Ah, February! The month of love, the month to leap (at least every four years!) and the month where we really settle in to the year, our goals hopefully clear and purposed. As part of my year of living intentionally, I focused my February on, you guessed it, love, and boy oh boy it did not disappoint!

As February unfolded, I asked my Creator to show me what it was about love that required my attention. No limits were placed on this request, only a heart willing to be open to the promptings of the Divine. And did He ever prompt me to explore my issues with self-love. Now I realize that this may not be as tantalizing as a post about having found a new romantic love, but it is equally, if not more important. For you see, until you truly love yourself, flaws and all, you will never attract the type of love into your life that you seek on a soul level. The kind of love that feels like home. And if you have found that kind of love, be so very grateful for having found it!

I have often struggled with self-love in the past, putting up shields to hide the feeling that I was not good enough or pretty enough or just plain not enough to have the kind of love that we all yearn for. So, in response to my intention to focus on love this month, I received a direct call from Spirit to, once and for all, fall in love with myself. Not in a conceited, or egotistical way, but just pure, authentic and unapologetic adoration and acceptance for who I am, in this moment and always.

Now I will not pretend that this exploration was easy. I have done a lot of internal work over the past several years on self-worth and just knowing that as a Diving being, I am enough. I actually felt that I was in a pretty good place, until the realization hit me that I wasn’t. I discovered that to a certain extent I still looked to the external as a measurement of my worth. If my external world wasn’t going as planned, then my feelings of worth plummeted, and vice versa, as the law of attraction would dictate. I held onto a way of living that was safe, familiar and comfortable in order to maintain feelings of worthiness.

And then it hit me. I have changed. I am not the person I was a year ago, or three years ago, or five years ago, yet I was living as though I was. Although I felt like I had learned to love myself, I did not act like it. Why?

“The greatest prison people live in is the fear of what other people think.”

~David Icke

Hours of prayer, meditation and journaling finally yielded an answer. When it came right down to it, I realized that I loved myself, but not enough to be myself. My self-love was conditioned on maintaining the status quo of what others might think and how I was expected to act. A stinging, yet necessary epiphany, indeed! Love yourself enough to be yourself, no matter what. You may ruffle some feathers, but if you love yourself unconditionally, you will experience love unconditionally. And that is a Divine promise!