The Self Love Journey
Practices for self love, conscious parenting & spiritual growth
There was a question left in the comments of “Are You Pouring Love into the Right Person?” that I thought may be helpful to respond to as another post. The question was:
“Have you found specific practices or exercises that effectively contribute to self-love in the journey of conscious parenting?”
I love this question because it highlights that conscious parenting really is a journey — there’s not an end point; it’s a practice with highs and lows like any other journey. And for me, the journeys of discovering self-love, conscious parenting, and spiritual growth are all deeply intertwined.
I once asked a roshi, a venerable Buddhist teacher, with children of her own about the connection between parenting and spirituality, and her response was eye-opening. She responded that if the spiritual masters of the past had been parents, they would have never needed to go on spiritual pilgrimages to faraway places and face trials and tribulations along the way. She emphasized that, as parents, there are ample opportunities for growth within the walls of our own homes.
So below are specific practices and exercises that have helped me think of my home as a sacred space to discover self love, work on being a conscious parent, and travel a spiritual path (within the walls of my own home). I share in case they are helpful to any others walking a similar path, and since this list is certainly not exhaustive, I’m curious to hear your practices as well.
Building awareness
The first step to self love, conscious parenting and spiritual growth is awareness. It’s very hard to grow as a person if we are velcroed to our thoughts. When there is no separation between ourselves and our thoughts, it’s difficult to see them at face value. We hear them and instantly accept them as truth, so it’s important to cultivate the awareness that we are not our thoughts.
Meditation is an incredibly powerful tool for this, but if you’re not drawn toward meditation, there are many other ways to pause our inner monologue so that we’re not glued to our thoughts all day. Mindfulness timers that go off at random intervals during the day, sticky notes with reminders to pause from the busyness of life, and short mantras repeated in the mind instead of listening to our thoughts are some examples of ways to build awareness.
One technique I’ve played around with lately is using notification alert sounds from my phone as a mindfulness reminder. When my phone alerts me of a text message, my kids and I pause and take a deep breath together. More often than not, my five-year-old daughter is the one who reminds me to breathe when my phone goes off, which I love for both myself and her budding relationship with technology.
It doesn’t really matter what our reminder is as long as it helps us notice when we’re lost in the mind and increases the space between our awareness and our thoughts. Once we can see our thoughts as separate from our awareness, each and every little pause during the day adds up to more and more conscious choices.
Making peace with emotions
One of the most powerful practices for tapping into self love and compassion that I have experienced is releasing painful emotions as Michael Singer teaches it in his book Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament.
Our default mode in life is to push away painful feelings — especially feelings that threaten our self concept. We immediately jump to the mind to think about how we can fix the situation, or before we are even consciously aware of the painful emotion, we may reach for something sweet, our phone, a glass of wine, or one of the many distractions always available at our fingertips.
Releasing emotions, however, is the alternative and a courageous choice. Instead of turning away from the discomfort within us, we turn toward it. We welcome it in the way we might welcome our child who comes to us for comfort when feeling sad or scared.
As spiritual teacher Rupert Spira, who also teaches a similar process for releasing emotions, says:
“To live without fear, you must first learn to live with it.”
He doesn’t mean that we need to walk around in a state of anxious, heightened fear but that we must learn to lovingly invite in the feelings that scare us the most. The way to move through them is to allow them to come in, pass through our hearts. and realize that we are not them.
This process has been described as “the pain that ends all pain.” As we open up to the discomfort more and more, something truly incredible happens: the pain begins to dissipate not because we outsmarted it, but because we welcomed it in and realized it couldn’t hurt us. It releases like steam from a kettle dispersing into the air, and what is unveiled once the emotional pain dissipates is a deep sense of compassion, peace and contentment. At the heart of this magnanimous feeling toward life is a profound acceptance of ourselves.
Connecting to our loving inner parent
While people on a spiritual path often are working toward the goal of having a quiet mind or “empty mind,” as is said in Buddhism, it can also be helpful to purposely cultivate our loving inner parent to support us on that journey (and particularly in our most challenging parenting moments).
A wonderful practice for cultivating and accessing the voice of the wiser, loving self is journaling. There are a number of ways to journal to invite our higher self in, and I love asking the question Liz Gilbert shares in her Substack community: “Love, what would you have me know today?”
As we practice inviting our most loving, wise voice in through journaling or another similar intentional practice, it starts to merge with our own inner monologue.
In the ancient spiritual text The Bhagavad Gita it is written:
“Elevate yourself through the power of your mind, and not degrade yourself, for the mind can be the friend and also the enemy of the self.” (BG 6.5)
And so while we continue on our growth journey, we can use our mind to support us by helping it become a wise, loving voice accessible to us when needed.
Cultivating feelings of self love
There are many ways to connect to deep feelings of self love and inner peace, and one that I have found to be particularly powerful is lovingkindness meditation. It’s also extremely accessible for people who don’t meditate because it’s not like what we normally associate with meditation. It’s more like softly repeating beautiful lyrics in your head and letting the words stir up loving feelings inside of your heart; if you’ve ever been moved by the lyrics of a song or lines of a poem, you essentially already know what to do.
There is wonderful information about the lovingkindness and many teachers who share the practice, but here are the basics: essentially, there are five phases to lovingkindness meditation where we extend feelings of love and kindness to ourselves, then a mentor, then a person who we feel neutral about, then an enemy or someone we don’t like, and then the entire world.
However, the first phase focusing on ourselves is the most essential, and in fact, some people practice the this phase for weeks, months or even years before moving on to the next.
To practice, we simply sit in quiet, close our eyes, and repeat the following lines (or some variation of that resonates with us) in our minds:
May I be safe.
May I be happy.
May I be healthy.
May I live with ease.
As we repeat the words over and over, the idea is to let the words stir up those feelings within us and to open our hearts to them more and more as we go. You can practice for five, ten, twenty minutes or whatever you feel comfortable with. As we put our attention on the words, they help to create loving feelings in our body like a warm inner hug. It’s really quite remarkable the first time it becomes clear that a deep sense of self love can be generated completely from within.
Modeling self love
Another powerful way to grow self love is by modeling it for our children. We can intentionally show children how we are cultivating a loving voice within our own head.
When we face a challenging moment, we can pause and say out loud for our child to overhear, “Mama, I see you’re having a challenging time right now, and I want to let you know how great I think you’re doing. Even as you struggle on the outside, I know you are good on the inside. I love you.”
The sentence about struggle comes from Dr. Becky Kennedy’s parenting book Good Inside, and she suggests putting a hand over our hearts as we say it. I find a big self hug works as well.
Teaching ourselves self love
We can also include ourselves in any lessons about love and worthiness that we are teaching our children. Ashley Patek, an occupational therapist and parenting coach, shares a very touching story about a 92-year-old woman who passed on valuable parenting advice to Patek shortly before the woman’s passing.
Patek visited her in a nursing facility as the woman’s occupational therapist, and she would overhear the old woman and her family members (children, grandchildren and great grandchildren) say to each other, “I love you and I love me, too.”
Patek was curious about the phrase and the woman explained she had grown up in a hostile home never believing she was worthy, and she didn’t want her child to feel the same. Patek shares what the woman told her:
“I love you and I love me too,” she explained, “was something that I started without much thought. I would soothe my baby’s cries while rocking in our chair and say it. In the morning. Before bed. As she learned to crawl. To walk. As she grew … until she was grown. It just became our thing. And, as you can see, each generation has passed it on.”
She shared that when she was little, she just wanted to know that someone loved her. Motherhood was her bridge. “Funny thing. While I started this little saying for my children, I benefited just as much. Piece by piece I came back to myself. It was like my body finally accepted the words one day, you know?”
What is so profound about this example is that as we teach our children the very things we want them to know — that they are loved and worthy just as they are — we can teach ourselves, too. The more we say the words and embody the feelings for our children to learn, the more we internalize the same lessons for ourselves. It’s a beautiful moment when we realize that we have deepened our love for ourselves through a practice initially developed out of love for our children.
Following your bliss
An essential way to unearth and clearly see the incredible soul that each one of us is to follow our own unique threads of joy. It is difficult, for obvious reasons, to set aside time as parents for ourselves, but it is so important to touch in with the things that inspire us and remind us of the joy of being uniquely us. And, thankfully, these don’t have to be big things!
We can simply ask these two questions:
1) What are the things that light me up the most?
2) And where are the micro-moments in my day that I can weave these in?
Maybe it’s reading a few pages of a favorite book. Maybe it’s playing music. Maybe it’s listening to music or a favorite podcast. Maybe it’s breathing fresh air first thing in the morning. Maybe it’s dancing or doodling. Maybe it’s writing or reading a poem. Maybe it’s being in nature or gazing at the starts for a minute before bed. Whatever it is that lights us up is what we should follow — even if in very tiny, incremental steps.
Yogananda, an Indian guru who introduced millions to meditation and yoga in the West in the early twentieth century, said the goal of life is to find “the secret river of joy” within ourselves. In 1936, he wrote:
No matter what you are doing, keep the undercurrent of happiness, the secret river of joy, flowing beneath the sands of various thoughts and the rocky soils of hard trials. Learn to be secretly happy within your heart in spite of all circumstances.
Many ancient spiritual traditions point us toward the lasting river of joy and deep peace within ourselves. No matter where our journey takes us — whether it’s discovering self love, conscious parenting or a certain spiritual path — ultimately, joy will always lead us home.
What are your practices for cultivating self love on your journey? Whether you’re on a parenting, healing or spiritual journey, I’d love to hear in the comments.
About me: Mom of two, wife, writer and podcast co-host who is fascinated by the intersection of parenting and spirituality — one seeker exploring the wild experience of being a parent and being human. For more reflections on parenting and spirituality, follow me on Medium and subscribe to my free newsletter: aparentspurpose.substack.com.
© Caitlin Frauton. All rights reserved.
