The Self-Love Work That Changes Everything
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Episode Summary
We hear all the time that self-love is important, but what does that actually mean? And why is it so hard to practice? After leading a four-day workshop on self-love, I wanted to bring some of the biggest takeaways here—why we resist self-love, how to recognize where we are in our relationship with ourselves, and what real self-love actually looks like in practice. If you’ve ever felt like self-love is too self-involved, too indulgent, or that you need to “fix” yourself before you can love who you are, tune in now. Because self-love isn’t about becoming someone different—it’s about seeing yourself clearly, shifting the way you speak to yourself, and finally feeling at home with who you already are.
Topics:
Why so many of us struggle with self-love (and common fears around it)
How your current relationship with yourself shapes everything in your life
The connection between self-love, confidence, and feeling more present in life
Practical exercises to start shifting how you talk to and think about yourself
A sneak peek into The Self-Love Sessions course and how to deepen this work
Episode Resources:
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Cecelia Baum Mandryk (00:00.376)
Hey, welcome to Calmer Conversations. I'm Cecilia, your host today. I wanna talk all about self-love. I just got off a four-day workshop where we focused on creating self-love. And so I thought it might be helpful to talk about here why you might wanna do this work because some of us have an aversion to it and how to get started. Okay, so first everyone from Oprah to, I don't know, Carl Rogers to the Buddha agree that
self-love or loving oneself is crucial to having a fulfilling life, feeling in alignment with oneself, to happiness, to contentment in your day-to-day life. And yet, so many of us struggle to actually get there. We struggle to do this work. We think that it's self-involved. We think that it's, I don't know.
it's narcissistic to do it. think that if we do, we will get complacent. So we'll stop achieving our goals that we'll find out we're lazy, that we'll find out that something is wrong with us or other people will see that we're human and then the world will fall apart. You have to fill that in for yourself because we each have our own doomsday scenario that we kind of entertain in our head. So we all know, or maybe you actually really want to get clear first. And I'm going to kind of pick out some of the gems from the workshop.
that you might be able to incorporate right now. So I want you to think about what your current relationship with yourself is, right? So if you were dating somebody or you just started a friendship or maybe you just started a job, you might sit down for coffee or tea with a friend or a drink and you might say, they might ask you, how's it going or how are they? And you would give them the lowdown, right? You'd describe how they treat you, how they talk to you.
what's funny about them, what you like, what you don't like. So I want you, you describe your current relationship. When you get started doing this work, I think one of the most important things, whether it's self-love or something else, you have to figure out where you are right now. You have to start where you are. And starting where you are is the place that most of us don't want to do. Right? We don't want to go to the yoga class because we feel like we're not flexible enough yet. We don't want to go to the gym because we feel like we're not strong enough yet. We don't want to make that post on social media because we don't think we're polished enough on camera yet.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (02:20.398)
We don't wanna start the podcast because we feel like we have a weird voice and we don't know what to say yet. So we have a lot of like, need to be somewhere else before I can start. So I need to be more lovable before I start. Which I said like a little bit emphatically and with a smile on my face because it's something that so many of my clients say, right? I need to be more lovable before I can love myself. The trick here is starting to love yourself and starting exactly where you are. So you need to figure out where you are, right?
So I guess even before we go into that, did say I was gonna start with why you would wanna do this work. And why you wanna do this work is kind of what I touched on when I was talking about why you should do this work, right? That you, when you have a loving relationship and a positive self-regard for yourself, you enter the world in a different way. You walk through the world in a different way. Suddenly what's happening around you and outside of you does not impact what's going on inside of you.
much and what that means is that you get to show up in a much different often bigger way that doesn't mean you become someone that you're not but it means that suddenly you're not distracted by all of the Millions of distractions that we have around us every single day You are more in touch with what's important for you What you need day to day and you actually are okay with giving that to yourself. You feel more empowered You feel that deep sense of contentment
You feel more, you're living in that space of equanimity, right? That kind of unshakable-ness. And that doesn't mean that you don't feel joy or you don't feel grief. You do in fact feel those things because those are part of the human experience and they don't rock you as much, right? If you think of, you're not maybe like a little dinghy being swept away on waves, you're kind of like a more stable vessel.
Okay, so how to start doing this work as I was getting started saying is first you have to understand where you are, right? So you have to understand what your current relationship with you is. And then I want you to just look at that and I want you to see, and you can pause, please pause this and spend time on this exercise, right? Don't do like a one-liner if you actually wanna do this, if you actually wanna dive into this work.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (04:47.384)
So pause and maybe even write a letter to yourself about your current relationship. You might get clear on how you've been mean to yourself or how you've been holding yourself back. And then I wish you would just take a breath and see if you can forgive yourself in this moment for everything that you've done. Because if there's one thing that I've learned from doing this work and that I carry through every day, it's that the thoughts that you have in your brain, the thoughts that I have in my brain, the thoughts that we each have in our brains are not our own.
And they are not truths about us in the universe. They are things that we picked up at different points in time that imprinted on us that we adapted and adopted into our brain so that we could be likable, so that we could fit in with our tribe, so that we could get our needs met, so that we could survive. And those thoughts continue on until we stop them.
And one of the things you're doing now when you get clear about your relationship with you and you get clear about how you've been mean to yourself or holding yourself back, you're getting clear on all of these thoughts and beliefs that you have.
Then I want you, so seeing if you can move into that forgiveness. If you know how to tap or do coherent breathing, this is a beautiful space to use tapping. This is a beautiful space to forgive yourself for all the beliefs you've been carrying and to see if you can start to let them go, to kind of drop them, to see if you're willing to see it differently. Because that's a key piece of this work, is willing to see yourself, willing to see your brain, willing to see your body differently. So maybe even ask that, am I willing to see myself differently?
Then I want you, I can't take you through everything that we did, I wish I could, I'm kind of like, I keep, I'm tempted to like do some of the exercises that we did in this workshop, but I don't want, if you do the whole course, I want you to be able to experience them as well. But I want you to know that this is just where you're starting, the thoughts you have in your head right now are just starting places. And then I think maybe the most powerful place that you could go right now is I want you to imagine the relationship you want with yourself.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (06:50.37)
So again, if you think back about dating, you might at some point, if you're not dating somebody, or even if you're in a relationship, you might even imagine, where is this relationship going? What is the best version of this relationship for me at this point in my life? What do I need from this relationship or want from this relationship? So you might even ask yourself, what is my dream relationship with me? If I could, if I could start from scratch right now, if I could just,
Conjure up the most beautiful, loving, caring relationship with myself. And I knew that if I did that, I wouldn't become narcissistic. I wouldn't become complacent. I wouldn't become self-involved. I would actually become the most me version of me that's possible. What would I do? Who would I be? And from this space, you might also ask yourself, what are some beliefs that I might have about myself if I was in that space?
So for instance, they might be beliefs like I'm enough as I am. They might be something like I'm proud of where I've come or I'm proud of where I've come from, I'm proud of where I'm going. So seeing if you can start to cultivate some of these beliefs that might support you in a journey of self-love. And then I want you to do one more exercise before we get off of this if you want to start doing this work and then we'll talk a little bit more about the implications. As I want you to...
ask right now from where I am. you know where you're starting, you know where you're going, but then we're going to come back sort of to the now. What's one thing you like about yourself or proud of right now? What's one positive characteristic that you think you have? So you can start to see some love for yourself. Alternatively, you could find a picture of yourself as a kid and you could start to see if you can feel love for that version of yourself. That version of yourself who is young, who is tender, who is just starting out.
Okay, so the reason why I am so compelled to do this work and why I think other people should do this work, I see the results of it, right? I've seen it in my own life when I've started to like myself and even love myself on a daily basis, what that means for me, right? So how I treat myself, how I talk to myself, how much less self-involved I am in fact, because I spend far less time thinking about myself and what other people think about me. And I think spend far more time thinking
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (09:12.686)
not even really thinking, but being, being in the present moment, being with my work, being with my clients, being with my family, with my kids. And that, I think, is where life is. And that's usually what most people who come to me and why you might be listening to this, right? They want to feel a sense of ease in their life or a sense of presence in their life, a calmness in their brain, right? So that constant chatter that's in your brain kind of slows down to the point where all of a sudden,
you can be there in the moment. You can be with the sunshine. You can be with your kid talking to them or with your friend talking to them and not worried about what somebody might be thinking about your hair or how they're judging you because they must know that you didn't work out today. Instead, you're there and you're listening and you're part of life around you and you're also able to really touch into your own values.
and what you want to bring into the world, which might be very important to you in this moment. And so instead of reacting from a place of fear, you're acting from a place of love. And that love that you can have that starts at home within yourself is the love, I think, and many other people think, I'm not alone in this, that starts to change the world.
Right, so if we are perpetuating violence and unkindness and meanness within ourselves to ourselves, it is very hard to perpetuate kindness and love out into the world. And so in order to do that, you have to start with yourself. You have to start loving yourself. You have to change the war that you have going on with you so that the larger world can start to shift and change. And in fact, if most people started doing this or some people started doing this or more people started doing this, then the whole
energetic kind of temperature of the world starts to shift and change and it can seem so trivial when big things are happening in the world wars and famines and genocides and all kinds of things To think why should I do this with me? But for most of us It's maybe even all of us the most important place to start is at home Because again if you're not doing it with you your capacity
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (11:30.662)
and your effectiveness at doing this work outside of you is greatly limited. So I said this was a workshop that I did with people and it was really amazing. It was four days. We did it last year in 2024 as well. And I think it was five days then. And right now I'm gathering all these things up. And by the time this episode goes live, this will be a course that you can grab and kind of like a mini course, like I have a five minute shift where that you can go in and it's.
It's kind of short, this one's gonna be a little bit longer than that, but it's a way you can do this work kind of by yourself in your own time. And it's a way to start doing this work in a supported way, even if you do wanna kind of DIY it. So it's with my guidance, you're going through, it's a way to start doing these exercises in a real way. Because I know that it's easy to listen to something like a podcast episode or read a book and not do anything with it.
And what I want you to do if you grab a course is to say, okay, now I'm committing to this at a different level. I have a little bit of money invested. I have a commitment to start doing this work. And then things change. So it's the Self-Love Sessions is the course. I'll make sure that there's a link in the notes for you to get it. But know that this is, if you liked this episode or you like listening to me, if you like what I say on social media, then this is a way to start doing this work with me.
so that you can move forward and you can start changing how you talk to you so that you can start changing who you are in the world. Okay, that's all I have for you today. Please, please try and do this work. One of my favorite exercises we do in the course is helping you feel the feelings of love. And this was mind blowing. I don't know how many emails I got about this, but it was mind blowing for people to actually feel love, right? To have the sensation of love.
and to feel it in general, to conjure it up intentionally and to feel it in their body and allow it to be there. And then, spoiler alert, by the end of our time over the week, you start to extend that feeling to yourself. But this was really revolutionary for people. And it's something that I was toying around with doing here, but I think it's better placed within a course and a container where there's some amount of safety that you're creating for yourself. But no.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (13:48.844)
that this is available to you, that you can do this work, that you can feel more love towards yourself. And when you do start to feel more love towards yourself, so many things shift and change in your life. And not only do you not become complacent and self-involved, but you really start to remove all the layers that are preventing you from shining. It's kind of like a really nice car wash at the end of the winter. Okay, it was lovely to be with you today. I will see you next week.