An easy way to invite more self-love into your life is to connect with yourself through your senses. Traditionally we know of five senses: smell, taste, touch, hearing, and seeing. There is also a sixth sense, called proprioception, which relates to being aware of your body position and how you interact with the physical space around you.

Here are some ideas to harness your senses to cultivate more self-love throughout your day.

Smell.

The sense of smell is one of the strongest senses that links to memories and emotions. You can practice more self-love by surrounding yourself with smells that you adore. Smells that bring back good memories, and that encourages specific emotions. Integrate different smells into your daily life, and especially into those times where you consciously practicing self-love. Combine the smells that you surround yourself with the memories, the feelings on the emotions that you want to experience.

Taste.

Invite self-love into your life through taste. This is an excellent opportunity to engage in conscious and mindful eating. Indulge in your favorite food and give not one thought to any conditioning that you’ve experienced around it. For example, chocolate is often referred to as a guilty pleasure, but cacao has been part of sacred rituals at least since the Mayan times. Take your time to prepare and eat the food that you enjoy and refuse to feel guilty or accept judgment. Open up yourself to new experiences and try things that are novel to you. You can find as much pleasure in the texture and taste of a crunchy salad as you could from a creamy and luscious dessert. The question is: what do you like? Consciously pay attention to the tastes that you experience. Show yourself more love by guilt-free eating the things that you enjoy and exploring self-love through your senses.

Touch.

Give yourself some lovin’ by touching your body. No, I don’t necessarily mean sexually… But I do mean sensually. There is a lot of power and, in fact, empowerment in engaging with your body sensually and exploring self-love through your senses. Touch the bits that you don’t often give attention to, like your elbows or the backs of your knees, the spaces between your finger and the small spot behind your ears. Get to know your body and show it some love through the sense of touch.

Hear.

Surround yourself with sounds that you like. Play your favorite music or listen to healing sound vibrations. Harness the healing power of sound to help you change your inner vibrations. Pay attention to the sounds around you, sounds that you usually block out or ignore. Find the joy in the voices of those that you love, your family, your friends, your children, your partner. Pay attention to the sounds of their voices, the vibrations they create, and allow yourself to be surrounded by those vibrations. Lean into them as if they were a physical embrace and soak up all the good feelings that come up.

See.

Celebrate your self-love by looking for the beauty in ordinary things. Practicing mindfulness meditation is a wonderful way to enhance this skill. Start to look at mundane things through new eyes, really pay attention to them. Notice how the light changes how something looks. See the reflections in a glass. Notice all the different colors of the hair that covers your dog or the flecks of color in your lover’s eyes. Surround yourself with things that you like to look at. Things that make you feel happy and inspired. Things that motivate you and raises your vibration.

Proprioception.

Practice self-love through becoming aware of your body. Take a few minutes throughout the day to check in to see how your body feels, pay attention to any spaces of stress or tension, and release them. Become aware of your physical body in the physical space around you. Notice how you are able to create changes in the space around you in an instant. All you need to do is have a thought, and you can reach out and pick up that apple or push in that chair. Pay attention to how you are the creator of your own life and your own space. It might not seem like much, but can you see how you are the vessel through which change happens?

Small steps. Small steps to a very big, unconditional and unwavering love. That is what we are doing here. We are consciously looking at and changing how we interact with ourselves. We are consciously starting to pay attention and to take better care of ourselves. This self-love affair is the most important relationship that you will ever have. Let’s work on nurturing and growing it together.

Here is a self-love infographic that can help to remind you…

Find out how you can increase your self-love through Remembering Your Worth.

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Here are a few things that you can add to your morning self-love ritual:

Wake up gentle and slow.

Set your alarm clock to go off a few minutes before your usual wake up time. Choose a ringtone that is gentle and calm with some soothing sounds, but that would still be loud enough to wake you up. There’s nothing as shocking and unsettling as waking up to the sound of an alarm or even a digital rooster crowing. Yes, yes, real roosters out in nature are not the same.

Take some time as you wake up to slowly take in your surroundings, become aware of your body in the physical space, look at how the sunlight plays through the leaves against the curtains or the window. Take some time to experience this new morning. Connect with yourself or your partner, your cats, or your dog. Soak up some self-love as part of your morning self-love ritual.

Start your morning by slowly, quietly, and calmly being present.

Wait about an hour before you engage with digital devices.

We are constantly attached to our phones and digital devices. It’s almost as if they have become an extension of ourselves, and we feel a little bit lost without them. It’s natural to have the impulse to want to check your phone, your messages, or your emails as you wake up. Give yourself some space and some time where you don’t need to engage with the rush, or the stress, or with work.

Take about an hour if possible to focus on what you’re doing whether you’re making coffee or breakfast or having a chat with your child or your husband or wife do you serve free from distractions of your phone or any other digital device. Self-love comes through spending conscious time with yourself and your surroundings.

Nourish your body.

Loving yourself means loving your body and taking care of it. Here I can throw in a cliche like ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the day’ or something like that. The truth is your body has fasted for around 8 hours. Take some time to break the fast, drink some water to hydrate and give your body a nutritious meal so that it can have the energy to power you through the day.

Avoid being distracted by devices or thoughts of what needs to be done that day try and engage in conscious eating and paying attention and being present. Practice self-love through nourishing your body as part of your morning self-love ritual.

Nourish your mind.

Your mind is mighty. Your thoughts literally create the world around you – ask the quantum physicists even. That is why it’s so essential that you need to take care of your mind. That you need to nourish it. That you need to put all kinds of good things into it. By taking the time out to feed your mind every morning, you can become empowered. You can start to gain control over your mind, your thoughts, and your life.

You can become a powerful Co-creator of your life. Now, don’t let me hear you coming up with an excuse like you don’t have time. This is how you create your life, and five or 10 minutes every morning is absolutely worth it to bring in the changes that you’ve wanted for so long.

Good ways to nourish or expand your mind is to do some yoga or meditate you can write a gratitude list you can spend time focusing on affirmations or intentions. Get in touch with that powerful tool that you have at your disposal.

Stay present.

You might have noticed by now that all four previous points have one thing in common – and that is to cultivate presence. How do you start your day is often an indication of how the rest of your day will go. If you started off rushed and hurried and disconnected, the chances are that’s what you’re going to experience for the entire day.

You’ll probably not pay as close attention to things. It will likely feel like everything is going wrong and that you just cannot catch up to the present moment. So start your day off with being present. With being connected with your mind, your soul, your body, and your surroundings. Take the time out to be quiet. To start your day with consciousness and awareness. Make it a part of your morning self-love ritual and watch it gather momentum throughout your day.

Self-love is a difficult practice to do regularly. It’s easier to make excuses, to avoid it because we feel guilty for taking time for ourselves. The thing is, without taking time for yourself, you engage in the world in a disconnected way, in a way that is not always authentically you. And the world deserves the authentic you. They deserve to experience the uniqueness of your soul, the valuable gifts you bring to every day… to every interaction… to every moment.

Take some time out to cultivate the love relationship you have with yourself in order to grow that love and to expand that love. Because the more love you have in yourself, the more you will have to give and to share with others.

Find out how you can increase your self-love through Remembering Your Worth.

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I’m sitting here scrolling through my memories on Facebook. Sometimes it makes me happy, sometimes it makes me sad and depressed. For a while I had stopped even opening them because it either represented forgotten friendships or people that I have lost, or… a visual reminder of all the most difficult times that I had gone through, neatly packaged into a stream of memes and quotes.

But it also gives me a sneak peek into my growth. I look at something I posted… I look at the date… I say ‘Ohhhh…that was when…” Most of the times that sentence ends with ‘I was hurting/struggling from or with something’.

The last day of May 2016 was the day that tore my soul apart. It broke me… Actually, it didn’t even break me. It completely erased me. All I was, was just empty. Nothing. It left me wondering whether I would ever be able to feel again. Hope again. Love again.

So I spent a year working on me. Sitting alone in the darkness of my room and my soul. Feeling unloved… feeling unlovable. And I healed… And I hurt… and I grew… and I clawed myself out of the dark and into the light.

I worked and worked – good lord I did all the hard work. And I felt like with every step forward I kept moving leagues back. But I kept at it. I kept persisting. Because in the moment that you have nothing, there is nothing to lose. Slowly, painfully I started to look at all the broken bits of me. At my insecurities and my flaws. At every limiting thought and believe that was holding me back. I looked them straight in the eyes – often shaking with fear. And I kept staring.

Until I felt it soften. Until I was able to envelope every barbed bit of me in love. And then I got cut some more. It is difficult to love the sharp, splintered bits of the human that is you.

But… I had nothing… and nothing to lose. So I sat with the pain. And I grew. And I got stronger. And slowly I started to change. I started to embrace me. Every dark and sharp and brittle and broken bit of me. I infused it with gentleness and love. I soaked it until self-adoration dripped off of my shattered edges like blood off the tip of a sword.

I was at war. One part of me shouting that I am not worth it, that I do not deserve to be happy, to be loved… while the other quietly whispered… ‘But dear Woman, you are’. And slowly the whisper grew louder than the shout. Day by day… moment by moment. The knowing grew. That I am worthy. That I am enough. Even with all my broken bits, with my cracks and dents, bruises and bumps.

This person, this soul is Enough.

The moment I started realising my worth my life changed. I fully loved myself, and within a month found someone who loves me, who accepts me, and who pushes me to heal even more. Today I see my posts on facebook from two years ago. And they show me the exact moment that I started Remembering my worth. I feel the change in the energy of the me from the past. And I cheer her on. I celebrate her. And I encourage her.

Because I know what she has been through. And I know what the me of this present moment has been through. Somewhere, for a moment, a minute, a month, I let myself forget.

I had put my head down and got caught up, and the ‘knowing’ my worth became a ‘guessing’ my worth. And really, that just wasn’t enough.

I have been feeling a massive shift in the last few days, and as if in an instant I was reminded of my worth. Of what I deserve. Of who I am and why I am here. That I am a beautiful, empowered, confident, created being who manifested myself into this life.

I can feel the changes in the air, the water, the earth and the fire. Are you ready to join the shift?

What pushed you to Remember your worth? Tell us in the comments below.

Click here to find out how I did it

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