What is the first image that comes to mind? Are you smiling? Are you satisfied with what you see? Do you approve of the way you look?
Or are you immediately under attack from your ‘Inner Critic’? Does your gaze zoom-in on the features you dislike most, and an inner harassing litany starts? Or do you focus on giving yourself a message of appreciation about who you are as a person?
If you criticize yourself every time you gaze at your own image in the mirror, you are not alone. Most women, unfortunately, are socialized to do just that.
If you have been working on loving and accepting yourself, you are not alone either. Many women have been laboring on this very path for years. Most find that they are successful some of the time, and slide back to the familiar judgmental-mode at others. One women wrote to me to say she is very mindful about not judging her body in front of her daughters, but when she is alone the internal barrage is as strong as ever…
Women understand that the self-critical current has to stop with us, or we will contaminate yet another generation with its stickiness: the precious generation of our daughters. Most women know we would highly benefit from loving our body in earnest, but don’t know how to turn off the Inner Critic’s voice…
Let’s start by playing detective!
Lets put aside the Judge’s hat, and put on an investigative cap instead :-) With your detective cap on, ask yourself: Whose voice is that judging my body? Where did I first hear this voice? Is it one of my parents? An advertisement from my youth? A line from a movie?
Whoever this voice may belong to, it is Not your authentic voice!
Tracing the origins of your Inner Critic’s voice is the first step to liberation. This may be a slippery road, because you may get fully hooked by the temptation of wearing the Judge’s hat while trying to determine its origins… You might launch into a full-on criticism about yourself, but — each time you hear an inner judgment about your looks , you have the option of stopping, and tracing the origin of the voice. Whether or not it becomes clear who’s voice it is, the asking of this question alone gets you one step removed from being in its grip. You can send the voice back to where it came from, and breathe. Next, think of something you like about yourself and speak it in your mind.
You are erasing old tapes and replacing them with new ones. It takes time, indeed, but not nearly as long as it took to imprint them in your mind in the first place! And the freedom that comes as a result is priceless!
And here is the cherry on top:
Not only will you gain freedom from an exhausting, never-ending inner dialogue of negativity, but you will start modeling self-love and-self acceptance to your daughter!
The road to self-loving may be windy, but it starts with tracing the origins of the negative, self-loathing voices, and returning them to their originators. Practice this for a while, and see how liberating this feels… The next steps will consist of replacing the negative messages with positive ones, and we will talk about this in another article.
Meanwhile, help your Inner judge retire, and revel in your new-found freedom!
This is what I’d like to teach you how to do!
The Self Loving Queen Academy
is open for a limited time
Read more HERE
We begin on September 19, 2022
