Unlocking True Self-Love: Introspection, Compassion, and Boundaries

Unlocking True Self-Love: Introspection, Compassion, and Boundaries

In this episode of The Danna Gift Show, Danna Gift delves into the essential practices of true self-love, which encompass developing your mind, body, and spirit. She emphasizes the importance of setting personal boundaries, self-reflection, offering self-compassion, cultivating self-trust, and practicing gratitude. Through introspection, Danna explains how to identify your true self, understand your strengths and weaknesses, and embrace your imperfections. Additionally, she discusses how setting standards for yourself is crucial for self-confidence and evolving as a better version of yourself. Finally, Danna explores the significance of physical and mental self-care in fostering deep, honest, and compassionate self-love.

00:00 The Importance of Setting Boundaries
00:34 Welcome to The Danna Gift Show
01:26 Understanding True Self Love
03:53 The Power of Self Reflection
07:36 Practicing Self Compassion
10:08 Setting Healthy Boundaries
13:15 The Role of Gratitude
16:13 Embracing Self Care
22:12 Cultivating Self Trust
26:50 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

0:00

Because if you don't set the boundary for yourself, and set it as a standard for yourself, then you will continue to go down this cycle and this slippery slope of depression and self denial and lack of confidence. Because if you can't trust you to hold the standard and follow through with that standard, then who else can trust you? Welcome back to another episode of The Danna Gift Show. And in this episode, I am sharing with you ways you can practice true self love that is going to help develop your mind, body, and spirit. So let's get started because I think this one's a very juicy one. I also think it is a very important practice to consider if you are trying to step into your femininity, if you have been overly masculine, protective combative overly stressed, all of that, if you have been in that state and you are trying to soften to allow and receive the gifts that God really has to offer you, then part of this. this entire video is going to be necessary that you adopt to learn how to love yourself. First of all, I want to address a common misconception of what self love is. People look at self care, and call it self love. That is not self love. It is an aspect of it. Don't get me wrong. Taking care of your body, your skin, doing facials, getting your hair done, your nails, all of that is absolutely a beautiful way to make yourself feel beautiful and make yourself adore you and learn how to love yourself. But that is just, again, one small aspect of what true self love looks like. So let's dive in. If you haven't already, please make sure you subscribe to this channel. I talk all about Self love, femininity, God, I think this is going to be so useful for those of you who are trying to practice self love practicing true self love is going to require a bit of introspective thoughts. It is gonna challenge your mind because to truly love yourself, you have to be able to love the dark parts of you as well. You have to be able to. Bring to light the truth of your past, the truth of your present, the truth of all of that, and bring it to light because when you can navigate the dark, you can prosper in the light. When you start this process, it might not feel like self love because there is going to be times where you bring up old parts of your past that are absolutely triggering. There's going to be things about you that you have felt shameful or guilty about, and you need to be able to work through these things in order to achieve True self love, true self compassion, and the beauty of this is when you learn how to accept them within yourself and you can offer yourself compassion for your, for the ways in which you operated and have a goal and desire to become a higher caliber man or woman, you can actually begin to offer more of this compassion for others. To love others. This is why when you hear about people talking about how the cup is full and you overflow and pour into others, this is what they mean by that. Because when you really love yourself, when you know how to offer yourself compassion and not live in the guilt or shame and truly can address your issues without getting triggered, this is going to be a symbol or a sign of your evolution. So first thing we need to do when we are practicing self love is first self reflection. It's the time for you to, one, identify your strengths, your values, what brings you joy, who are you without the outside noise. What things do you enjoy doing? What things upset you? What is your boundary when it comes to spending time with people, friends, family, all of that? Understanding who you truly are, not Just a culmination of everyone's opinions. I mean who you truly are without the influence of outside sources. When you learn how to understand that you can have a lot more excitement and joy and self love for who you are. The ways that you can do this to truly understand you and figure out what drives you is journaling, meditation, just time to yourself, right? A lot of the times we live in such a fast paced world. Things are just moving at hyper speed all the time. When you actually can slow down and bring yourself into your being and actually consider the things that bring you true joy and things that don't then you'll be in a good place. So taking the time to actually spend by yourself, take out the scrolling, don't scroll, don't read books to understand yourself more, just truly sit and allow yourself to be bored until a thought pops in. And those thoughts, the more you are able to sit alone and in silence, the more those authentic thoughts will begin to pop out. So I always I go through seasons of journaling personally. I try to journal often because I know that A lot of what I do often requires a lot of introspective work and self reflection. And it also just helps evolve my mindset. It helps me to stay up to date with what I'm currently doing. It also helps to keep myself accountable for the areas that I am not showing up at. So being really honest with who you truly are And this also means, the self reflection also means writing out some of the characteristics of you that you're not so proud of, right? There are things that I used to do even in my relationship with Dylan where I was, super combative or maybe there were times like when we get in arguments, I have this like natural desire to run away and like immediately I reach for the car keys and want to go for a drive. And so there are things that were happening. in my life and characteristics that I was displaying that I wasn't so proud of. But the thing I want you to do is when you go through the self reflection process and you start to write down all of these things, the things that you are currently doing, maybe that you're not necessarily proud of, or maybe the things that you want to do and you haven't done, try not to look at them from a good or bad perspective, right? You want to look at these as just the facts, right? This isn't to say that you are a bad person because you're doing all these things that you don't approve of. It's really just to question yourself is what you're doing right now, is it serving you? Meaning to say, is it actually helping you get to the next level of this high caliber person you're working to achieve? So I don't want you to look at it from a good or bad perspective. Instead, I want you to look at it from a way of. is it working for me or is it not? And if it's not, how do we get to stop happening in your life? How do you stop doing these things, right? That is the first thing. Self reflection is so important if you are trying to get to a place of self love because without self reflection and knowing yourself, you can't possibly love yourself, right? You really have to spend some time there. Okay. The next thing I want to say is offering self compassion. And this kind of ties into what I was saying earlier about not marking these things as good or bad, but instead understanding that sometimes we do bad things to good people, right? I look back at some of the past and how the ways I've behaved with things from ex friends and ex boyfriends and things of that nature, where I was not the best person. I was not able to offer compassion. I was hard and harsh and angry. And I projected right a lot of the times what we do is a projection of how we feel on the inside. And so to look at the past and be very angry and shameful for myself doesn't serve me, right? It. All it does is tie me to that story about how I'm such a bad person. And then because you're stuck to that story, it acts as an anchor and a weight that weighs you down to the past version of yourself. So if you are trying to elevate, you need to be able to release that weight and say, Hey, At that time, I was not doing the work. I was hurt. I was needing some healing. I was lost, angry and bitter. And that doesn't mean that what I did or who I was is acceptable and that it should be, that that, that makes it okay. But it does mean that With the awareness I have now, I can look at my past and say, I forgive you for behaving in that way because you were operating out of survival. You were trying to just make it work. You didn't even have the awareness. So how can you be angry at yourself for operating in that way? So it's learning how to forgive yourself for the past and being able to use that and move towards the future. And again, going back to the question of, is it serving you? Does that story serve you? And if it doesn't, why are you holding onto it? So self compassion. allowing yourself to make mistakes, allowing yourself to stop criticizing everything you do and marking it as good and bad. Instead, just looking at it from a perspective of does it work? And is it working or is it not? This is how we work on self compassion, right? Just learning how to understand that nobody is perfect and you will never be perfect. The goal is to continue to evolve and We will get better, but it requires practice and the only way we get better is if we're able to offer ourselves self compassion and grace throughout the process. Okay, next tip I will say to self love is you must be able to set healthy boundaries. This is a little bit more of a tough one, I feel like, for the women because for some reason, and I know the reasons, but let's not dive into that we, when we set boundaries, a lot of time us women becomes this thing where people think we're being a bitch just because we have standards and choose not to operate in a way. And so a lot of the times when we're not used to saying no or setting a healthy boundary, it's just because of old programming and beliefs that we have. basically learned throughout our lives probably most likely through childhood that we shouldn't get in the way or we're causing people discomfort because we're setting boundaries and we should be able to please everyone. People pleasing nature serves absolutely no one. It ends up causing resentment for yourself because you're serving others who cannot serve you in the same capacity. And it also causes. Almost a dishonesty between you and whoever it is that you are trying to please. Because at the end of the day, you need to have your own cup fulfilled before you can pour into others. And if you're constantly running yourself dry, trying to please everyone, not being able to set these boundaries for yourself, then you're going to be then you're not going to get anywhere. You're going to get stuck in this perpetual loop and cycle of resentment and pleasing. Setting boundaries is one of probably one of the most important parts of learning how to self love. Because if you cannot set these boundaries for yourself, you will not have the time to, to really offer yourself the self reflection, you are not practicing self compassion and the entire list I'm about to give you basically just goes to shit if you are not able to set healthy boundaries. And this is also meaning to say not just setting healthy boundaries between you and partners and loved ones, but it also means setting healthy boundaries for yourself. So example, if you have a scrolling problem first thing in the morning, right? You wake up, you get on your phone, you start scrolling, and all of a sudden you're in a bad mood. You read that one email that kind of threw your entire day to shit. If you know that is a habit of yours that you want to break, you must be able to set the boundary with yourself and actually follow through with it. Because if you don't set the boundary for yourself, and set it as a standard for yourself, then you will continue to go down this cycle and this slippery slope of depression and self denial and lack of confidence. Because if you can't trust you to hold the standard and follow through with that standard, then who else can trust you? And if you feel that way, then That's obviously going to take a plummet in your confidence, right? So setting healthy boundaries for yourself and others is going to be so necessary for you to adopt self love and to actually understand it and embody it. So the next thing practicing gratitude, right? We hear this all the time. There are gratitude journals all of this that you can get to help remind you to practice gratitude, but it is something and you say, I say practice gratitude practice, because that means you have to show up for it consistently to be able to really live in gratitude, right? Every morning I wake up and I get into prayer and I, the first thing I always say is, Good morning, Lord, my heavenly Father. Thank you for this beautiful day where I get to breathe another breath of air, where I get to live at home, where I feel comfortable and at ease, where I get to sit here and pray with you. And I just basically spend a good moment of my prayer in gratitude, right? And it is so important that we do this because it is so easy to get lost in the sauce, right? It's easy to get lost in the day to day and especially if things aren't necessarily going your way We can often compare it to other people's journeys and just not have gratitude for our own journey And we can get lost thinking that we never get any blessings, but the blessings are so evident I can promise you in everything that you do At this point in time in your life There is something to be grateful for. You just have to be able to sift through the dirt to find the gold. Every situation, every experience that we have in life absolutely has gold in it, no matter what. It really just depends on how you perceive that situation to be. So the experience itself is never good or bad. It is just how you perceive it that makes it good or bad. So for example, someone goes through a divorce, right? There's two perspectives that can be offered. The first is that this is the worst thing that's ever happened. Who am I? I don't deserve to be married. I am not a great wife or husband. I am a shitty person. You can go down that route, right? Obviously that is probably a route that's not going to serve you, but you can also go down the more positive route saying, Okay, I'm going through a divorce. This is tough. This hurts. However, the lesson that I learned is that maybe we weren't as equally yoked as I thought we were. Maybe this divorce is actually going to open me up to the next opportunity that I really wanted to take. Maybe you got a job offer that you really wanted to take and you couldn't because you were married. And so now maybe you need to go. And because of this divorce has happened. And because of what you've been asking God, he's given it to you and you are going through this divorce for a specific reason, right? There's so many different ways you can perceive one single situation, one experience, but it really, will be determined, good or bad, depending on you and how you manage your stories, right? Gratitude very important to have. The next point is self care. Ah, I touched a little bit on this in the beginning, but I will emphasize it a little bit more because it truly is important. important to have a self care routine. And I want to personally speak for women as well because I do think that us women have a little bit more desires to feel clean and like having our nails done and polished or at least clean. Like I don't have my nails done, but they do, they are, clean. That's what I care about. Getting haircuts and like making yourself feel presentable. There was definitely a time period in my life where I was just not taking care of myself and I would literally live, because I work from home, I would literally just live in my pajamas, never doing my makeup, never look good, I didn't do anything to care for myself. I was also going through a very broke period of my life, so spending money on extra things was just not in my budget. But that doesn't mean you can't just put on a nice outfit and look presentable and go to a coffee shop and. Like really channel your main character energy, right? You can do all of these things without spending a bunch of money. It's really the self care routines that kind of help us to feel like we are worthy of more, right? So catering to yourself, going to the gym. is also part of a self care routine. Eating healthy, whole foods, nutritious foods that fulfill your body. All of these things are part of self care routines that I truly believe are necessary in order for you to have self love. Because in order to have self love, you have to love The body that you are in, the experience that you have within your body is going to be highly determined by your routines. Are you eating healthy? Are you moving your body every day? All of these things are going to play a part in how you feel about yourself mentally. Okay. One thing I want you to consider when something is pressing within our body. So say you stick your hand in a fire, Your first immediate reaction is going to be let's respond to the fire. Do I pull away right? You probably will naturally want to pull away but It is very difficult to think about deeper things in your mind, including your perspective on things, all of that, if something within your body is aching or begging to be moved, removed if you're feeling sick, all of these things, if you're unhealthily obese, if you are Just not taking care of yourself, right? I truly believe that the beginning of self care in your mind starts with the physical body because we need to be able to Manage the temple that we're in before we can access the deeper parts, which means also eating healthy foods, right? Eating healthy foods is super important so important There's so much crap within our food, all these GMOs, all of these parasites that kind of reside within all of these foods that are designed to just keep us at a low vibration. So if you are not doing this and eating whole foods and all of that, I, I strongly encourage you to begin to learn about your nutrition, start to move your body. All of these things will help with your state of mind. It will help you bring yourself out of depression, right? There is so much that goes into that and I won't get super deep into it. Maybe I will in another podcast. If that's what you guys want to see, just let me know in the comments. I truly believe that moving your body and taking care of your temple will allow you access to your mind. Cause I can't tell you how many times I have suffered from brain fog because of poor nutrition and poor physical health. And I was just, I felt like I was on autopilot all the time because I didn't have access to my brain because I was feeling unhealthy within my body. Another thing to have self love is you need to be able to have a vision for yourself, having a goal or a dream. Now, it doesn't have to be set in stone. This is the thing I really want to encourage you to think of is sometimes people are afraid to have a vision because they are afraid that if they invest so much time in something and it doesn't work out that they are a failure. That is just not the truth. People who go for bigger things in their life often times pivot so many times along the way. This is my personal story. I myself have pivoted over countless times throughout my journey of, in pursuit of something better for my life. But each time, I truly learned how to listen to my own inner voice. instincts that told me whether this was the right path or not. Did I feel good about pursuing this or not? And if I did feel good about pursuing it and my heart felt like it was in it, that it was the right place to be. And I, this is where faith really has to play a part in it because you have to trust that, that the, that God, that the experience in life, everything will happen perfectly timed to pivot you. If you need to pivot, it doesn't, there is no. one recipe for the rest of your life. Okay. So even if there are people who have dedicated 10 years into a craft and then later on decided, okay, this isn't it for me and have to start all over. But there is a beauty in that, that when you have a vision for yourself, you get inspired by it. You are self motivated. You're excited to show up for something that you've truly feel passionate about. That helps you have self love for yourself. Because when you don't have a vision for yourself, you're just I don't know. I'm just here to be here. I'm just living until I die, basically. So have a vision for yourself. And that means taking some time to reflect on what it is that brings you joy, what you could do with that, and then writing it all down. Journaling is probably going to be your best friend when you are practicing or learning how to self love. Another thing, and this might be my last point because there's almost too many points in here and I'm trying to keep my things to 30 minutes or less cultivating self trust. So this is the next point that I'm going to make and probably the final point. And if you guys really like these videos, please let me know in the comments, I will make sure to add more because there is more on my list. I'm just not getting to them. So yeah, if you enjoy this, let me know, but cultivating self trust. In order to build confidence, we need to be able to trust ourselves to do the things that we say we are going to do when we continue to not show up for ourselves. and give ourselves excuses as to why we didn't do this or do that. We tend to lose the confidence within ourself, which makes sense, right? If you think about it, if your friend told you that they were going to do something all the time and they never showed up to do it, and you're just wondering what the heck I can't even trust you. You eventually start to lose confidence in them and their ability to show up, right? So if you are going to be setting goals, make sure that these are things that, that you can work towards and learn how to break these goals into tinier sections so that you can actually work towards them and achieve them. You develop self trust by showing up for yourself consistently, when you say you're going to do something and you do it, all of these things, you begin to start to build that confidence knowing Hey, I was able to do this, and this, there's so many things I'm capable of. And when you truly have that belief, because you have the proof and the evidence stacked up against you, that's how you know. that you are that bitch, like you are that man, right? So if you want to build unshakable confidence, you have to be able to show up for yourself consistently. That means getting a plan together for spending time to self reflect, right? Putting it in your calendar, maybe every morning you set these routines, setting a routine to care for yourself to hit the gym, move your body, take care of your spirituality setting a future vision for yourself. All of these things are not new. Like you hear this all the time, but. We fail to implement them and this is where the confidence begins to drop because we're again not showing up for ourselves. That's like a small list of what self love looks like and the journey of it is, very long and extensive, and it takes time and patience and a lot of introspective work. But I promise you, if you practice these things and start to be honest with yourself and really dig into it, you can learn how to love yourself deeply, honestly, truthfully, and with compassion. And that is the most important part, is to really learn how to give yourself a break during this process because the process of learning how to love yourself and digging out all this dirt can look ugly and sometimes it gets way worse before it gets better. Allowing yourself to make mistakes, embracing your imperfections is all going to serve you. Because at the end of the day, like I said, nothing is ever just good or bad. It is all perspective and how you perceive that experience to be. And the question that you need to ask yourself is not if this is the right or wrong way, but instead, Is this action, habit, or behavior serving me or is it not serving me? And if it's not serving you, how do you get rid of it? How do you stop doing it? And then if you're stumbling throughout the process of trying to stop doing these activities that no longer serve you, have patience. I can't tell you how many times I have done something or changed a part of my character and then had a setback because I behaved differently. Like for example, the whole example that I gave about wanting to run away during heated conversations and like raising my voice and then reaching for the car keys and trying to run away for the most part. I don't do that anymore, but there are times where I feel less my capacity is a lot less than normal. Maybe it's because I didn't get good sleep. Maybe it's because this week has been hell week, who knows where I'm not able to manage my emotions and reactions as well as I typically do. And I could look at that situation and say, Oh I, everything I've done is just derailed and now I'm a failure. Or I can say, okay, I had a little setback. Let me first take accountability for the way I showed up and apologize and then let me offer myself some compassion because I'm just in the process of learning how to truly embody this part of myself, this characteristic that I am wanting to build for the highest version of myself. I hope that you guys really enjoyed this. I'm excited to start releasing these podcasts out again. I truly hope that there is people out there who receive what I'm talking about and who are able to actually implement this into your lives. Thank you so much for joining in on another episode of The Danna Gift Show. I truly hope that this helps serve somebody out there. And if you haven't already subscribed, please do I'm excited to be bringing that back and we are full speed baby. So let me know what you want to hear from me, what questions you have, maybe about this video or maybe suggestions on the next video that you want me to record. So let me know in the comments, I would love to hear from you and I hope you have a beautiful day.