It's Not You, It's Me

by Camilla Sacre-Dallerup

  At the launch I remember her mother saying that her daughter’s weight-loss journey had “started with her deciding to love herself”. That to me was everything. Right there, that’s it, guys, that’s where healing starts by loving ourselves right here where we are, not where we are going to be. By meeting our own needs, soothing ourselves and treating ourselves lovingly just the way we all deserve. Simone said she actually chose to love her excess skin before deciding to have surgery to remove it.

  “It’s quite simple, when you love yourself you make different choices for yourself.”

  A diet might sometimes feel like a quick solution, but it’s not the long-term answer that’s going to make you feel good in your body at all times – that happens only when we choose to LOVE LOVE LOVE ourselves. Every shape is beautiful and it’s far more important to focus on being healthy and to learn to accept and love yourself than what diet to try next.

  I truly believe that when we love and respect ourselves we become unafraid of showing up in the world the way we were born to show up.

  Bernadette’s story

  “A friend gave me Camilla’s number and said, “Call this Life Coach. I think she’s perfect for you.” I was looking to work with a coach that understood how to boost confidence and give me mind tools I could use in my career and sports. As I was putting Camilla’s phone number in my phone, I dialled her by mistake and she happened to pick up as she was driving. I was planning to call her in a few weeks, but when she picked up something told me it was meant to be and I had to book in immediately.

  Never in a million years did I know when I started working with her two years ago, to gain more confidence, that I would be going on an inward journey that would prepare me for the toughest year of my life. It was a year when some of my most precious relationships got challenged and a lot of the year was spent in different hospitals visiting my dearest. In one year I almost lost my brother just before we lost both my dad and then my mother. It was a year I would not wish upon anyone – so extremely emotional, sad and exhausting.

  Thank goodness I had carried on working on myself with Camilla. We worked on different subtle wounds hidden in my subconscious and the importance of self-love and self-care, and the importance of having a deeper connection with the breath.

  I honestly don’t know how I would have gotten through this time without the mindful tools Camilla gave me. With so much going on around you, it’s easy to get caught up and neglect yourself and I was close at times, but Camilla would remind me that then I was no good to anyone. I needed to look after myself, sleep, meditate and eat well. Being able to pick myself up and centre myself helped me beyond belief. I wasn’t just able to show up fully for myself, but I was able be there for my parents when they needed me the most and also be there for my siblings. I can’t believe it took such a life-challenging situation for me to truly know that loving yourself and knowing your worth and that you are enough really is so vital in life in whatever you are going through, and that really helps you make choices in life that are aligned with that even in the most difficult times.”

  What we can learn from Bernadette’s situation is that self-love sees us through even the roughest of rides. With self-love comes resilience and inner strength to carry on in the moments where we feel like we can’t.

  Self-compassion and your heart

  Self-compassion is important to boost self-love. It means to be compassionate to ourselves whether things are going well or not, and it means being able to forgive ourselves when things are tough. It means meeting yourself exactly where you are at and knowing that you matter in this world and that you are lovable.

  This exercise is an alternative to the traditional mindfulness-based loving kindness meditation, a practice I urge you to make your best friend. It’s impossible really to talk about love and then not talk about our powerful hearts (we’ve already looked at how everything is vibration on page 33). One of the things I have learnt by studying and teaching the chakras, or energy fields, in the body (see page 148), is that we often try to “work things out logically” in our minds and are completely disconnected from the feelings in our heart. When all we have to do is listen to how we feel to find the answers. There is an excellent saying I try to live by that goes “You know the truth by how it makes you feel”. However, sometimes we ignore this because it’s not what we want to be feeling and if we act on it, it won’t lead us towards the outcome we think we want in that moment. So we ignore how we feel and stay figuring it out in our minds.

  When we drop into our hearts this beautiful feeling area, we are able to connect to a powerful source of energy. In her book High on Heart my dear colleague Jessie May Wolfe explains the power of our hearts: “Your heart’s electromagnetic field holds enough power to light up a small city.” Some will even say there is a “heart brain”. I have experienced many profound moments with my clients where they have allowed themselves to drop out of their thoughts and logical minds – away from the “should”, “must” statements – and into the feeling and the guidance in their hearts. It’s often like a light-bulb moment – suddenly they know exactly what feels right to them and what they need to do.

  Knowing what I know now about self-compassion, having studied and taught different mindfulness practices and truly understood the benefits of having a daily self-compassion practice, it’s beyond me why we aren’t all taught this at school. In one of my favourite books, The Self-Compassion Skills Workbook, Tim Desmond explains how the brain has a care circuit, which creates the experience of compassion, warmth and love. And with compassion training this can actually grow in size. When it’s activated through self-compassion, it can reduce every form of emotional distress, including anxiety, anger and depression. It’s a powerful practice and one that has seen many of my clients through difficult times and supported them through anxiety and stress.

  I guess the first couple of times I was encouraged to put my hands over my heart and say something kind or loving to myself, I didn’t really understand how powerful a practice it actually is, but it didn’t take long to feel the difference it was making to my life and my clients.

  YOUR TOOLBOX: SELF-COMPASSION AND YOU

  Now try this wonderful self-compassion practice for yourself.

  1. Find somewhere comfortable to sit and close your eyes. Place your hands over your heart.

  2. Consider first a relationship or situation in your life about which you have been negative or hard on yourself. Let the feelings around this arrive in your mind.

  3. Then say: “I’m going to be kind to myself” and repeat the words:

  • May I be safe

  • May I be loved

  • May I be well

  • May I be kind to myself

  Repeat each sentence three times, then switch to saying:

  • I am safe

  • I am love

  • I am well

  • I am kind to myself

  Repeat three times, then add your own nurturing and loving sentence. This can change each time. It could be something along the lines of:

  • I am connected to the infinite love in this world

  • Love flows through me in abundance

  • My heart is open for love to flow in and out in perfect harmony

  • I attract loving relationships because I am love

  • I am always guided and supported

  Sit for as long as you need and, like with any of the other meditations I suggest, feel free to have your favourite relaxing piece of music on or the sound of the ocean playing in the background, or just sit in silence if you prefer – whatever works for you.

  YOUR TOOLBOX: CREATE A SELF-LOVE RITUAL

  To get you into the flow of focusing on loving yourself, what’s one thing you could do every day to show yourself love? Ask yourself what emotional support you can give yourself today? For example, “Today I will focus on making myself feel good by tapping into my joy, my intuition.”

  Part of my self-love ritual is
to put away my phone 30 minutes to an hour before I go to sleep on weekdays and 2–3 hours before at weekends. I leave it charging far enough away that I would have to get out of bed to reach it, sometimes in another room. This is my way of ending each day by saying because I love myself I give myself the best possible way of resting without stress arriving into my sacred space. Sleep is such a healing time and allowing ourselves enough time to sleep is a sign of self-love too.

  I also buy myself flowers because I deserve them. I love the whole ritual behind flowers and caring for them. Whenever I see the flowers at home it just says “I love you” to me and, although I’m married, it reminds me that I am completely capable of meeting my own needs in love too. I did this for myself when I was single and I do it still because it’s a loving act that makes me smile. The upside is my husband gets to enjoy them too, as do clients and friends who visit, which shows the ripple effect that a loving act has.

  What is the one thing you are going to do as your daily, weekly or monthly ritual of self-love?

  YOUR TOOLBOX: HYPNOTIC VISUALIZATION – FALLING IN LOVE WITH MYSELF

  In this visualization I will guide you on a journey where you will explore and remember all the beauty, wisdom and qualities already within you and imagine yourself fully loving yourself. I have created a special visualization for you to listen to at www.zenme.tv/mindtools.

  To give you a taster of what to expect, the visualization starts with closing your eyes and imagining you are opening up a magical box of treasures within. Each piece of beauty you find in this box is another part of you that you love or are proud of. It can be any quality from being a good listener, being kind, having beautiful eyes, having the courage to be authentic or to speak your truth, and so on. It will let your imagination work for you, helping you unlock the treasure of self-love.

  Mind Maintenance

  To help you stay with this feeling of self-love, I’d like you to do the following every day for a week:

  Meditate: Take a few minutes to connect to your breath by simply observing how the breath is flowing through the body.

  Reflect: Start to reflect on the following sentence: I choose to love myself because I am love.

  Journal: Write down what came to mind, without judging it. Perhaps even acknowledging how your love for yourself has improved from when you started this chapter to now. Even just being open to the idea is movement in a positive direction that will support you.

  So I hope you’re feeling fulfilled and enriched by a feeling of self-love. I’m now going to show you how to maintain that and take good care of yourself. See you in the next chapter.

  4

  SELF-CARE

  This is huge! I mean as important as self-love. I kind of consider them best friends, they totally go hand in hand. However, just like self-love, self-care is one of those things that gets tossed aside until we find ourselves in a place of feeling rough, stuck or exhausted, or worse we find ourselves in the midst of a panic attack or burnout, then we suddenly wake up and think “Oops, I think I should have looked after myself.” I’ve totally been there too. I’m still slightly puzzled by my younger self, who I think didn’t look after herself in the way she deserved to. Seriously, though, we have this one life and if we don’t take care of ourselves, our mind and body will start acting out in different ways that really aren’t good for us.

  Self-care is suddenly this trendy concept we see in magazines, as if it’s some elaborate thing we should do for ourselves. Let’s get real, guys, self-care is not a luxury, it’s your birthright and an absolute must if you really want to live a happy, fulfilled life with rewarding relationships. It’s so easy to neglect yourself when your focus becomes the needs and feelings of your partner, your children, your job, but when you start to suffer so will all your relationships. So just like anything else in life, and as we’ve seen throughout this book, it all starts with you.

  I’m going to show you how to declutter your life from all the crap you don’t need to waste your energy on and help you figure out how to make self-care part of your day-today routine. You will soon reap the rewards once you see how looking after yourself improves your relationship with yourself and others.

  A self-care plan

  I’m going to share my absolute favourite tools with you, some of which I’ve used for over a decade. I’ve handpicked tried-and-tested self-care exercises that have seen my clients and me through every scenario you can imagine, and I’ve created a 7-day easy-to-follow self-care plan to help you get started. After doing that, you can pick and choose the tools that work best for you. I want you to be able to return to the plan again and again whenever you feel like you need a reset, or just need to feel cared for, and be reminded that it’s totally fine to take time for you! If you’re worried about finding the time, don’t be. Most of the exercises only take a few minutes, so there really is no excuse not to make time to care a little more about yourself, right?

  Clint’s story

  Before we get into the exercises, I want to share a real-life story with you, one that sums up perfectly how when we look after ourselves everything else falls into place.

  When I thought of asking Clint, a regular student at my class at Unplug Meditation, to talk to me about how self-care had helped him, I was amazed by how far he’d come on that self-care journey in three years. He is now the co-founder of one of Hollywood’s most innovative media companies but, like many of us, went through a time of struggling with feeling okay within himself. But he dramatically altered the course of his life because he took back his power and gave himself the time and care he deserved. He got in the driver’s seat of his relationship with himself and realized that that was where it all had to start if he wanted to make meaningful change in his life. I loved our honest chat and I hope his story will inspire you and many others to take time for self-care and to know the ripple effect and power it can have on your life and relationships. Here’s what Clint told me…

  “There was a point in my life when I realized that something had to change. I’d started a new job, thinking it would be everything I had ever dreamt of, but I really wasn’t enjoying it – far from it, in fact. It was starting to make me someone I’m not. It’s a hard thing to focus on the relationship with yourself – it gets buried when you’re so busy and you give away so much of your power in the course of a day. It became hard to remember that it was my relationship with myself that was everything, but I was about to find that out. I suddenly found myself feeling totally overwhelmed and I was struggling to find my footing – the job was seriously affecting my mental health. Because I was in an environment at work that didn’t suit me, I was in a constant state of feeling “not enough”. I needed a new mechanism to cope with the environment. Of course at the time I thought I was the only one feeling like that but I know now that I wasn’t.

  I found it really helpful when Camilla explained in the meditation class how the negative things we think and say to ourselves affect us. It was a great reminder of this internal dialogue and once I was aware of it I started reframing “not enough” to “I am enough”. I realized I had identified getting that job with my success, my own identity. So coming to the realization that it wasn’t the right job, definitely not a good fit for me, and that I had to leave was daunting. It felt like an identity loss; it felt horrible and truly sucked, not least because I had a family to look after.

  I gave myself three months to figure out what to do next and meditation became my daily act of self-care, my constant. I’m glad I let my friend know how I was feeling as he introduced me to a meditation app and took me to Camilla’s class at Unplug Meditation in LA.

  I’m also grateful to my wife for understanding the importance of me taking that time for me – this meant everything to me. She said, “Let’s take the summer and then see how you feel.” Feeling this bad pushed me to look at myself and flush out all the things that didn’t work any longer – the old beliefs and habits – and find new ways of doing things. I was the main p
rovider and I just had to figure it out, so giving up was not an option. Instead it was about finding a new way that would serve me and my family. Meditation helped me find my footing and begin to think constructively about how to rebuild my relationship with myself, which created a way to look at my career with fresh eyes. I started to feel different right away.

  I remember Camilla doing a meditation in one of her classes that turned out to be critically important to me. It was about planting the seeds of intentions in the garden of opportunity. I have returned to that garden many times since. It became a safe place to go in my mind and a lot of good thoughts and intentions were planted and grew from there. I rebooted my entire life in 2015, as I started to believe that it’s your relationship with yourself that is everything. I began to start each day with self-care, which was a workout then meditation and then, and only then, I would figure out what else I needed to do each day. Self-care was how I aligned myself with what was to come next for me. I also learnt the importance of a morning ritual, which I still do to this day.

  The beauty of having gone through this time is that I now listen to my mind and body in a way I didn’t before. I now have tools I can rely on, such as positive affirmations, breathing exercises and meditation.

  I started with self-care and that has helped me develop self-love, although that is still new to me and it takes a constant reminder. Looking back, this was the best thing that ever happened to me. Getting knocked down emotionally led me to find the courage to found my own company and that led to me meeting the business partner I run my company with today. It felt like a deconstruction. And in retrospect it had to happen. I went to the life gym, I guess. I was a high achiever and dependent on other people’s validation, thinking I needed it. Now I know the validation starts with me.”