I didn’t always know that loving yourself was a “thing”. They didn’t teach us that in school and I must have missed the memo on it at home. If I think about what I used to think self-love was all about, I think I thought it was for people that were vain or full of themselves. It was for people that thought they were all that and a bag of potato chips. It wasn’t until I had a nervous breakdown spiritual awakening while being at home with two small kids and running several businesses, that I learned self-love was actually respecting yourself enough to look after yourself (plus much more). If I didn’t do it, no one else was going to do it.

What I learned was that we teach others how to treat us based on how we treat ourselves. Your friends, family, children and horses.

Horses?

Yes. My relationship with my horses has changed as my relationship with myself has changed. A very cool side effect from learning to stay sain, though self-love.

What’s good for the inside of you, is good for the inside of your horse. There’s this little thing that manifests when you practice self-love. It’s called happiness. It’s really actually HUGE and super important and incredibly amazing. Just like your friends and family enjoy being around you when you are truly happy so do your horses.

Think of what you are like to be around when you’re down in the dumps and not loving yourself. Those times when you’re miserable and running yourself down. Do your friends want to be around you? Not likely, and neither does your horse. He’s just the sacrificial lamb that you take your day out on. You pick on him and ride the hair off him. Thankfully our horses are super forgiving and let us away with things our friends and family would never.

But then we feel bad for that ride that didn’t get anything done and we beat ourselves up for it. Now we’re hating ourselves again and the cycle of self-judgement continues.

One of the things we do is that we put our expectations and judgments of ourselves on others. Including our horses. Perfectionism is one of those expectations. When we don’t love ourselves we expect we should be perfect. We end up expecting others to be the same. Is that really fair? Can we really expect our people and our horses to be perfect? As you learn to love yourself your expectations of yourself will be more realistic as will the expectations you have of others, including your horse.

Through my own journey and practice of self-love, I find my horses are learning quicker and enjoying the process more themselves. They see me as a beacon of light and fun in their day instead of doom and gloom coming their way. My horses want to work for me and I don’t have to make them do anything. I’m still working on my kids receiving me quite that fantastic, but like I say I’m a work in progress.    My mindset in the competition arena has strengthened as my self-confidence has also improved.   I don’t worry about what others are thinking quite so much which was something holding me back in the arena.

Through this journey, I have learned many tools and energy healing methods to quantum leap people from not living a practice of self-love to recognizing how important it is and putting it into practice. I remember clearly a day where I said to some friends “Love myself, I don’t even know if I like myself”. It was true and followed by awkward silence. Now, I can look myself in the mirror and truly say “I love you, you’re awesome”. Some days it’s harder than others, but now I know how to get back there. I challenge you to look yourself in the mirror and see if you can say “I love you”. If it’s hard or you know you can’t do it without even trying it, please join me for my 30 Day Love Yourself Challenge. We start Wednesday, May 10th. Register here. If you aren’t at a place where you can do it for you, ask yourself “Would my horse, friends, and family want me to join this challenge?”