Self Love Spells

 

The snowdrops are up here in the mountains, I first spotted them from the porch. From a distance, they look exactly like the glitter of the last remaining scraps of snow. Up close, they smell like melted vanilla ice cream and look like hope. February is a softening month. A time when the hardness we place on ourselves, the impossible standards, melt a bit around the edges. Like ice on the pond, a new way, a gentler way, seems incoming.

In our country this month is often synonymous with love of the romantic kind. Gifts and kisses and happy endings. But something tells me this wasn’t how it all began. In February the love of aliveness itself begins to push back up from the soil. Stand still on a thaw day and you will be able to feel it, the sense of the world celebrating its own being. Today in the mountains the spicebush branches are waving like sparklers and the mud sings with every squelching step. The snowdrops are blooming in a kind of jubilee, each petal a marker of some inward twirl, an exuberance that almost shouts— How good it is to be! 

February is a time of self-love spells. The opportunity to shift the incantations we repeat to our own selves, so that we can recognize that such love and blooming is our birthright as well. In February we are invited to remember that we are not just a self. We have a self. And that self is worthy of celebration.

 

 

I will admit it, I love Valentine’s day. I have celebrated this holiday for as long as I can remember, and I imagine I will far into the future. But I don’t necessarily mark this day in the way mainstream culture advertises. For me, Valentine’s day is an invitation to shower myself with all the love and recognition I’m craving. A day to give myself the sweetness and affirmation that I so often go looking for from others. It is a day to honor myself, this self, this person I have come here to be.

Spiritual teacher Matt Kahn once put it this way— we are the spirit guides for our body. We are here to take loving care of ourselves, to bring our consciousness into this form to celebrate the body (including our personality and unique history) and help them to grow.

Our consciousness can understand things as quick as lightning, but our body takes a bit more time. We can intellectually understand the concept of self-love inside and out, but our body won’t believe one breath of it until we show it what that means on a tangible level. So, on Valentine’s day, I shower my embodied self with love. I write myself notes. I take myself on a date. I do the things I love, and I let that love naturally emanate out from my innermost self.

 

 

I had a student once who shared a wonderful phrase with me. In talking about doing journeywork to connect to their spirit guides, they mentioned that they always specify a wish to encounter only those who “love them beyond all reason.” This stuck with me in a powerful way.

What if we were able to do that for our own selves? What if we truly loved and accepted ourselves beyond all reason? What would a culture-wide flowering of that magnitude look like on the earth as a whole? I truly believe that kind of belief-shift would be a true miracle here on this planet. It may not be tomorrow, or next week, but I hold the dream of that day as close as a rosebud in mid-winter.

In the meantime, I invite you to join me in concocting new ways of letting this message into the deep wells of your innermost self. What would shift if your body knew how much you loved being you?

Need some ideas? Check out my new YouTube video where I share all my simple, silly and love-filled rituals to mark this day of love. And if you want to bring even more herbal wisdom and support into your celebrations just month, check out my online class Herbs for the Heartgate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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