Inside Out with Jimi Hunt - The Mental Fitness Podcast
Health & Fitness:Mental Health
25. GRACIE BALEV - Self Love (your quality of life depends on it!)
“The quality of your life is 100% contingent upon your capacity to unconditionally love yourself.”
As Jimi chats with self-love expert Gracie Balev they lead us through a beautiful discussion about what self-love really looks like.
Highly misrepresented in social media and mainstream media, self-love is often confused with acts of self-care hyped up as doing lush, trendy things seen on Instagram. Gracie explains how, while not intrinsically bad, those things are merely 5% of the equation when it comes to learning how to truly practice self-love. Guiding us away from the well-intentioned but surface level acts like the occasional face mask and yoga retreat, Gracie re-frames how we can view self-love and helps us understand its importance in our mental fitness.
"We are craving and starved for that self-source fulfillment and that deep knowing that we are actually worthy and deserving of a high quality, loved-based life experience. We are not thriving, we are simply surviving because we are disconnected from that inner core self and we are accustomed to, at this point, reaching externally to fulfill ourselves internally."
As humans we are so used to seeking validation from external sources, feeling like the things we achieve and possess will bring admiration and validation from other people but as Gracie puts it, there is only one true way to be validated; and that's to practice self-love.
"We need to start checking in with self - where our voids might be, where our wounds might be, heal all of that, transmute all of that and then fill our hearts from the inside out so that then we are simply outpouring love because we are so full of that genuine self-validation and self-worth that that’s all we can do - express the true love that we innately are."
Jimi sees the process of self love as “the ability to go inward, to repair the hole that had been dug inside of us through society, through our traumas, through our experiences...what a lot of people find hard is understanding the process of how that happens.”
Listen as Gracie reveals her three step practice to unlock true, fulfilling self love. Something that she practices multiple times per day, because, as she puts it, practicing self-love isn’t linear and it is a never ending process.
Jimi and Gracie discuss some excellent, practical tools that you can implement straight away to improve your capacity for self-love and they explain the importance of having a daily self-practice, of carving out time in the day, every day, where you go inward without distraction to check in with what you are feeling and why.
Jimi also reveals the three most negative beliefs he has about himself and talks about where these come from and how to heal from them.
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