S2 EP303 – How to Take Loving Care of Yourself Without Guilt

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Margaret Paul and I’m here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. And today I want to talk about how to take loving care of yourself without guilt.

So first I want to talk about what does it mean to actually take loving care of yourself? Sometimes people say it means things like taking a hot bath or going to a spa or getting your nails done, and that’s great, that’s taking physical care of yourself. But I want to talk about taking emotional care of yourself that’s very different.

So I’d like you to think about having a young child, having a baby or a toddler who you really love and you want to be a loving parent for that baby or toddler. You wouldn’t put that child to sleep and go out to lunch, you would probably have a baby monitor on so that you can know as soon as the baby is up and crying or calling for you so that you can take care of the baby’s needs.

Taking loving care of yourself is what I call having your inner baby monitor on. Because we have an inner child inside and in the Inner Bonding process, the inner child is actually our soul, it’s the spark of the divine within us and this part of us communicates with us very often through feelings. And so you want to have that inner baby monitor on, you want to be tuned into your feelings.

Very often as we were growing up, we had to disconnect from our body, we had to dissociate from our body because our feelings were too big and we couldn’t manage them.

But now, as adults, we can learn to not only manage our feelings, but learn from them because all of our feelings have vital information for us. Some of our are letting us know if we’re loving ourselves, if we’re taking emotional care of ourselves, or if we’re abandoning ourselves.

We have lots of ways that we can abandon ourselves, we can judge ourselves, we can numb out with various addictions, we can blame other people, we can stay up in our head, just be completely disconnected from our body and not even know that we have feelings but our inner child will let you know with feelings like anger or anxiety or depression or guilt or shame or feelings like that, that you’re actually abandoning yourself, you’re not taking loving care of yourself, so those feelings are giving you important information.

They’re giving you the information that you need to start to attend to that inner child. Other people, they have different definitions than we do in inner bonding of the inner child, the inner child to us is our soul, that divine spark within us that communicates through our feelings. And it’s not really a child, but we call it a child because many people don’t realize that they’re responsible for their own feelings.

And so they might recognize that they’re responsible for a child, for their own inner child, but this part of us is actually the immortal part of us, it’s not a child. But taking loving care of ourselves means that we want to take responsibility for our feelings.

We want to learn about what our feelings are telling us some of our feelings like loneliness or grief or helplessness over others or heartbreak, these are the existential painful feelings of life. These feelings are telling us that we really need to have compassion for ourselves, we need to be present with ourselves in order to learn to manage these feelings.

But the wounded, the feelings we call the wounded feelings that come from self abandonment are letting us know that we need to do something to take care of our feelings, we need to explore what we’re telling ourselves, how we’re treating ourselves, how we’re abandoning ourselves, that are causing these painful feelings.

And so, part of loving yourself, part of taking loving care of yourself without guilt means that you recognize that there’s no reason to feel guilt because loving yourself is actually one of the most loving things you can do for yourself as well as for others. Because anything that you do that’s loving to you is going to be loving to others because you’re not going to be needy for them to give you what you’re not giving to yourself.

And so, why judge yourself? Guilt comes from self-judgment. Why judge yourself if you’re doing something that will enable you to stop trying to get somebody else to give you the love that you’re not giving to yourself? When you learn to take responsibility for your feelings, when you learn to truly take loving care of yourself, you fill yourself up with love and then it’s like, it’s like a cup running over that love runs over and you want to share it.

Usually when people want a relationship, it’s either because they’re trying to get love from somebody or they’re all filled up with love and they want to share that love with somebody and that’s what creates a loving relationship, two people taking loving care of themselves without guilt, filling themselves with love and sharing their love with each other.

Now, you might wonder, where does that love come from? Well, part of the Inner Bonding process is learning to tune in to a higher source of love. We’re surrounded by love, the universe is love, God is love. And when you learn to tap into that, then you can bring that love down inside yourself and take loving care of yourself and then share that love with others, which is what creates a loving relationship.

If you’re not taking loving care of yourself, then who’s going to do it? If you’re in a relationship and you expect your partner to do it, they may also be expecting you to do it and that creates a lot of relationship problems.

And so if you’re not taking care of yourself and you’re feeling alone, you’re feeling empty, you’re feeling anxious, and you go to your partner, basically what you’re doing is you’re handing your inner child over to that person and saying, “Here, it’s your responsibility to take care of my feelings.” And then of course, that person can’t do it because how we’re treating ourselves is what’s causing our pain.

And it’s not like they can’t care about our feelings, it’s not that they can’t help us, but they can’t do it for us. And one of the problems that comes up in relationships is that if you’re a person who wants somebody else to do it for you, you’re going to attract somebody who also wants you to do it for them. And so we attract it, our common level of self abandonment or our common level of self-love and self-care.

And so if you really want a loving relationship, you’re going to have to learn to take care of your own feelings. This is really what the Inner Bonding process is about. Step one of Inner Bonding is learning to be inside, with your feelings.

Having your inner baby monitor on so that you know when to go inside, when to attend to your feelings, when to listen to what your feelings are telling you, and you learn through Inner Bonding to open to your higher guidance, open to your higher source of love and open to a higher source of wisdom.

I grew up in a household that had no role modeling for how to take loving care of myself. And when I started to practice Inner Bonding, I didn’t know what it meant to love myself, but Spirit brought us this fabulous process of Inner Bonding, and I learned to access that information from my higher guidance of what’s loving to me.

And you can learn to do that too. All of us can learn to access that higher information about what’s loving to us, and then to do it and to fill ourselves up with love to share with others. Imagine the planet we would have if each person were actually taking responsibility for learning to love themselves and taking loving care of their own feelings, their own needs, filling themselves with love to share with others.

And part of taking loving care of yourself is learning to define your own worth. So many people are trying so hard to do everything right and say everything right and act right and succeed in order to get approval and validation from others. But when you learn to take loving care of yourself, you’re learning to define your own intrinsic worth, not based on how you look, not based on performance, but based on who you truly are inside.

When you learn to do this, then you’re all filled up with love inside, and then you’re in a position to share love, share love with a partner, share love with your children, share love with friends, with parents. If you’re not learning to do this and you’re a parent, then you’re not being a good role model for your children.

Your children need you to be there for them, but they also need you to role model loving self-care without guilt so that they can learn how to take loving care of themselves. And you can learn all of this by going to innerbonding.com and learning the powerful process of Inner Bonding.