Honor Yourself

To honor oneself is to acknowledge the steps one has taken thus far, the achievements, the heartaches, the winding roads, and to not only recognize where we are today, but to accept with appreciation that this moment, is just exactly as it is to be.

I generally believe that people are good at recognizing what they are feeling, when they are feeling it. Even if you’re one that’s not good at claiming your emotion, you have an awareness of the happiness, the sadness, the loneliness, the comfort that exist in and around your life. I feel we’re generally good at embracing the ups and downs that life brings us, and we’re aware, noticing the things we want to be changing, growing about ourselves and our lives. Why then, as fairly awake individuals can it feel so difficult to honor ourselves, to honor our emotions, our experiences?

Honoring our story, honoring our sadness can not only feel challenging, it can often feel like a downright betrayal of our past and all that we’ve successfully held onto all these years. Maybe you’re not ready to let go of your pain, your sadness? Maybe you’re not ready to let the story become redefined, and as a result you push up against the emotion each and every time? That is, until that no longer works and you’re pushed open to honoring your state of being.

photography by: Rachael Reiss

That’s where I’m now. It no longer works for me to keep this firm grip on my pain, the emotion wants out of the container I’ve kept it in for the last few years, and it’s time to honor its needs.

For me, much of honoring myself has been about honoring my soul’s desire. When my soul is in need of some rest, some down time, honoring myself looks like listening to the easy life. It’s slowing down, it’s taking a break from the busyness of life, and all the productivity that is pulling at my attention. Recently it’s also been about allowing the container for which I’ve held my sadness in, to expand. In other words, the space that has held my own healing, my pain, my sorrow has held me for a long time, and it’s worked for me for a long time as well. Suddenly, it stopped working for me and I found myself unsure of where to put my sadness so it began pouring out into the streets in a completely unorganized, sob story kind of way. Okay, I’m being dramatic. It hasn’t really poured out onto the streets, I just really liked that sentence. It is true however that I found myself unsure of how to express my pain, my healing journey, and it did pour out at some unexpected times. It was only then that I realized it wasn’t about figuring out “the right”, linear way to express, but rather was about HONORING the emotion for what it was. The emotion was like an alive living creature inside me that has been playing in it’s usual playpen, and it wanted, no, it needed, to spend some time in a different playground, this time in the light of day. So when it wanted to be felt, I felt. When it wanted to be explored I explored. When it had no words, I allowed it to be what it was as it was. This type of emotional honoring of my pain was, still feels new to me, but I am willing to explore it in the name of my own healing journey.

Honor the emotion. Honor your accomplishments. Honor your story and make way for even deeper love to enter, to flow through your life.

Honoring ourselves can look like honoring the place we are at in our journey, it can be about taking pride, and acknowledging ourselves for how far we’ve come, or it could be about recognizing our own accomplishments and celebrating. Honoring ourselves could be about honoring our stories, all that has happened to get us to where we are today, it could be about honoring our pain, our sadness and allowing the emotion to exist without the need for immediate solution, or it could be about honoring the joy, the happiness we’ve created within our lives.

Honoring oneself all leads back to recognizing the steps we’ve taken on our journey thus far so we can meet ourselves just exactly where we are today. When we empower ourselves with awareness of our life, of our beingness, of our souls, we set ourselves up for (more) success, abundance and more importantly, more love for our tomorrow.