Hey, everyone.
Welcome back to Lavendaire. It's Aileen.
Today, I want to share some self love shifts that have changed my life.
And I want to focus more on the changes in my mindset and my way of life
that have really enhanced my self love and how I feel about myself.
This video is a collab with the lovely Jasmine Lipska.
She is the princess of self love and self worth,
and I truly feel like she such a light and she's an angel on earth.
I met her when I went to Australia almost a couple of years ago,
and Jasmine in person is just as sweet and kind and gentle as you would imagine her to be.
So anyway, let me get into the self love shifts that have changed my life.
The first shift that really, really changed my life, and it sounds so simple,
but it's a huge one, is I began to listen to my heart.
I began to listen to that inner voice and that intuition,
because my entire life, I lived my life listening to what other people told me to do.
I listened to what my parents told me to do,
what my teachers and society and peers were suggesting me to do.
I never felt confident in myself and my own voice.
Anytime I had to make a decision,
I would ask everyone around me for what they thought
and I would value their opinions over my own.
So what really changed in my life in my early twenties,
when I was finishing college, was I started to realize,
I can't live my life listening to other people.
I have to listen to this voice within because deep down,
I truly know what feels right and what's best for me.
Listening to your heart, listening to that inner voice,
is the most powerful guide you have,
because that is going to lead you to where you're meant to go in life.
If you listen to other people, if you live your life trying to impress other people
or get other people's approval, you're just going to be led astray
and you're not going to feel happy and fulfilled.
The second shift that changed my life is I started to discover
and nurture my own gifts, strengths, and talents.
I felt like I didn't really know myself that well before I was in my early twenties.
I just kind of went about life and some things I might've been good at, like music,
but I never really took the time to really understand myself and reflect and recognize what I'm good at.
What personality quirks do I have?
Why do people like being around me?
I didn't recognize the talents and the gifts that I had,
and when I didn't know what I was meant to do in life,
that's what I really had to search to figure out who I am,
what I'm good at, what I love to do.
And that journey in just exploring all these different things that I was curious about or interested in,
that journey led me to really understand myself, where my strengths lie.
And once you understand where your strengths and gifts and talents lie,
that's kind of like your toolkit.
That's what you use to create your dream life,
because that is your best chance to create value in the world,
meaning it's your best chance for maybe a career path or a life path.
It's your best chance to feeling fulfilled along the way,
because you feel happy and fulfilled when you're doing things that you're good at and things that you love doing.
So if you don't know what those are for you yet, that's totally okay.
I simply suggest you go out and find it, to have the courage to go out and explore,
try new things, figure out what you're good at.
Maybe ask the people around you what's unique about you.
What are your strengths?
What do they think you have about you that is special, that is different from others?
Because we all have things that make us unique and knowing that is our power.
The third self love shift that changed my life for real is being gentle on myself,
learning not to be so hard on myself,
because I was a person that always put such high expectations and pressures on myself –
obviously a trickle-down from the expectations my parents put on me,
but it just became my own voice that I would push myself to succeed.
I would push myself and I would suffer because of it.
I would never feel good enough.
And I would be a perfectionist.
And with everything that I created, it just never felt perfect.
It never felt right. And I just didn't feel good about it.
Or I just felt like it was a struggle through all my journeys,
because I was hard on myself for the little mistakes or failures that I might've made along the way.
The mindset shift that hugely changed my life was
learning to give more love to myself and recognizing that if you love yourself –
if you love a person, you're not going to be so hard on them.
You're going to just naturally gently support them.
And if they make a mistake or if they fail, that's okay, it's a part of life.
So it just allows you to be more accepting of yourself.
Once you give yourself love, you accept yourself, everything is more okay.
Nothing is the end of the world.
Life will go on and you're just less stressed that way.
There's less of a pressure and less burden than if you were to be hard on yourself
and be super perfectionist about everything.
Even now, things go wrong all the time, like with the Artist of Life Workbook launch.
So many things were delayed.
There was a lot that went wrong along the way, but I was just more carefree about it.
You know, whatever happens, happens.
As long as I do my best, it's okay.
I'll be gentle on myself for all the little mistakes, because I know that life is not perfect.
The next self love shift that changed my life is learning to find self-worth from within,
rather than from external validation.
This is huge.
This is something that I battled with my entire life, that I'm healing,
I've healed a lot from, but it's still an ongoing journey.
I made an entire video about this, how I healed my sense of self-worth.
But the basics of this is: I learned to finally see that I am worthy within,
without having to prove myself to anyone, without having to be successful
or have any achievements to prove that I am worthy.
I am worthy regardless, simply because I'm a living being.
I have my own unique light.
I have a personality that is different from others.
Just me being me is worthy enough.
And I don't have to prove my worth to anyone.
For the longest time in my life, I felt like I had to be successful
in order to be loved and accepted and approved by others.
I felt like I had to be someone else in order to gain other's approval,
or listen to what others told me to do,
or follow what other people said, things like that.
And more and more with age and through life,
I recognize that I can give myself my own worth, my own feelings of worth.
I don't need to find that feeling of worth outside of me.
And this is easier said than done,
but I hope you guys understand the concept that you are worthy as you are.
You don't have to be successful or have these material things or achievements to show for it.
You are already worthy and lovable and valuable,
and you don't have to feel like you're lesser than other people,
that you're smaller than other people.
It's not like that. You are enough.
That is the foundational belief that I really truly wish we all have.
The next self love shift that changed my life is
changing how I manage and handle my emotions.
Before I might have felt emotions and I might've either bottled it down
or hid it from other people,
or I might've let it overcome me and take over me,
and me identifying with my emotions like, “Oh, I'm such a sad person,”
or “My life sucks,” this and that.
I might've either put it down or let it overrule a lot of how I feel about my life.
But now I see my emotions as things that come and go.
They're a natural part of being a human being.
We all have emotions, and the big part is embracing and accepting the emotions that you feel.
Whatever you feel is okay.
It's not wrong to feel any certain way because it's just natural as a human being.
Learning to embrace and accept the emotions that I have,
and then allowing myself to feel them rather than pushing it down
and trying to avoid it and ignore it.
And allowing myself to feel my emotions but at the same time,
keeping a balance between feeling my emotions vs. letting them overcome me.
And the balance is that I stopped identifying myself with my emotions.
The difference is in thinking, “Ugh, my life is so sad.
Look at all these horrible things happening. I'm such a sad person,”
vs. “I feel sad right now because of X, Y, Z. That's okay.
I will allow myself to feel that sadness,
but I understand that that sadness does not equal me or who I am.
It's just a feeling that may come and go."
Just allowing yourself to feel the emotions.
When it comes out, just let it out.
And also learning physical ways to let your emotions out,
like dancing, working out, singing, or even yelling,
you know, whatever helps you release that energy from you.
It's a healthier way to just manage and deal with your emotions.
The next self-love shift that changed my life is one that everybody should implement in their life –
you can start implementing it right now, today – is to be grateful.
Have gratitude.
Choose to see what in life that you have to be grateful for.
Choose to see the positive side of life instead of what you lack,
instead of all the negative sides – and not ignoring the stuff that you lack,
but more focusing on what you have,
what you already have in your life that is abundant and beautiful and something to be grateful for.
I know it can sound cliche because we talk about gratitude so often,
but gratitude truly is one of those key things you have to have in order to be happy in life.
And sometimes we forget that we can simply be grateful for being alive.
We can simply be grateful for existing,
for having these feelings, for experiencing the world today.
There's so much to be grateful for just in that.
There's a saying that I really love:
"Trade your expectations for appreciation. That makes all the difference.”
Because once you stop having so many expectations for how you want your life to go,
what will happen, and instead just appreciate what's there, that changes everything.
That just levels up your life as a whole, because when you have expectations,
you envision your life to be a certain way.
You envision that things will go a certain way
and being so attached to that expectation,
you will likely get disappointed when things don't go that way,
when life doesn't go that way.
So that's why it's better to just have no expectations or low expectations.
Simply appreciate that which is right in front of you.
All right, so now I'm going to hand it over to Jasmine to share her tips on her self love shifts.
Hi everyone, this is Jasmine Lipska,
and thank you so much Aileen, for having me in your video today.
I am super grateful to be here,
and here are some self-love shifts that definitely changed my life for the better.
The first one is knowing that what I see in others, I also see in myself.
This is also known as shadow work, and it is such a great practice,
not only to grow from within, but to let go of judgment and also heal your triggers.
So here's an example: Maybe one day you are sitting at a cafe
and you see someone walking around about your age
and they have a brand new Louis Vuitton bag.
And immediately you get a bit triggered and you start thinking,
“Why would they spend $2,000 on a brand new Louis Vuitton bag?
How can they ever justify that?”
So by you now being aware that you were triggered,
you can now come back to yourself and ask yourself,
“Why am I being triggered?”
And you'll start to discover, maybe you have never allowed yourself to own luxury items.
And maybe you've never felt worthy and deserving of good things.
Maybe your whole life you've only felt deserving of second-hand items.
So if someone else has a brand new Louis Vuitton bag,
it triggers you because deep down inside you don't feel worthy of it
but you see that they feel worthy of it.
So by this shift in mindset you can make, it's gonna change your life,
because from now on, you're gonna be able to see a reflection of you in others,
and look at yourself and see where maybe you are not accepting yourself
or not feeling worthy or deserving of something.
The second shift I made is practicing gratitude towards all parts of my body.
I love doing this through a body massage.
So I'll take some time to get present
and I'll start to feel different areas of my body
and just tell myself, “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
And the more we practice gratitude towards the parts of our body,
especially the parts we tend to take for granted
like our toes, our digestive system, our shoulders,
and all these different, beautiful parts of your sacred body,
the more you're going to develop self-acceptance and self-love,
because what you appreciate appreciates,
and gratitude is such a beautiful feeling
and you deserve to feel good in your body just as it is.
It's helped me to let go of comparison,
and as Aileen says, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”
So give thanks to all parts of your body that are literally keeping you alive
and allowing you to experience this beautiful life.
All right now, back to Aileen.
All right, I hope you enjoyed this video today with Jasmine and myself.
Sending you so much love, and I truly hope you make these self love shifts in your life.
And lastly, I want to remind you that we just launched
our 2021 Artist of Life Workbook, and I'm super proud of it.
I'm super proud of the new web page and the pictures and the videos and everything.
So go down below, go to shop.lavendaire.com
or just click the link down below to check it out.
Thank you so much, and I will see you all next time.
Bye!