It’s been a minute since I sent you one of these messages –
If you’ve been part of the Embrace Her Legacy family for a while, you know that every week I used to send out these “legacyism” messages.
They were words of encouragement (or sometimes a good old gut check) for your personal growth.
This morning I decided to bring it back.
I’ve been so busy with growing Embrace Her Legacy…making sure every woman and girl around the world has access to our programs. I actually discovered that we’ve impacted 15,000+ women and girls worldwide since inception! Isn’t that something?
Additionally, I had a birthday two weeks ago and as always my birthday is a time of deep reflection for me.
Last year was dynamic for various reasons. I got my swag back, grew my team, started pursing my Master’s to better serve you, learned how to beat my own face but most importantly, I’ve learned to fall in love with myself…which is a daily effort.
Learning to love yourself is not something that you do by lighting candles or getting a pedicure checking off your self-care activity of the week, however, learning to love yourself comes with learning to practice self-love, not just professing it.
Think about it. Someone can tell you that that they love you but their actions indicate otherwise. Same applies when loving yourself.
Loving yourself is such a layered conversation. But one area that many of us struggle with is forgiving ourselves. We fail to give ourselves grace which means to show ourselves some compassion when we fail, miss the mark, revert back to old ways, or fall short of the perfectionism that we desire to achieve (which is a lie anyway).
Some of us are still beating ourselves up over things we did when we just didn’t know any better.
The great Maya Angelou teaches us to “Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it.”
So the first step in learning to practice loving you is to forgive yourself. It’s OK if you forgot who you were for a second which caused you to get caught up in something that you shouldn’t have…you simply forgot who you were and I’m reminding you.
I want you to start talking to yourself the way you would talk to your best friend when she tells you her flaws and mistakes. It’s time for you to be just as compassionate to yourself as you are to her. Stop beating yourself up. God loves you and forgives you so why not extend it to yourself?
If you’re feeling a little crappy because of your circumstances, take a look at my latest IG post and I hope it gets you out that funk.
XOXO!
Maria M.
