[MUSIC PLAYING]
Namaste, everybody.
Lisa A. Romano here, the Breakthrough Life Coach,
and today I'm gonna teach you all about why
it is brave to love the self.
Many of us who don't know how to love the self
don't recognize that anytime we self-care or we
act in the name of self-love, that this is actually
a huge act of bravery.
And today I'm gonna prove to you why loving yourself
is actually one of the most bravest things you could do.
It is brave to love yourself because, if you come
from the type of background where you never felt loved
and you are learning to give yourself something
that you never had, that is a huge act of bravery.
If you've come from an alcoholic home or a narcissistic home,
or if you've been pushed around in the foster care system,
if you've experienced some type of abuse
in your background or childhood emotional neglect,
and today you are acting on learning to love yourself,
you're actually learning to love yourself,
this is absolutely an act of bravery.
You're saying to the world, in spite of me never
feeling loved, in spite of me never feeling worthy of love,
today I'm going to love myself.
And, yes, that is an act of bravery.
In spite of possibly spending decades,
decades feeling unworthy, today I'm going to self-care.
Remember, self-care is self-love in action.
And even though, in spite of possibly feeling
for decades that I was unworthy of love, today
I'm going to self-care.
Today I'm going to act on loving myself in spite
of never feeling loved.
Yes, that is brave.
It's brave because most people are waiting for someone else
to make them feel worthy of love.
Most people don't even realize that they're
waiting for permission from the outside to love the self
or to feel worthy of the self.
So if you are somebody who is going out there in the world
and you're learning to take care of yourself and love yourself,
yes, this is an act of bravery.
You aren't somebody who is waiting for someone
to rescue you anymore.
You aren't someone who is waiting
for the knight on the white horse to show up.
Or you are longer the type of person
who is looking for other people to fix and to take care of
and to work out this rescuer dynamic with.
No.
You are learning to say, I am enough to self-care,
and I'm not waiting for someone else outside of me
to give me permission to do that or to make
me feel like, because someone else loves me,
then I must be worthy.
No.
I'm learning to love myself because I am enough.
You are saying to the world and to your inner self, enough.
No more waiting.
No more waiting for this person or that person
to love me enough.
No more waiting for the right circumstance.
No more waiting till I weigh enough to think I'm enough.
No more waiting till my hair grows a certain length
to feel enough.
No more waiting to feel better before I can take
care of myself or love myself.
No more waiting for anyone outside of me
to give me permission to say, yes, Lisa, you are worthy
and you have the right to take care of yourself.
If you are that person.
If you're saying, no more, enough waiting,
and you're learning to love yourself,
yes, that is an act of bravery.
It is brave to love the self and to self-care
because most people worry about what
other people think about them.
Think about it.
When you say you love yourself, what you are implying,
you might not realize it, but what you are implying is,
I accept myself.
I accept my flaws.
I accept that, when I was below the veil of consciousness,
I said and I did things that I wish I didn't do,
that I would have never done if I was highly aware
or I had a healthier sense of self.
I did things I wasn't proud of.
I said things I wasn't proud of, right?
I have that.
Absolutely.
I have that in my head.
But when you learn to love yourself,
you're embracing those aspects of you,
those lower personality aspects of you.
They're not your true self anyway.
Those were things that you went through
as part of your evolutionary journey as a soul
here on planet Earth.
Right?
So when you are learning to love yourself
and you're learning to accept yourself,
you're learning to accept your flaws
in spite of what other people might think about your flaws.
You're learning that the person whose opinion matters the most
has always been yours.
It is like you are saying to yourself, I see you.
I know that you've made mistakes.
I know that you've bumped up against walls.
I know that you've said and you've done things
and you've felt things that you're not that proud of,
and I love you anyway.
Yes, loving yourself in spite of all of the things
that you know about yourself that you wish no one would ever
know or you hope no one else finds out
about, you are the person who knows your deepest,
darkest secrets.
If you are somebody who is learning to love yourself,
that means you're embracing the shadow self.
And, yes, that is an act of absolute bravery.
It is brave to learn to love the self because most
people, whether they're aware of it or not,
are living in a state of reactivity
to what is happening in the evil world
or they're living in reactivity to what is happening outside
of them and how other people treat them,
waiting for permission, like I said earlier.
But there is this sense that, when we are not
loving ourselves, we are in a state of attachment
to the outer world.
And so if you are learning to address that,
yes, that's an act of bravery.
When you love the self, you're learning
to care less about what's happening outside of you.
You're shushing the outside.
You're reducing mental chatter.
You're turning to the God-self within.
You are learning to find inner peace.
What other people say is no longer bothering you that much.
You know that is not where your true power lies anyway
because you're learning to love the self.
You're learning to see value in the self.
You're not begging people to hang out with you anymore.
It is brave to love the self, because when you love the self,
you're letting go of these egoic attachments.
You're saying, I am enough.
And this goes against what most people want to do.
Most people want to cling.
They don't realize it, but they're
clinging to whatever's happening at work.
They cling to what their mother said or what their sister said.
They cling to what's happening in politics,
or they cling to something outside of them
that their ego attaches to and that
makes them feel alive because the ego is tied to survival.
And so when you're learning to love the self
and you begin to let go of what other people think about you,
then you are living a brave life because you're
learning to care more about what you think about you.
You're going against the grain, and that is brave.
It's like you're saying to the world, yes, I used to cling.
Yes, I used to worry.
Yes, I used to react.
Yes, I used to try to manipulate.
Yes, I used to try to control.
Yes, I fell apart when people didn't agree with me.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, but no more.
I know that I am enough, and I know that I
must seek my own validation.
And, yes, you letting go of other people's validation,
you letting go of accepting when people don't validate you,
that is absolutely brave.
Many of us have been taught that, if you take care
of yourself, you're selfish.
If you put yourself first, you're selfish.
I know that I came from that lineage for sure.
And I watched my mother neglect herself my entire life.
And what did I do when I got older?
I neglected myself.
What did I do every time I bought myself a $15 blouse?
I felt guilty.
What did I do when I needed deodorant?
I waited until there was no deodorant left,
hardly any deodorant left, and I was scraping my armpits
with the cap because I didn't feel like I had a right
to go out and buy deodorant until I absolutely
had no, zero, deodorant left.
Literally, that's how I grew up.
And so learning to love myself, yes, that was brave.
Coming from the type of background
that I came from where, you are not enough.
Who do you think you are?
Who do you think you are for wanting that?
Who do you think you are for saying that?
Who do you think you are, right?
I grew up with that.
And so I learned to be small.
And loving myself, even though that is the key to everything,
love is the key to everything, no, I
didn't feel comfortable loving myself.
In fact, it felt completely uncomfortable to learn
to love myself.
But I forced myself to do it.
And, yes, it was brave for someone
like me to learn to love herself.
Many of us have not been taught, literally,
we have been brainwashed and conditioned
to feel like we don't have rights like everybody else.
Right?
I know that I used to look up to people like--
well, just think about people in high positions,
whether it's a pop star or a television talk show host
or whatever.
It's just this idea that there was this hierarchy
that there were the haves and the have nots,
and I was a have not.
I have not.
I was a have not, have not, have not.
I was not allowed to have this.
I was not allowed to think that.
I was not allowed to have this experience or that experience.
And this was an undercurrent in my life,
and I never even realized it until I started
doing my work through codependency
and recovering from CPTSD and narcissistic abuse.
It was like, oh my god, the heavens opened
and I began to understand what was wrong.
And so when you come from a traumatic background,
or you may not even realize that you
may have been conditioned to not even feel worthy of taking
care of the self.
People who take care of themselves naturally,
they have this innate sense of value,
an innate sense of worth, that people like me, and maybe like
you, didn't have.
And even though that's not our fault, if we don't address it,
we can't fix it.
So oftentimes, I coach people, and even myself,
I have felt in my life where I was
an extension of someone else.
I was put on this earth to carry the shoes,
or I was put on this earth to put the toothpaste
on the toothbrush, you know?
I was an extension.
I wasn't meant to be out there in front of my life.
I wasn't meant to have a dream manifest through me.
That was for the other people.
Those were for the haves.
And, yes.
So when you're learning to love yourself,
and you're seeing those things so clearly,
and you are gaining some momentum on the inside,
it's like the choo choo train going up the hill,
I think I can, I think I can, I think I can, that was my life.
It was little shifts, incremental shifts,
over a long period of time through commitment
and through dedication and through knowing that I
did have intrinsic value.
I do have value because I am here.
I am as valid as a star in the sky, as you are.
I am an extension of divinity, as you are.
And when that hit me, when I realized
that I am as important as anything and anyone
in the eyes of source or God--
call him Snuffleupagus for all I care, or call him or her or it,
I don't care.
Source!-- but in the eyes of source
I was just as valid as anybody else, that
definitely helped me shift the way
I saw myself in terms of value.
When we are learning to put ourselves first,
it's like we're saying to our inner self
and to the world, look, I know that I have lived my life
feeling like an extension.
I have not accepted my divine God-given power,
and I have played it small, and I have lived in fear,
and I have given permission over myself to other people,
but no more.
I am not going to believe in conditioning anymore.
I'm not going to believe what people
say about me being a woman.
I'm not going to believe what people
say about me being a man.
I'm not going to believe what people say about my heritage,
or whatever.
I'm going to be myself.
I'm going to create my own program.
I'm going to interface with the matrix
based on what I want to believe about me because that's
my God-given right as a creator incarnate.
That's right.
And it's your right too.
I'm going to start listening to my own self,
designing my own blueprint.
I am going to start living out loud in my life,
and I'm going to love myself and take care of myself,
because that is my God-given right.
You bet your butt that's brave.
So self-care and self-love can be very triggering
because what we are doing is, we are pulling away
from the outer world, and that can
trigger all sorts of abandonment trauma, attachment trauma,
and even threaten our sense of survival.
Humans are born to connect.
And so when we start retreating into the self,
it can trigger our physical, very innate need
that's tied to the root chakra for survival
because we are born to feel connected to other people.
We want to experience bonding with others.
When we start loving the self and saying,
I'm not looking to the outside world for my sustenance
anymore, I'm not looking to the outside world
to fulfill me anymore, it can trigger
all sorts of clingy, co-dependent, reactive behavior
in us, and it's something to be aware of.
When we stop waiting for other people to give us permission,
to feel good enough or to be good enough or to be ourselves
and to step out front, when we stop
waiting for someone to say, yes, you
have a right to follow a dream, we
dive right into the belly of a human being's primal fear
for the need to connect.
Letting go of needing other people to take care of us
or to validate us so that we can finally
learn it's our responsibility to love the self,
we let go of thinking there's a rescue boat coming.
There's no rescue boat coming.
When we let go and we stop worrying
about what other people think about us,
it's like we're cutting this lifeline to the outer world
and we're saying, nope, I've got this.
I'm going to learn to love myself.
And it is extremely brave because there's no proof
that you're going to be able to actually feel enough and feel
connected.
The only way to prove this to yourself,
and to prove what I'm saying happens, is by experiencing it.
If anybody would have told me 20, 25 years ago,
Lisa, if you want to be happy, let go.
Accept what people say about you.
Let them smear you.
Let them lie.
Let them make up stories.
Let them twist the story.
Let your parents think what they want about you.
Let people judge you.
Stop fighting to get people to acknowledge you.
Stop trying to fix other people.
If somebody would've told me 20 or 25 years ago
that the way to be happy and the way to inner peace
was through the divine self, that it was through letting
go, that it was detaching that was key,
that it was learning to feel my own feelings
and to honor myself and to see myself.
If somebody would have told me that 20 or 25 years ago,
I might have panicked.
Because clinging and co-dependent
behavior and acquiescing were the ways
in which my brain, my dysfunctional brain,
and as a result of my childhood programming,
taught me was what I should be doing.
And here I was learning to confront that and say,
no, no, no, no, no.
That's exactly why you're going in the wrong direction.
And my body knew it, right?
All these bumps in the road, all this resistance,
all these bad relationships, all these bumps
on my body and hives and migraines
and asthma, and lions and tigers and bears, oh my.
All of this stuff that was showing up
was just evidence I was going in the wrong direction,
but I didn't know how to go any other way.
So learning to love yourself in spite of childhood programming
that teaches you to cling and teaches you
that you're not enough, yes, dear one,
that is very, very brave.
If you are learning to love the self,
especially if you have never felt
loved, especially if you have never felt connected
to another human being.
If you are letting go and you are
accepting that it's not your place to get people to love you
or to convince people that you love them
or that they love you.
If you're letting that go, dear one, I want you to know,
that is an extremely, extremely brave act.
You don't need permission from anybody else
out there to put yourself first, even though you
might feel like you do.
I hope this video has helped you understand that you don't.
The universe is waiting for your command.
The universe is waiting for you to awaken.
The universe is waiting for you to realize that within you you
have always been enough and it was only faulty childhood
programming, or faulty programming,
negative core beliefs, that had you
going in the wrong direction on your search for true love.
You are the love you seek.
My name is Lisa A. Romano.
I'm the Breakthrough Life Coach and the creator of The 12 Week
Breakthrough Coaching Program that's
helping people heal from codependency and narcissistic
abuse, that really helps them unplug from the old
and plug into something new so that they can create abundance
and love and attract inner peace into their life.
It's absolutely amazing.
I'm also a meditation teacher on Insight Timer and a bestselling
author.
If you'd like to know more about me and my membership site,
you could check out my website at www.lisaaromano.com.
And if you click any of the links below,
you could actually listen to one of my books
for free on Audible.com.
Namaste, everybody.
Bye for now.