Self-Love Practices: How to Love Yourself
- Marije
- Jul 9
- 6 min read
Why everything you've been told about self-love is only half the story, and what it actually asks of you, every single day.
Six years ago, my doctor told me that if I kept living the way I was living, I would not be alive much longer. I was in my forties. From the outside, I had a career, a house, a life that looked fine on paper. Inside, I was disappearing, and I had been disappearing so slowly, for so long, that I had stopped noticing. That was the moment I understood that the way I had been treating myself was not sustainable. It was also the moment I realised I had no idea what it actually meant to love myself. I don't think I was alone in that.
Almost every person who comes to me asks some version of the same question: "How do I actually love myself? I've been trying for so long and nothing works."
And I understand why, because everything we've been told about self-love is focused on how it should feel. The warmth. The confidence. The quiet contentment. Nobody talks about what it actually looks like. What it requires. What it asks of you quietly, in the ordinary moments of an ordinary day.
Real self-love practices are not about feelings you arrive at. It is what happens when you become aware, aware of your patterns, your fears, your daily moments of self-betrayal, and you start making different choices because of that awareness. Small ones. Daily ones. Choices that say, over and over: I matter enough to stay.
Awareness is where it begins. And awareness, it turns out, is the most demanding practice of all.
Why We Lost It
You were not born without self-love. Watch a young child. They cry when they are sad, laugh when they are happy, ask for what they need without shame. They exist fully, without editing themselves for whoever is in the room.
Then life happened. A criticism that landed wrong. A rejection that left a mark. A heart that broke and quietly decided: never again. Sometimes one big wound. Sometimes thousands of small ones, so slow and gradual you didn't notice them stacking up.
And so you adapted. You became the one who says yes when they mean no. The one who shrinks to keep the peace. The one who keeps everyone else comfortable while quietly, habitually, putting themselves last.
We are trained from an early age to escape discomfort, to reach for distraction, for approval, for anything but the feeling itself. Self-love begins the moment you stop escaping and start staying.
The Wall, and What It Really Costs
Every time our heart breaks, we add another brick. Not because we are weak, because we are trying to survive. The wall keeps the pain out.
But walls don't discriminate. Slowly, they start keeping love out too, love from others, from life itself, and most painfully, from ourselves. And then something subtler happens: we start unconsciously choosing situations we can control. Partners who can't quite reach us. Friendships that keep us small. We sabotage the things we want most, not out of stupidity, but out of a deeply human calculation: if I never fully open, I can never fully break.
The wall that once protected you slowly becomes the prison you live inside. And the cruelest part? You built it yourself, with very good reason, and now you cannot find the door.
The door is awareness. It has always been awareness.
What Self-Love Actually Looks Like When You're Living It
I know when something has genuinely shifted in someone. Not because they tell me they feel better, but because of how they describe their life weeks or months after leaving. What they write to me is never "I feel so much love for myself now." It sounds more like this:
They sit with what they feel instead of running from it
When something uncomfortable rises, grief, loneliness, anger, fear, they no longer immediately reach for their phone, a drink, a distraction. They stay. They let it move through them. And they discover it passes, every time, and that they are far stronger than they believed.
They hold boundaries they couldn't hold before
Not dramatically. Not with speeches. Just quietly, clearly: no, this doesn't work for me. For someone who spent years dissolving themselves to keep others comfortable, that sentence is one of the most radical acts of self-love there is.
They make different choices
They notice the moment before the old pattern takes hold. The reaching for the wrong person. The yes that should be a no. The shrinking. And more and more often, they pause, and choose differently. That pause is everything.
That pause is self-love in action.
They are gentler with themselves when they fall back
Because they will fall back. We all do. Self-love is not a permanent state you arrive at. It is something you return to, again and again, with a little less judgment each time. The returning is the practice.
Your Body Is Keeping Score Too
Self-love doesn't only live in your thoughts and your emotions. It lives in your body. In every daily choice about how you treat it.
What you eat. What you drink. Whether you move, even a half hour walk changes something, quietly, reliably, every time. Whether you let yourself rest. Whether you make time for things that have no purpose other than bringing you joy, a meal with people you love, an afternoon doing something completely pointless and wonderful.
None of this needs to be extreme. I am not talking about perfect eating or daily exercise routines or cutting out everything that isn't virtuous. I am talking about awareness, the same awareness we bring to our patterns and emotions, turned towards the body.
Notice what gives you energy and what takes it away. Notice what you reach for when you're stressed, lonely, or numb, and what that reaching is telling you. Notice whether the way you treat your physical self reflects the same care you are trying to build on the inside.
Your daily choices are a mirror. They show you, more honestly than any reflection, exactly how much you currently believe you are worth.
The goal is not perfection. It is paying attention. Because the moment you start genuinely paying attention to your body, feeding it, moving it, resting it with real care, something shifts. It starts to feel less like a machine you manage and more like a home you actually want to live in.
What Helps You Get There
Over twenty years of working with people from all over the world, through yoga and Ayurveda in India and Nepal, and through plant medicine ceremonies in the jungles of South America, I have never seen one single thing transform someone on its own. What I have seen is a combination. Time in nature. Practices that bring you back into your body. Silence deep enough to hear yourself think. Communities of people who are asking the same honest questions. And sometimes, for the right person at the right moment, an experience, a ceremony, a dieta, a week away from everything familiar, that makes the unconscious suddenly, uncomfortably visible.
What all of these have in common is not the tradition or the technique. It is that they get you quiet enough, and present enough, to finally hear yourself. The sound of a river. Birds before dawn. Rain on leaves. These things do something that no amount of thinking can do, they pull you out of your head and back into the moment where your life is actually happening. And that is where self-love is practised. Not in a breakthrough. Not in a ceremony. In the ordinary Tuesday, in the small choice, in the moment you catch yourself mid-abandonment and decide, just this once, to stay.
The Most Terrifying Choice You Can Make
Love, real love, for yourself and for others, is the answer to almost everything. And yet we choose pain instead. Again and again, we reach for what hurts rather than what heals.
Why? Because pain is familiar. Pain we know how to manage. We have built our entire lives around it, our walls, our patterns, our carefully controlled distances from anything that might break us open.
Love is different. Love is so vast, so powerful, so completely beyond our control, that it terrifies us. It asks us to be fully open. Fully seen. And that, after a lifetime of building walls, can feel like the most dangerous thing in the world.
But it is also the only leap worth taking.
Be brave. Get to know yourself.
And when you are ready, choose love.
Even when it scares you. Especially then.
If this resonated, you might want to read the full story of my own journey, from burnout and depression to the life I live now, here. And if something in you feels ready to go deeper, I would love to talk.
The Garden of Peace · Tarapoto, Peru
Something in you is already ready for this.
At the Garden of Peace, I don't offer a programme that promises to fix you. You don't need fixing. I offer space, in the jungle, beside a river, to get quiet enough to finally hear yourself. Plant medicine ceremonies guided by indigenous Maestros, woven together with nature, real food, and genuine human presence.
Not ready to travel yet? Online coaching is also available, grounded, honest, and rooted in real experience.
No pressure. No sales pitch. Just a real conversation about whether this is right for you.
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