Hi, I’m Kelly and welcome to the Raising Love podcast. Raising love within yourself as only you can.

Brought to you by LOVE body and the Positively You program.

In this weeks episode I want to share with you a concept that I have had great success with.

If you don’t already know, I absolutely despised myself for most of my life. Probably from the time I became a teenager. Maybe even a bit before that there was a level of hatred that hadn’t quite consumed me yet.

I hated myself, my body, my life, my family. All of it.

I wanted to be someone else so bad.

And as I grew older and the teenage years took hold of me, the hatred and the loathing filtered into every part of my life and every part of my being.

It didn’t matter what I did, I did it with a full blown sense of hatred.

I ate, I hated. I tried to have fun, I hated. I tried to workout, I hated. I went to school, I hated. I hung out with my friends, I hated. I spoke, I hated. I got angry, I hated.

The hate was everywhere. I couldn’t escape it.

So, for years that was all I was. Hate. For every single inch of myself and my life there was hate.

It became my normal. It became who I was. It was how I functioned.

And, because this was what I was, I became angry. I didn’t know how to deal with my feelings about the hate, there wasn’t anyone to talk to about it so I filled up with blistering, scorching, burning anger.

And, Kelly became the angry woman full of hate.

Ohhh, and I hated anyone who was skinny, looked so much better than I did, had a boyfriend, had THE perfect life. How dare they have all this while I am over here suffering.

Why can’t everyone else be suffering just as much as I am?

My mind went crazy and I became irrational and fearful. I allowed dark thoughts to penetrate my mind and my body.

I sat in this whirlwind of destruction inside my mind because the hate was stronger than anything else inside of me.

I didn’t know if there WAS anything else inside of me. Even just a little bit.

This hatred prevented me from enjoying my life. I had resting hate face all the time and smiling was foreign to me.

Resting hate face has definitely eased up now and my face is much softer but I have to consciously tell myself to smile because it is not a natural response for me to just do it.

Slowly this is getting easier to do because of one thing. This one thing I tell myself whenever I do something that I feel is not quite me. The real me. Whenever I feel like the old me has come out to play or whenever I behave in a way that I no longer want to display.

I simply say “I love myself anyway”.

Now, this isn’t my get out jail free card. It is not my justification to do whatever I want and get away with it.

No. It is my way of saying that even in those moment when I fuck up I can still love myself anyway.

I don’t need to hate myself any more because inside of me is an abyss of love. An abyss so deep it would take years to reach the bottom.

I have been searching for this most of my life and I finally found it. It was inside me this whole time waiting for me to rediscover it. I was born with this abyss of love but I wandered so far away from it, it took me decades to find my way back.

So, any time that I need some reassurance or I need to stop feeling guilty about eating something I think I shouldn’t have or feel better about not enjoying myself more or whatever it is; there is the abyss of love slowly and gently swirling inside of me ready to rise up when I need it to.

I can honestly tell you that this has been working wonders for me. As I said I was so full of hate and I truly believed this hate would always stay with me forever. It was who I was.

There was no way I was ever going to get rid of it. But since using this phrase in those times of hate, a huge shift has happened inside of me.

And, I have to say that the hate is almost gone. It really has almost disappeared.

It feels so good. Especially when I didn’t think I could ever feel this way.

My LIFE feels so much better. I don’t beat myself up as much because I ate an extra piece of cake or I said something I shouldn’t have in a way that I shouldn’t have or I look at myself in the mirror and see myself a body that isn’t what I’d love it to be.

I get to love myself anyway. Because there will always be shitty things that happen in our life, there will always be moments where we could have behaved better, there will always be moments where we should have stood up for ourselves, there will always be moments when we eat something we believe we shouldn’t, there will always be moments when life just sucks and you can’t deal and you want to just run away for a bit. Whatever it may be for you.

Even in those not-so-great moments you get to love yourself anyway. You are doing the best you can. You are learning from those shitty moments so that next time you can do better. You are giving yourself a chance to be who you are at all times because you love yourself anyway.

When you look in the mirror and all you see is a fat, wobbly body. A body that is not “perfect”, a body that must be skinnier, more toned, more tanned, more this, more that, less this, less that, your jelly belly, your bat wings, your tree trunk thighs…

What are you going to do? Love yourself anyway.

And honestly, that woman you see in the mirror with those tree trunk thighs and those bat winged arms and that jelly belly that birthed your amazing kids that NEEDS to be 10 kilos lighter, 20 pounds smaller…

Well, that body deserves your love. That body deserves for you to look at it with loving eyes. For you to love it anyway. Because your body is friggen amazing. It works so hard for you everyday without you even knowing what is going on inside of you so to see it as a thing you hate, a thing you despise because it is not what you’ve been told it is supposed to be…

Well, that is bullshit. You bloody love that thing anyway. It is your body. And no body gets to take that away from you.

Love those thighs that help you to walk everyday, they get you where you need to go. Love that jelly belly because it grew your wonderful kids inside of it, love those bat winged arms because they get to hug every one that you love and be the comfort your kids, partner, friends and family need.

It is all about perspective and that’s what this beautiful phrase does. It changes your perspective.

Don’t continue to live in misery and hate. You have been gifted with this amazing life and it is yours to be lived with love.

You DO get to love yourself anyway.

That love is inside of you and it is yours for the taking. You can go into your own abyss and scoop out as much as you need. The supply is endless.

You don’t have to ask for permission to go in and get it. It is right there. In you. You are allowed to love yourself. You are allowed to give yourself a break from all of the hate and loathing.

You are allowed to be loving towards yourself. As women we are expected to be self-deprecating because a woman who loves herself is up herself. How dare she feel good about who she is. who does she think she is?

I have seen way too often how a woman is treated when she shows herself love. We think she is conceited and her confidence is uncomfortable for us because we don’t have that same level of confidence she has so we get defensive and protective of our shitty feelings and become savage toward her to bring her back down to our level.

In my own experience of being around women who show themselves love, I have felt very uncomfortable and uncertain in myself. I have allowed their confidence to affect me because I was so insecure about my feelings for myself.

But we shouldn’t allow our insecurities to stop other woman from expressing their love for themselves.

We must allow ourselves to be in our own love and allow other women to be in theirs too.

Can you imagine how wonderful that would be? Can you imagine how much better we would all feel and how much we could achieve in our life?

If we stopped wasting so much of our time hating who we are, hating our life and hating what we looked like?

How much free time would we have to be able to pursue our dreams, have fun with our family, laugh, enjoy our food instead of feeling guilty because we ate something naughty and full of hostile calories that are going to ruin us completely.

What if you chose not to spend your time hating who you are, hating what your body looked like and hating your life?

As women these really are our top 3. The top 3 things we can’t stand about ourselves. Our life sucks, our body is disgusting and we are awful.

We obsess about them incessantly. We give ourselves over to what we don’t have, what we are told we are supposed to have and what we believe is true about ourselves.

There is a whirlwind of shit that rises inside of us because of what we don’t have…

We don’t have the right job, the right car, the right body, the right house, the right eating plan, the right exercise plan, the right clothes, the right purse, the right shoes, the right furniture…

Oh, my gosh its exhausting, isn’t it. Worrying about not having all of the right things. And this worry leads us to feeling shitty about ourselves. It leaves us feeling as though we are not good enough. It leaves us feeling as though our love must come from all of these things.

But it doesn’t.

Your love comes from one source and one source only.

YOU.

So when you feel as though you aren’t RIGHT and the hatred and the loathing and the longing and the depression and the unworthiness and the hopelessness and the failure and the emptiness and the sadness and the loneliness and the frustration and the anger; when they well up inside you and you feel lost and unsure…

Remember this and say to yourself out loud or in your head…

Say gently and kindly

“I love myself anyway.”

And that my beautiful friend is your simple power move for this week.

In those moments where those not-so-great feelings have taken over and you are beating yourself up because…

Say out loud, shout it if you want to,

“I love myself anyway”.

Doesn’t that feel great?

Thank you so much for listening, beautiful. This really is a dream come true for me.

I spent so much of my life being quiet, not speaking up, staying small that I forgot I have a voice worth listening to.

You may not always agree with what I say and that’s ok.

This is a conversation between us. Yes, I have lots to say but I also want to hear what you have to say.

So, leave me a comment, email me your thoughts, get in touch and let me know what conversations you’d like to have, what your thoughts are about this podcast.

But before you go, I invite you to find out more about the Positively You program. Inside the program there are so many more ways I can show you to love yourself even more.

It’s time, beautiful. Time to love all of you again. Time to LISTEN to the woman within, LEARN who she truly is and LOVE every single part of you again.

So, you can forget about what is right for other people and begin living what is right for you. You deserve to create your most inspiring and beautiful life. And the positively you program will inspire to do just that.

To find out more, please use the link in the show notes.

Continue raising love within yourself. Speak soon.