The Ultimate Pleasure List

The title of this blog sounds really hot doesn’t it!?!? It is hot and we’re about to go deep y’all!

Does this sound familiar? For years this was how I was living. I thought I loved myself, but my actions didn’t come close to matching. I acted as though I was mediocre. I treated myself in ways I wouldn’t treat my worst enemy. The way I was acting towards myself was being mirrored back to me in all areas of my life from my diet (I would drive from fast food restaurant to fast food restaurant raiding their dollar menus and I would eat entire loaves of bread and quarts of ice-cream even though they would hurt my stomach so bad) to my relationships to the ways I treated my body (I was so mean and focused on hating parts of it) to my careers or lack there of (I was in a job where I would pray I would get into a car accident so I didn’t have to go or held jobs just for the money) to my home environment (It was a disaster zone full of clutter) to my hygiene (I hadn’t gone to the dentist in years)to the way I dressed myself (As my grandma would say, “I was schlepping around looking like a schemata”). The way I was acting was not the way that someone who truly loved themselves would act.

I woke up one day and had enough of this behavior and was done being stuck in a rut. I’m the only one that could get me out of my funk and I decided from that moment on I would act as though I loved myself right now even if sometimes I felt like I was faking it. Sometimes you have to fake it until you make it. I committed to do things people who loved themselves would do right away. Not after I was happily married. Not after I got my diet perfect. Not after I made millions of dollars doing something I loved. Not after I has the means to hire a cleaning professional to keep my home beautiful. Not after anything, but right now! What the heck was I waiting for? Life was passing me by and I didn’t want to miss another minute of it …so I did it and my life was never the same.

This week during the Virtual Love Fest we dove head first into this topic in detail. The members saw how their actions weren’t loving towards themselves. I asked them to look at an area in their life where there is a disconnect between knowing they love themselves and acting like it and to talk about it with the person I partnered them up with what that area would look like if they acted loving towards themselves. Woah! Sometimes you don’t even notice how mean you are acting towards yourself. I challenge look at an area in your life where there is a disconnect between knowing you love yourself and acting like it. What would that area look like if you acted loving towards yourself? Go there. Trust me. It’s worth the time. Share what comes up for you and join the conversation at the bottom of this post.

A simple tool you can use to act loving towards yourself is the “I Love Me Pleasure Menu.” Come up with 25 things you love to do. Some things can take 30 seconds and some can take all day. Practice one of these items a day because you love yourself. If you don’t feel as though you love yourself right now fake it until you make it. Practice one of these items a day to show yourself you love yourself. It’s so much easier to do nice things for other people than it is for yourself and you may have feelings of guilt that come up. Acknowledge those feelings and do it anyway. Start acting loving towards yourself right now. Start this list immediately after finishing reading this post. Here’s my list.