Read the transcript:
Meredith Rom:
Welcome to the Rising Women Leaders podcast. We are a sisterhood of women stepping into courage, self love and feminine leadership. I'm your host, Meredith Rom and here I'll be sharing personal insights as well as interviews with inspiring leaders and entrepreneurs so you can create more daily magic in your life and also grow your business without losing sight of spiritual values as a rising woman leader. If you like this podcast, use our hashtag #risingwomenleaders.
Follow me on Instagram @meredithrom and sign up for email updates at risingwomenleaders.com. You'll receive all the new and inspiring content including insights I only share on email. Now get cozy with a cup of tea, light a candle and grab a journal to listen to this week's magical radio podcast.
Welcome back to the Rising Women Leaders podcast. This is Meredith Rom and today I'll be sharing about how to fall in love with yourself. I feel this is such an important topic because we really do need to value and love ourselves in order to live happy, fulfilled lives where we're able to give back at our fullest capacity and to live up to our highest potential.
Just an example from my life this morning, I knew I wanted to sit down and record this podcast first thing but I woke up and I was feeling just in a terrible mood. I had a headache, my muscles were aching in my back and overall, I just was not feeling very positive. Just the thought of sitting down at my computer to record this podcast felt impossible so instead of forcing myself to do something I didn't actually have the capacity to do, I paused and I checked in.
I knew I had a choice. I could dive into my work and to my to do list and probably have a pretty grumpy day or I could really honor myself and take care of myself first even though I had a million things to do on my list. When I really considered it and checked in with my body, I knew I had to do the second. I tidied up my room and I chose a yoga glow class, a yoga class.
I highly recommend Yoga Glow as a way to keep up a home yoga practice and I found this class with Elena Brower and it was called Value Yourself to Master Yourself. The whole class was about taking that time to take care of yourself and I realized, wow, you really need to have an innate sense of value in order to take care of and fall in love with yourself. Owning my innate value has been a big part of my inner work over the last few years and I have come a long way.
Valuing myself has shown up in ways in terms of how much money I earn, how healthy my relationships are and even what I choose to wear and how my environment shows up around me. What I've found is it really is a choice. You can choose to start valuing yourself right here and right now. I have an affirmation for you and it's I am valuable no matter what. I am valuable no matter what. After my yoga practice today, I felt so much better.
I was able to make a beautiful breakfast for my partner and me and I sat down to record this podcast feeling so filled up with love that I couldn't wait to sit down and share with you all. What we're going to learn today are some tips and tools that have helped me to fall in love with myself, how to move past resistance, around self love and self care and how to turn self love into an art. Like most women, I am a nurturer and just to tell you a little bit about my story, when I was in college I was in a relationship where I would give and give and give.
I didn't realize it at the time because I thought I was being selfless but I was always putting him before myself. I was giving love and in an imbalanced way and because of that, it actually pushed my partner away because ultimately I was not taking care of myself. When we broke up, it was so painful. It was as if I had lost everything because I had made him everything in my life. That breakup made me realize I always need to put myself first.
I always need to love myself first because I am the only person I can really truly rely on in my life. I needed to put my dreams and my ambitions and my body first. When I did that and I focused on myself, I became more of this whole person and that was when I attracted someone in my life who was also this whole person. Someone I could walk with on my path and next to each other as long as we were complimenting each other's paths.
This is why I think it's so important to discover our life purpose and to follow it and live it no matter what. If we are following that purpose, everything else begins to fall in place around it. People in our lives will come and go but I know I'll be okay and on solid ground because I haven't lost everything. I know that if I have my calling and my purpose and something I'm excited and passionate about to devote myself too, then I can really honor and deeply love myself and nurture myself and know that I can get through any kind of pain or suffering that might come up in my life.
The problem I see in society is that so many women do not love themselves first. It has almost become this cultural norm that we see so many moms who put their children first, their husband first and their own self care falls off track. I've worked with many women who have had this problem of shifting into loving themselves first and I also know many women who have had problems around body image and eating disorders because they were trying to live up to some cultural stereotype of what they thought beauty was.
Really, when I look around me, there are a lot of women out there who are at war with their bodies and I just want to share that I've been there too. In that endless fight against my own emotions or my weight or having acne or freckles or cellulite or split ends, any of that, it just goes on and on. I've been in that position of feeling like, I don't want to feel this right now or I don't look like how I look right now or if only I were fill in the blank, taller or shorter, thinner, curvier.
You get the idea. In the past, I did use to turn to food or alcohol or shopping to calm and distract myself from these kinds of thoughts and as so many other women do. Thoughts like, if I eat this ice cream, at least I'll feel better for now and I won't have to think about how crappy I really feel. I've had days where I picked parts of myself that I would do anything to change and it would consume my thoughts. As soon as I let go of this stuff about my body, then it would come to my personality of like, why can't I be this way or more outgoing or more funny?
The thoughts were really just all adding up to there must be something wrong with me. It's been a long road for me to find a deep level of self acceptance and self love. What I see now is that it didn't happen all at once. It was gradual, it was the little actions I did again and again that led me to my own radical self love and self acceptance. Through my work, I've learned that no matter how much love and encouragement I funnel to my clients, I can't actually make them fall in love with themselves.
It has to come from within them and that was the same for me. It had to come to a place where I needed to make a shift, I needed to start taking care of myself. What I found is the first step is really just about awareness. To ask yourself, where are these thoughts coming from? Is it the TV shows I'm watching? Am I surrounding myself with people who talk negatively about themselves? What was my mother like when I was growing up?
Was there women in my life who were giving, giving to others but not to themselves? Once you have this awareness about your patterns and where they've come from, that's when you can begin to take action. That's when you can stop buying the magazines or watching the TV shows that always end up with you and a carton office cream on your lap and you can begin starting to listen to podcasts like this one or Ted Talks or Super Soul Sunday, something that will light you up and make you leave feeling inspired.
This is when you can begin to take action around making new friends. Maybe turn to the woman next to you in a yoga class and introduce yourself. Remind yourself that I'm not my mother or my sister or my best friend or that person I knew in high school and I can do this differently. That's when you can create a new reality. I believe it's impossible to feel stuck and depressed for to long if you are consistently eating whole, organic foods, exercising regularly, taking baths, meditating, giving yourself enough time to rest, having meaningful connections in relationships in your life.
What I did was I started with those small consistent actions of self care to discover love within and for myself. Now I feel so connected to this deep love within myself that I can easily make those choices of what is going to be honoring for me today? What do I really care about? What do I really want to do right now? That has impacted everything in my life. That has allowed me to give back in the way I want too.
It has helped me to become that inspiration for other women, to be able to be a guide for other people because I had been there and I was able to move past resistant, make new choices and really find that deep connection of love within myself. I wanted to tell you a little story. I recently came home after a long day of teaching yoga and I knew I needed to recharge. I felt my energy levels were depleted. I had been giving a lot of myself throughout the day and I needed some serious self care.
I was thinking back to when I was in college and how after a long day of classes, of being in school, my self care ritual used to look a little something like this. I'd walk home from class and on the way I would pass Coldstone Creamery and I would walk in, order my favorite ice cream, Birthday Cake Remix and then I would slowly eat it on my way home back to my apartment. When I arrived inside, I'd shut the door to my room, I would turn on some TV show.
At the time I loved Desperate Housewives and I would just tune out the world for the next three to four hours. I was so full from the ice cream that I wouldn't even eat dinner sometimes and I would just fall asleep. This was one of my ways of dealing with stress, of "treating myself well" after a long day. It did give me the comfort I needed in that I thought I was going well and that I was taking care of myself until I started to see the negative side effects that it was having on my body.
It was causing constipation and acne and grogginess in the morning and even getting cavities, just terrible stuff came from these kinds of habits. This was a big wake up call for me and I began a quest of how to find out how to truly take care of myself. Over the years, as I mentioned, I have shifted my life so much from this old way of living. I have now completely cut sugar and dairy out of my diet. I don't eat ice cream anymore which is pretty amazing.
I no longer zone out in front of the TV. I don't even have a TV in my home and only just recently I watched a movie a couple weeks ago and I was like, wow. I haven't watched media in so long. It came to a place of like, wow, this can be something refreshing. This doesn't have to be something I OD on after a really stressful week. I have also moved away from New York City. I now live among the wine vineyards in Sonoma County so I am just connected to nature.
It's just a lot has changed in my life from this time. As I arrived home from teaching yoga that day, when I was feeling depleted, my self care routine looked a little something like this. I tidied up my room to feel more spacious in my space. I put a heating pad in my bed so I could lay down and relax my muscles. I have an essential oils diffuser that I put some essential oils on and turned it on and started breathing in those balancing scents.
I lit candles all along my dresser and my alter and on my nightstands to create a soothing atmosphere. I warmed up my favorite Tulsi Cinnamon Rose tea by Organic India. I love that tea if you ever want to try it. I put on gentle music. I got out my Tarot deck and my journal to reflect on my day. I felt genuinely proud of myself for how much my life had changed. I was no longer having those cravings of the ice cream and even if I do have cravings sometimes, it's like, I can really ask myself, what else do I really need?
What is missing right now? Do I need a hug? Do I need to just have some time to rest? I'm not having those wasted hours in front of the TV and so within just about twenty or thirty minutes of being in this beautiful, tantric atmosphere with myself, my depleted state had completely shifted. My energy levels had come back and all of this, like creating this beautiful atmosphere was really for myself. It wasn't about for anyone else.
It was just falling in love with myself and what I found is that when I have been able to make self care become something seductive, I no longer needed those tools that I used in the past. Like the ice cream or the zoning out in front of the TV and finding a way to turn self care into an act of seduction, creating that beautiful tantric atmosphere for yourself, this is really the art of falling in love with yourself.
To allow your self love and your self care to become this act of seduction for yourself. The next time that you are finding yourself of just craving ice cream, really ask yourself, how could I nourish myself in this moment? What do I really need? Maybe it's a bath, maybe it's a book or even a really good cry and when you learn to nourish and listen to your body and make self care enjoyable and seductive, you'll be able to slowly let go of those habits.
They'll just naturally begin to fall away, whatever is not serving you in your life. Another tool that has been absolutely essential for me in falling in love with myself has been meditation. Over my career as a yoga teacher, I have spoken to many women who strive to keep up a home, yoga or meditation practice but then quickly give it up when life gets busy. I used to constantly struggle with keeping up a morning practice and I would feel guilty when I fell off track.
I tried numerous ways to keep up a practice but I had a hard time doing it and I wondered why is it so hard for me to keep up this consistent connection to spirit? I know that when I'm connected and do take that time out of the morning for myself, like I did this morning, I am so much more present, calm and compassionate throughout my day. I know that's when I relied less on others and I am more in tune to my inner guidance.
When I'm able to connect to love within myself, I am not constantly searching for it in my relationship or in my friendships or anywhere outside of myself. I have that connection within and that keeps me really grounded and stable throughout my days. I found that more than anything else, when I made my meditation practice enjoyable, that was when it became sustainable. I knew I wasn't going to wake up every morning and just sit quietly and do something I dreaded. I had to lure myself into meditation.
I had to bring in the romance. A quote that I love from Gabrielle Bernstein, she says, "I made a spirit my boyfriend," and when she did that, everything else in her life began to flourish because when we fall in love with spirit, we begin to attract and to manifest what we want and need in our lives with so much ease and grace. I know how hard it can be to keep up a daily meditation practice so I wanted to share a couple of my tips and tools of what really helped me to fall in love with spirit and myself and to keep my morning practice sustainable.
The first step was around shifting this idea of being disciplined into being devotional. I used to live in a house where my roommates and I would practice silent meditation together for one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. That practice actually became so disciplined for me that I began to avoid it altogether. I would try and find ways to not be at home when my roommates were meditating because it just felt so constricted and all I wanted to do was break the rules.
Later on when I moved out of that house and I actually went several months without meditating because that rebellious side of me was wanting to take back control. After a while though, I really did begin to miss those solitary moments with just myself and my breath but I knew when I came back to my meditation I had to approach it in a different way. I remembered something that my yoga teacher, Kimber Simpkins had said about developing a home yoga practice.
She said, "No one is making you do it. You're doing it for yourself. Think of it as a devotion rather than a discipline." Just this little shift, shifting my perspective and realizing no one was making me do it but rather I was showing up in devotion to myself and to spirit and that really did begin to change everything. I suddenly was able to show up to my meditation pillow and my yoga mat with ease. Another step I found really valuable is changing it up.
When my practice was the same silent meditation every single day, I got bored and I went back into avoidance. I learned I needed to change it up once in a while, even if I was going to be able to stay with it so now some mornings my morning practice will include yoga, someday it's Pranayama, breath work and sometimes it's just mostly silent meditation. When I prioritize devotion over the structure of what it needed to look like, I was able to get go of the guilt and to keep coming back to my meditation seat.
Another idea of bringing into your meditations is calling upon an archetype. A couple years ago I read this book by Deepak. It's called the Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire. He has a whole chapter on discovering your archetype. I began to imagine a heroine, a chief or a goddess, something I felt connected too and I began to ask this archetype, please express yourself through me. Over many days of connecting to the powers and the attributes of someone or something I looked up too, I began to embody those qualities in myself.
When I connected more and more into a future version of myself, a higher self, I really wonder how would this person wake up every day? How would she start her days? Often I would see myself in a really devotional morning practice and that was another way of just being able to help me show up consistently and to call in that archetype during meditation and to embody those qualities of that person or thing. Another tip is to move and breathe first. What many people often struggle with when meditating is having such a busy mind.
The Indian guru, Osho, a teacher that I have learned a lot of teachings from, he says you need to get all the garbage out of your mind first before you can get anywhere in silent meditation. The best ways I've found to get that garbage out is to breathe and move my body. For example, last week, I woke up and my mind was so busy. I knew I couldn't sit down and silently meditate so I turned on one of my favorite albums and I just started shaking and dancing and moving and just moving my body, getting all that garbage out.
Another idea is you could go for a run. You could do breath of fire which is a form of [inaudible 00:25:49]. Kundalini meditation doing breath work, doing that before sitting down to silently meditate. I found that sometimes when I exerted myself first and then I sat down in silent meditation, the experience became so still and so silent and so peaceful and it really became that sense of enjoyment I was looking for. Bring in the romance. Coming back to the art of falling in love with yourself is to really think of your morning practice as this beautiful devotion.
I began to think of all the ways that I could make this practice more enjoyable. That's when I bought my essential oils diffuser, I created this beautiful atmosphere of filling the space with scents of rose or geranium and I would sit down on this heating pad I have and I would warm myself up and I began even singing in my morning practice. I created an alter that just felt gorgeous, this representation of my devotion.
Everyday I felt so happy waking up to my practice because of how loving and nurturing and romantic it became. It was this art of just falling in love with myself. Another idea is to connect to a vision. After learning about the law of attraction, I began to bring manifestation into my morning practice. I wrote out in the present tense what I wanted to create in my life and in the world. I connected to how I wanted to wake up and feel every day.
I connected to why I wanted what I wanted and every morning, I began to read this vision out loud. Every morning then became this, not only a devotion to myself and to spirit but this devotion of what I wanted for my life and also for the world. This is something that I teach in my online course, Vision is how to write a vision, how to connect to it, how to create a morning practice that is devotional, enjoyable and sustainable. Learning to be still. In order to create a new healthy habit, it helps to choose a set number of days to do your practice for.
You can feel free to start small and say something like, "Okay, for the next seven days, I'm going to do this practice." You put a reminder in your calendar or an alert on your phone or a note on your bedside, whatever you need to do to remind yourself. Tell yourself, "Okay, I'm going to do this for seven days. If resistance comes up, I'm just going to sit down and do the practice just for these seven days and I still don't want to do it after these seven days then I don't have to do it anymore."
But chances are, you'll be able to keep going after that set amount of time you create because you realize how much benefit it brings to your life. I choose to do my practices in forty day increments. Forty days is historically known as the sacred time of period of enacting real lasting change. It can clear out old subconscious patterns, set up new positive patterns and change your life for the better. At the end of every forty day cycle, I celebrate and reflect on what has changed in my life.
I go back and read that vision and really notice all that have come true from it. Then another tip is to get other people involved. It helps if you know there are other people out there meditating with you. Try calling up a friend, creating some kind of accountability partner. I began this whole program based around creating a vision and meditating with other women for forty days because I wanted to create that accountability for myself and for others. This program vision which I am now in enrollment for, I'll tell you a little more about it at the end.
It's now grown over the years I've been leading it to include women in five different continents and everyone who joins has lifetime access to the program so it's just continuing to grow and we're all coming into our state of devotion when we do these forty days of meditation together. I began to see when I was meditating not just for myself but meditating for the visions of all these women, all over the world, it became so much easier to sit down and to meditate and be devotional for myself, having that accountability and that support.
Whether you're just starting a meditation practice or you're a seasoned meditator, I suggest that you really try some of these tips and see when you sit down for your meditation practice if you can begin to cultivate that love for yourself and for the connection to spirit. The last thing I wanted to talk today about is resistance. Resistance is one of the biggest blocks to our self care, to our self love and to really honoring and valuing ourselves. Resistance does not want you to wake up in the morning.
Resistance doesn't want you to meditate or to do yoga. Resistance doesn't want you to write your book, doesn't want you to spend time chopping vegetables and it definitely doesn't want you to set the table or do the dishes and sometimes it doesn't even want you to bathe. Resistance is, if we were to personify resistance, it is happy to be curled up safe in bed where no one can bother him.
He wants to be surrounded by pillows so that he can use them to throw them at people if they try to get him to do something he doesn't want to do but when you look at your goals in your to do list and you really ask yourself, what would make me happy? You might see that you need to move past your resistance in order to accomplish that and to really come into that sense of joy and fulfillment. Here are my tips to do that. The first one is to develop awareness.
Simply notice when you are resisting. The other week I woke up naturally before the sun rose even though I was wide awake and ready to start my day, resistance came in. You shouldn't have to wake up when it's dark out, before the sunrise. It's cold outside of this bed. I don't want to get up. There's no way you're going to get me out of here. I sat with the resistance and for about ten minutes I noticed it.
I saw why he was there and what his motivations were and I listened. I sympathized with him. I understood where he was coming from but then I decided to ask, how would it feel if I accomplished exactly what I am resisting? How would it feel to accomplish what I'm resisting? I connected to what I wanted to accomplish. Wouldn't it feel good to wake up early, to do a full meditation practice, to clean my room, to work on the next writing submission for my book.
I imagined having a accomplished all those things and I saw how amazing and spacious my day would feel if I did them. I got up and I took action despite the resistance so that's the third step. Simply take action despite your resistance. It wasn't easy. Resistance was pulling me back in. Resistance was whining and crying, "I don't want to get out of bed before the sun is rising. Please don't make me." I was able to lure resistance out of the bed with me and as soon as I did, he was fine.
I got a hot cup of tea, I sat down to meditate and resistance was there, sitting with me the whole time but by the end, he had softened. He was no longer screaming or crying and as I continue my day, I felt so good having moved past that resistance. Once there's awareness, you are back in your power. Every action is a choice. Why not make choices in alignment with your goals and your aspirations? When you take action despite your resistance, that's when true maturity is born.
This week, I invite you to be present with your resistance and then do exactly what you have been putting off first thing in the morning tomorrow. Be with your breathe and see if you can make friends with your resistance and take action despite it. Just in summary, I've covered today how to honor and value and fall in love with yourself. I've covered some of my self care tips for self love, how to move past resistance and how to enjoy your meditation practice.
Many of you will take these tools and you'll run with them and I honor you for that. I hope that you are able to implement all of this information into your life. For some of you, you may be feeling called to go deeper, to learn more or you may wonder if you really can make these shifts on your own and I know it can be really hard because often we're missing these two really key essential ingredients and those are accountability and support.
For those of you who are feeling called to go deeper on these topics and really do want to participate and cultivate a forty day meditation practice, I invite you to join and to learn more about my online course, Vision. Vision is an online course that includes a growing network of women joining together from around the world in daily devotion to themselves, to spirit, to their sisters and to their visions.
Each week, I release a new topic that covers anything from self love and self care to cultivating courage, developing body wisdom, honoring your love and relationships in your life, really learning how to take grounded action on your dreams. Daily rituals to support you in your path and in your self love and of course, sisterhood, that accountability and that support we can provide for each other.
The course includes forty days of devotional meditation where I teach the personal meditation practice that I use most often that I found is really amazing for manifestation and then I also provide, I have a whole tool box of resources. I have so many meditations, audios. I have videos, I teach about Pranayama, I teach about all the different kinds of meditation that you can really then begin to piece together. Like, what would be exciting and enjoyable for me to create my own daily devotional practice?
Then we have these weekly coaching calls so there are eight calls over the eight weeks and we connect with the other women who are in the program. We have the space to share any challenges that are coming up along the way. You can all share your successes. We can encourage and support each other. Right now I have a free training that is up at 40dayvision.com.
That's 40dayvision.com where you can watch four of my guided meditation videos and you can learn more about the course. The course begins February 3rd, 2016 and enrollment closes on February 2nd, the day before. There's a special offer right now. One hundred dollars off the program. That is available until this Saturday, January 30th so if you're listening to this and you feel called to learn more, definitely check out the website, 40dayvision.com.
See if it's something that you feel called to do. I would really love to support you and have you join us on this amazing transformative journey. Forty days of meditation, eight weeks of weekly audio content and these sisterhood calls. I've seen so much transformation in the women that have taken this program and I'm even connecting with women who did the program the first time I ran it a year and a half ago and they are saying, "Meredith, I can't believe it. The things I was cultivating in my vision have come true.
Everything that I was writing about," and it's amazing to see like when we really consciously make these shifts in our life and we show up for ourselves to our self love, our self care, really love ourselves first, we can not only cultivate so much inner change in ourselves, in connection to guidance and our body's wisdom but that's when we can really begin to cultivate change in the world. That's when we can give back at our fullest capacity.
That's when we can really connect to that deep love within and go out and share our gifts and do what we love and find that sense of fulfillment and then inspire others to do the same. I am very deeply passionate about this work and I hope that I have the opportunity to share more with you. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast today. I honor you for being here and for wanting to take steps towards falling in love with yourself.
I'd like to close today with a closing prayer. We can all close our eyes and tune back into our breath. Exhale all the air in the body, take a deep inhale and exhale it out. I invite you to tune in to a feeling of love within yourself. Know that you are loved, know that we all have the ability to connect to this deep love within ourselves and for ourselves. I pray that we are all able to cultivate the courage to step more and more into our self love and daily magic and synchronicity from taking those steps of really honoring and loving who you are. I bow to each of you. I honor you and I send you off with all my prayers and all my blessings. From my heart to yours, namaste.
