Teal Swan - How to Love Yourself

ALSO BY TEAL SWAN

The Sculptor in the Sky

Originally published as Shadows Before Dawn (2015)

This newly revised and updated edition, first published in the UK and USA

in 2022 by Watkins, an imprint of Watkins Media Limited

Unit 11, Shepperton House

89-93 Shepperton Road

London

N1 3DF

Design and typography copyright Watkins Media Limited 2022

Text copyright Teal Swan 2022

Teal Swan has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs

and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

without prior permission in writing from the Publishers.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Typeset by JCS Publishing

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1- 78678-700-2 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1- 78678-704-0 (eBook)

www.watkinspublishing.com

This book is dedicated to my 21-year-old self, whose struggle to love herself ultimately resulted in this book.

This book is also dedicated to each and every being who is ready to stop wanting for a different lifethose brave individuals who are ready to transform their suffering into joy and their hatred into love. Therefore, this book is dedicated to you.

May you come to know the first, last, and only love that ever is or ever will be... self-love.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

DELIVERING LOVE TO THE UNLOVABLE

W e all know on some level that it is important to love ourselves. But when people say that all you have to do is love yourself, its kind of like telling a child in kindergarten that he or she has to solve a college physics equation. Like that bewildered child, we have no idea where to begin. We are standing in a place where we dont love ourselves and havent for some time. We simply have no idea where to start and where to go from here.

On the matter of hating myself with a passion, let me tell youI am an expert. My journey to a new life was long and complicated. I couldnt continue hurting myself; I had to find a way to love myself... or I knew I wouldnt make it.

So the book you hold in your hands contains both my gut-wrenching journey to self-love and the techniques and methods that enabled me to turn my life around. In , I share my harrowing story and hold myself up as proof that self-love is achievable even for the most desperate person, in the direst of circumstances.

Then in , I share what I call my Self-Love Tool Kit30 techniques that I learned on my journey, which I trust will help you on yours. Anyone who enters this path is welcome. There are small steps and bigger steps, whatever you are ready for at this time. Enter slowly or jump right in. You have nothing to lose and a life full of love to gain.

PART ONE

Lost LoveFound Love

CHAPTER 1

CHILDHOOD LOST

A Difficult Beginning

The journey from self-hate to self-love was one that I had no road map for. I started in the depths of emotional hell. I was suicidal with no hope left for my life. And I clawed my way, oftentimes on hands and knees, to this place of freedom, joy, and love that I stand in today.

Let me assure you: It was worth it. Thats easy for me to say, because I am now standing on the other side. But its my promise to you that if you keep placing one foot in front of the other in the direction of self-love, you will get there, too, even if you have faced the worst kind of pain, heartbreak, and despair.

I would not ask you to go on this journey with me with an open heart if I did not first open my heart to you and share with you the story of how I got to where I am today.

By societys standards, my mother and father were good, liberal people who spent their lives in the pursuit of higher learning, justice, equality, and environmental protection. Having grown up in the 60s and 70s, they were well-educated hippie activists. Unknown to them at the time, neither of my parents had healed from their own emotional trauma before I was born; but nonetheless, oblivious to this, they met, married, and started a family like so many of their peers.

While my father was fairly ambivalent about having children of his own, my mother, on the other hand, felt as if motherhood was one of her lifelong callings. She dreamed of having the perfect relationship with her children, and when she found out she was pregnant with a girl, she imagined exactly how this little girl would be. She felt that her daughter would be a carbon copy of herself; and she would have a friendly, happy child who shared her common interests and who would fit right into the family. Most of all, she imagined that her daughter would validate her as a person and as a mother.

It was therefore quite a shock to her when I began to grow into my own personality because it soon became obvious that I was anything but what she had imagined. I didnt fit the image that she had in her head of what her child would be like or what being a parent would be like. As a result, my mother felt invalidated, just as she had felt during her own childhood.

A Girl with Too Many Gifts

My parents professed to love me, but they often admitted that they did not know how to love me. They had such a hard time relating to me that there were two running jokes in the house when I was growing up, both of which I found extremely painful as a child.

The first ongoing story line was that one day an alien spaceship would arrive to pick me up. And the second line was The Beeswaxes have our baby. This joke came about because when I was born in New Mexico, most of the hospital staff was Hispanic and therefore spoke Spanish; they had such a difficult time with the pronunciation and spelling of my parents last name (Bosworth) that when they rolled me from the nursery into the postpartum room, the little label on my hospital crib said Beeswax.

The gap between my parents and myself was increased one hundredfold by the fact that I was born extrasensory, with a number of sensitivities that no one in my family could understand. The best way I can explain it is to say that our sensory organs are a bit like filters. They filter out stimuli in the environment around us so that we can perceive solid objects and the usual things in our world. But to me as a small child, it felt like my filters were blown. I figured out when I was older that I suffered from sensory integration disorder, and I knew then why I struggled with my abilities so much throughout my early years.

Of course, its always hard to explain how the way that I see differs from other people because I have very little idea how other people see. Thats part of the beauty of individual perspective, but its also what makes it hard to fully comprehend how different I view the world in comparison to what is considered normal by most people.