self-love grows from self-supporting actions. Simple and obvious and yet many of our actions could be categorized differently. Our default isn’t set correctly, a rather non-adaptive trait. I wonder what caused the skewing from survival behaviour?

Links within links provide an action plan, the seven steps to self-love. I both hate and love prescriptive lists. I consider them reductive and effective. Rock and hard place, like so much of life. To summarize:

• Become mindful;
• Act on what you need rather than on what you want;
• Practice good self-care (often the first to go);
• Set boundaries (always boundaries);
• Protect yourself (but not too much);
• Forgive yourself; and lastly,
• Live intentionally (a hard one for me; I tend to drift.)

The link to “Self-Love and What It Means” is below. It’s a short read. It took less time to read than it took to eat the fudgesicle I was consuming in accompaniment. I’m giving myself a break from self-judgement: treats before breakfast are a part of that.

You will love others as much as you love yourself, no matter how much you try to convince yourself otherwise. When I’m hating on myself, I can be toxic to be around. That’s not who I want to be.

https://www.bbrfoundation.org/blog/self-love-and-what-it-means?mc_cid=61f20d9774&mc_eid=8963629bbf