On an evening in November 2018, I found myself numbly drawing small spirals with a pen across a sheet of white paper. It was my way of processing the news I’d just heard that my father had taken his life.

I love and accept myself exactly as I am. This is the single sentence that could have saved my father’s life. No one else could tell him so and make him believe it. 

The moment marked the start of a new path I would take to love myself more deeply. 

For most of my life, I felt like I was missing something. I had expectations about what should or shouldn’t happen, and they kept me from enjoying the moment. My new path involved letting go of a life and habits I adopted when I believed happiness could be found in things outside of myself, such as a lucrative career, a marriage, a large home, alcohol and even caffeine. The more I focused on loving myself, the less I needed these things. Releasing them happened slowly over time in a way that was best for my soul. 

I began by spending more time than ever in stillness. I learned my life moves as a spiral—there’s no true beginning or end. What I experience matters less than how I feel as I’m experiencing it. 

Since childhood, I accepted beliefs about what was good or bad based on the way I felt. I cycled through these feelings as I drew from the past to interpret the events of my life. For example, one day I might have felt I was falling behind and I needed to work hard. I hadn’t felt that way the previous day, but I had felt it before. It was the limiting belief that my worth was based on what I did, which I'd experienced since my childhood. It was then I decided I would receive more love if I made good grades or kept my room clean.

As I doodled spirals that evening, I was subconsciously asking for a way out.  But there is no way to escape the spiral of my life. No white horse will ever come to carry me away. It can only be done within, through loving myself now as I am. The more I do this, the more I’m able to view everything in my life as love. My perspective of negative feeling events from my past shifts until I see them as love and as opportunities to love myself even more. This draws more loving experiences my way.

One way I have healed my limiting beliefs is by reconditioning my thoughts and feelings to accept that I don’t need anything but my own love. In the past, I thought I needed at least the most basic things—food, water, shelter and air. In reality, I never have needed them. I don’t even need to be alive. My heart chooses to be here to love myself entirely and experience that love in the things I do. When I think I need things, I stop being what I believe we all are—love—to obtain them. When I fill myself with love, my heart guides me to the things I’m meant to experience for my highest and greatest good.

I’ve learned to trust that my heart already has everything worked out for me. I never need to worry about anything. When I don’t trust myself, I allow the outside world to dictate what I should be doing, but living that way has never led me true. Only my own heart knows what is best for me.

I say three things to myself every day, especially when a negative thought pattern surfaces: I love and accept myself exactly as I am. I need nothing from this day but my own love. I always have everything I need and more. 

Afterward, I feel relaxed, and I often find clarity for any actions to take next. 

My life looks completely different than it did five years ago, and the biggest difference is in how it feels. Now, my spiral mostly moves me into deeper feelings of peace, joy and love. ❧

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