Self-Love Versus Self-Care

What is the difference between self-love and self-care? How do you know if you're practicing self-love and not self-care, or the other way around? In this episode, I'm going to explain to you what makes the difference between simply taking care of your 3D body versus what self-love actually looks like.

Transcript

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Hello everyone, I hope you've had a beautiful week. This episode, we're going to be speaking on the difference between self-love and self-care and how to know the difference between the two. I think a lot of us practice self-care quite frequently in the form of working out, eating healthily, getting a massage, reading a book, taking time to relax on vacation. But when do we practice self-love and what does it look like? First, let me say that the term self-care is an umbrella term for anything that we do externally and through the ego in order for the ego to not be in pain in some way. Self-care is the ego taking care of itself, whether that be something as simple as getting a pedicure so you don't feel judged by your friends when you wear sandals to brunch, or whether you jog 10 miles a day in order to keep your heart healthy because you come from a family with a propensity for heart disease. This is still the ego in control, and self-care is definitely an important self-soothing mechanism to relieve stress, keep the physical body healthy and functional, and not ruminate on things that are so easily in our 3D control. It's common to hear that self-care is created by self-love, or that self-care is the action to self-love. But this is not usually the case, and I will exemplify this with a story. Rachel had been a vegetarian for five years and decided to become vegan. She loved animals, wanted to lower her carbon footprint in the world, and mostly wanted to keep her body healthy and internally as clean as possible due to the fear of cancer that took her mother three years ago. On the surface, Rachel is practicing self-care. But then Rachel began turning down dinners out with friends because she could not eat anything healthy enough on the menu. She also stopped eating anything except her own cooking, believing that her body would be tainted if she didn't know every single thing that she put into it. She started dropping a lot of weight on her new vegan diet, and people were commenting on how great she looked. Even though Rachel may seem slightly militant at this point, we can still make the argument that she is practicing strict and stringent self-care, and it is via love and loss of her mother that shifted her into this greater self-care. But now let me inform you that Rachel was out hiking one day and fainted due to heat stroke. Her friend gave her a sports drink, and as she drank thirstily and then glanced at the label, she noticed that one of the dyes in the drink was derived from animals. In horror, Rachel dropped the bottle and began yelling at her friend. Her friend, not needing to read labels for the addition of animal byproducts, had no idea, and so Rachel turned her rage back on herself. She chastised herself the entire way down the mountain for not paying attention to the label first. She cried on her drive home that she ingested something that could hurt her body. She cursed herself for not properly packing her own drinks and keeping to the shade. She stayed awake at night ruminating on the fact that she'd done all of this work to have it all ruined by a single drink. Does this sound like self-love? Self-care can masquerade as self-love as long as the ego is happy. Self-love is acceptance of the true self and the ego. Acceptance of true self is a remembrance of what and who you are, the universe manifested here in physical form. Acceptance of true self is working with the ego as a tool, not against it or for it. Acceptance of true self is understanding that any negatively perceived things that occur whilst in this incarnation are simply constructs of the ego and have nothing to do with who you actually are, but rather how your ego is programmed. Acceptance of true self is not having to prove yourself in order to gain love from external things, because you're always aware that attempting to gain love from external things is merely the ego trying to feel better about itself. Attempting to get love from others is actually self-care created by a trauma response. Self-care doesn't always have to be egoically positively perceived, as is in the case of Rachel. Self-care is simply making the ego hurt less. So now let me tell you a story about self-love regarding Rachel again. The day that Rachel fainted on her hike, realizing she consumed animal byproducts in the sports drink, Rachel did a few things differently. Instead of yelling at her friend for not being aware that there were animal byproducts in her sports drink, she instead told her friend, just for future reference, carmine is made of animal byproducts, and I can't consume it as a vegan. But I am so grateful that you gave me your drink when it's so hot out. Instead of chastising herself for not paying attention to the label, Rachel instead said to herself, your body needed hydration, it is what your body needed, you are safe. Instead of crying over the potentials and hypotheticals that one drink would affect her physical wellness, Rachel instead accepted that her drinking the sports drink already happened, and no amount of self-deprecation would change that. She could either dwell on it or move forward with the plan the next time she hiked. And instead of ruminating all night that the one drink ruined all of her hard work, she smiled and thanked her body for being so strong, thanked the higher self for her current health, thanked her ego for having the motivation and willpower to abstain from what she told it to, and went to sleep, waking the next day to a clean slate. Do you see the difference between stories? In the first story of Rachel, she was loaded with self-care. When it came to true self-love, she was unable to feel nor practice it because she fought her ego and body and self-deprecated because she didn't control what she put into her body. But in the second story, she accepted what occurred, accepted what her body needed in that moment, and accepted her situation. Acceptance doesn't allow the ego to run wild and it doesn't pretend to shut the ego down like self-care does. Acceptance allows us to watch what the ego is doing objectively and actually cultivate self-love because we can see that the ego is not who we really are. Self love is accepting the current ego for its programming, trauma responses, and self criticisms, and making a choice whether to change them or not. Self love is knowing that no matter what the limited ego or body do, the true self is infinite. Until next week, all of my best and highest vibrations to you.