ST Healing Love-IntoBalance October2022 - Flipbook - Page 57
Practices to Cultivate Authentic Self Love, Love of Other
and Community Love
One big insight for us, threaded through our first and now second paper is that authentic love practice
is hard work! Life-changing and community-changing, but we’ve got to be committed and disciplined
for lifelong toil. This means practice to adopt and adapt new habits that feed our mind, heart and souls.
We asked some of our co-sojourners to share example of their love practices and we received some
heartfelt and wise offerings to share.
Through the decades, I have realized that self care is an active and ongoing practice and
part of a larger community - it is everyday self care. Here are some of my daily practices.
I enjoy long bike rides (and now some shadowboxing!). I feel blessed to be the baba of an
awesome and autistic soon to be 8 year old. I feel my best self when I write and reflect. I
have found purposeful paid and unpaid work. I have a loving and caring community.
I feel grateful for my generative somatic practice where I can accept my old self
and can slowly nurture and heal the pain that has accumulated over decades while
being on the path of becoming the best version of myself.
—Alex Tom
When it comes to self-love, I’ve found some different practices that help
me be more centered, more authentic, more emotionally intelligent, more present. So
daily, well six days a week, I do morning pages. Morning pages is a practice
I got from a book called “The Artists Way.” It is a practice to help unleash creativity,
but I have just found it a very helpful way to be present. Every day you write you sit
down and you write three pages. Some days I have huge epiphanies and some days
they fly by and some days they’re hard. I also have my weekly breathwork practice
that I mentioned doing with a leader and group of people who call in at the same time
…it’s a somatic practice of doing a particular kind of breath pattern
with music, but there’s also a weekly theme, so there’s talking and
doing it in community and being vulnerable together.
—Sarah Stakowiak
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