The Power of Self-Love: How Mindfulness and Therapy Can Heal Anxiety and Trauma
Self-love is the embodied presence of love towards our inner being. This means being able to look at ourselves with kindness. Some sense self-love through sensations like warmth, lightness, flowing. Others can tap into self-love through feelings like acceptance, understanding, kindness, and compassion. Others can find love for themselves through memory or image such as seeing yourself crying and imagining giving yourself a hug or saying to yourself, “it’s ok”. However you find yourself being able to tap into, self-love is the ability to sense a place of home and acceptance inside yourself.
When we can fully embrace this, this can transform the way we heal. According to Internal Family Systems, compassion from Self (our most authentic Self) is the only way that true healing and transformation can happen. Within the Yoga tradition, it can be said that Mūlādhāra is the padma cakra (that is often referenced as chakra) related to Source, or the Mother Root of existence. This can be linked to the root area where we create our sense of relationship to mother/nurture in our trust and dependence and vulnerability and safety. If this area is developed we will experience a sense of love, nurturance, and belovedness. And if it is not developed or effected by trauma, etc then we can see how this would impact our ability to experience self-love and nurture.
For women who have experienced trauma and struggle with overcoming anxiety, it can often feel difficult to tap into self-love practices. The idea of self-love can feel foreign and even unobtainable. Through mindfulness and somatic therapy, these techniques can help to remove some of the barriers that make it difficult to feel an inner sense of love. They can be powerful self-healing tools that then allow inner peace and healing to happen naturally.
Woman, releasing her arms to the healing powers of the sun
How to Understand Self-Love in the Healing Process
Let’s imagine for a moment that when you were born, you received all the nurture and care you needed as a newborn. As you grew up, you were often supported and never felt that your needs were too much. You were held then you needed it. You were comforted when you cried. You were supported when your feelings got scary. You learned through this that you could be vulnerable and safe. If that happened to you, then feeling safe within yourself would be possible. In fact it would be normal.
Now if the opposite were true, then we have to imagine then that it was safer to begin to protect yourself from that vulnerability. Instead of feeling safe within, it was more important to be protected within. That means separating yourself from that sense of it’s ok to trust in this love and that you will be safe here. From that place, disconnecting from that love within became safer. Therefore part of our healing work is getting to know and build a relationship with the parts of ourselves that disconnected from that love. The healing comes from really understanding how come they needed to separate us from that inner vulnerability. Once we can do that, these parts then begin to trust that we can help them protect that vulnerability so that they don’t have to do it alone. Once that happens, it build inner trust and the capacity for beginning to feel kindness towards ourselves grows. Over time, we can then start to come home to ourselves. And when self-compassion happens, it literally rewires our brain for healing and shifts our neurons.
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray, Love”, talks about her spiritual practice called Letters of Love. For years she has written daily love letters to herself and calls it the most transformative spiritual practice of her life.
Self-loathing is a rampant virus in our contemporary culture — so prevalent as to have become the default setting in most of our minds. Seldom do we even stop to question whether it is normal or healthy to live within a consciousness that is constantly attacking, judging, and insulting itself. But to condemn yourself as unlovable is to swallow a terrible lie. And to believe that you must earn love through perfectionism, or that you must seek love from others in order to become whole, turns all of us into hungry beggars. I believe there is an ocean of warm, affectionate, and outrageously unconditional love available to us all — and that it is conveniently accessible from within. I don’t believe anyone is excluded from this ocean of love; it is only a question of learning how to hear it, how to feel it, how to trust it. - Elizabeth Gilbert
Role of mindfulness in reducing anxiety and healing trauma
Slowing down and showing kindness to ourselves is often a challenge when we are moving quickly and feel as though we “must do” more to fix ourselves. That hint of “fixing ourselves” can come from a place of self-loathing, that we are not good enough. Some have described self-loathing to be equivalent to self-hate, or despising ourselves. There is where mindfulness can be extremely helpful. It can begin to help us break through the cycle of anxious thoughts by teaching us how to create space from those thoughts. We can then begin to see more clearly what we are doing to ourselves and how come it is so difficult for us to love ourselves in that moment.
Mindfulness is the act of being present in the moment without judgment. -Anxiety and Depression Association of America
It helps us to see things not from a place of “good versus bad” but from a neutral, witnessing and observing stance. A mindfulness technique is RAIN by Michelle McDonald.
Recognize: Acknowledge what is happening
Allow: Let it be present
Investigate: Be curious and collect data without judgment
Non-identification: Natural awareness by providing reassurance and comfort
For trauma recovery, there is research behind the science of mindfulness in rewiring brain pathways disrupted by trauma. This leads to better emotional regulation, increased resiliency, and decreased activated triggers. Regular mindfulness practices have been shown to promote neuroplasticity, which reorganizes and creates new neural pathways.
Therapy as a tool for self-discovery and healing
In Internal Family Systems Therapy and Somatic therapy, techniques are used to help lend self-compassion of the therapist to the client to increase the embodied sense of self-love. Therapy provides a safe place for processing emotions and from that validation, there comes the inner kindness of feeling safe through being held in those feelings. A therapist who is trained in Internal Family Systems Therapy carries with the model the understanding that inside all of us in the capacity to have compassion, it is not something we have to seek outside of ourselves. The therapist can lend their self-compassion energy until there is enough space for the client to begin to access it within themselves and then the goal becomes transferring that energy over so client can access and feel that energy with or without the therapist present.
Somatic therapy is a way to embody self-love through sensations and movement. We cannot “think” our way to love, we must feel it. Somatic yoga therapy can be very helpful in using breathwork and movement to help find more comfort within ourselves. Finding the right therapist is crucial to this work, so I encourage you to do your research, interview, and find a trained therapist that you trust to be your guide on your journey.
Yoga: A mind-body approach to self-love and healing
Yoga is a intimate connection between movement, breath, and the bodymind system. Yoga asana poses and breathing help to support relaxation that can often bring about inner peace and emotional release and even at times trauma that is stored in the body. Yoga enhances the practice of mindfulness by allowing ourselves to be with whatever is there with ease. We don’t have to fight ourselves when we have a supportive practice that can hold us.
A yoga practice is adaptable to our needs, depending on what our bodymind system needs. It may help give us strength when we are feeling weak or stumbling over ourselves. It can give us balance when we feel anxious and all over the place. It can give us an opening when we are constricted and stubborn to see our own barriers. It can give us boundaries when we are too flexible and lose ourselves in the process.
A practice that is crafted for us gives us an anchor and stability to have a greater sense of ourselves, what we need, and how to get those needs met.
Through that, I believe that yoga is the ultimate practice of self-love.
Practical self-love practices for daily healing
An easy way to begin self-love practices is to try a “Dear Love” letter to yourself. When you wake up take out your journal and begin by writing Dear Love and from love write to yourself. Let whatever come out speak and try not to monitor and inhibit what you write, just write. Do it for no longer than 5 minutes and see what happens.
Wherever your find yourself on this journey of healing from trauma and holistic healing, I encourage you to remember that healing takes time and progress is personal. If you are ready to take the next step for yourself, explore somatic yoga through my online classes (they are only 45 minutes long!) or reach out for 1:1 IFS therapy if you need more intimate care. Give yourself the gift of self-love and let your healing happen. You are so worth it my dear.
Warmly,
Leslie
