It’s actually simple

I had my baby sister’s wedding on the weekend. It was pure magic. Everything went to plan, she looked stunning and most importantly she was happy and relaxed. Growing up it was endless playbacks of Walt Disney movies, namely Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid, that sort of thing and I have to say she got her fairy tale wedding. She was the princess and she had found her prince. Honestly if I had to choose two people genuinely in love they come to mind straight away. It’s a beautiful thing to witness.

For a long time my sister and I didn’t see eye to eye. That’s an understatement actually. We just plain and simply did not get along. We were just too similar and too different – make sense? I’m sure anyone with a sister can understand this to some extent.

Being only 15 months apart, the very early days saw a lot of ‘me too’, of being dressed in the same clothes and of being told to give in to her cause she whinged more effectively than me. Over time, to my child brain, this built up a very strong level of resistance to wanting her nowhere near me. I’m a Leo. I like the spotlight and I like to be viewed as unique. ‘Me too’ and not getting my way irritated me to my core. My small self knew no other way to react but to repel. We were always seen as one in a way due to being so close in age and she was much cuter, which doubled my level of resistance and annoyance.

I remember a few years back when I was studying my Life Coaching course at Nature Care they used to harp on about self love and I used to think, what on earth is self love??? I mean, I could understand the concept, but to really understand at the time surpassed me. That was until I watched the DVD ‘You can heal your life’… good old Louise. Oh how you moved things in the direction I needed them to move. In the video Louise speaks of mirror work, that is going to the mirror and telling yourself ‘I love you, you are perfect just as you are’. How foreign this was at the time! Honestly, so foreign. Never had I felt more ridiculous. But I did it. And a bizarre thing happened, the person staring back at me wasnt only me, but my sister. It was her eyes, her skin, her smile staring back. I started to cry. This was the start of me really starting to love and accept myself and of being proud of where I came from.

Once I hopped on the self love train I expected things with my sister to move as quickly as they did for me. For forgiveness to take over and for us to move to that level set aside for sister’s alone. It wasn’t the case and would take another 3 years before things really started to shift.

This year especially, but over the past 3 years I have been forced to look at my shadow stuff. The stuff that is your less than best stuff, your less desirable qualities. But in order for the good to exist the not so good has to exist equally as much. It’s the law of yin and yang. So as I was saying, I’ve had to really look at and come to terms with my less than best stuff – which included the way I had behaved with my sister. While this has been confronting and hard, it has also been incredibly freeing. Self love is all about loving ALL of you. Not just the bits you think other people will accept you for.

I know now that me rejecting my sister and all of the things that connected me back to my origins, were an attempt of me rejecting myself.

My sister and I are in a good place at the moment. Things have shifted. You can feel it in the energy between us. Something I am so incredibly grateful for. A part of it was certainly letting go of the guilt and instead welcoming forgiveness of self and for not being the sister she had wanted me to be. But most importantly acceptance. I had to accept that things had been as they were, because they had to be. It’s influenced who we have become as women.

‘We are powerless to change anything without first accepting it.’

– Mastin Kipp

Everything shifts – once we accept things for the way they are. This is what I had to do. I had to relinquish control, accept and surrender.

I’ve mentioned before that I adore over analysing. But most of the time you just don’t need to. You just need to accept, let it all go and hand it over to a force much greater than yourself. Then things shift.

This post is two-fold – acceptance and self love.

Where in life are you resisting? Where are you coming up against stuff that feels crappy? Where are you desperate for change, and yet it doesn’t seem to budge?

Where and what do you need to accept? About the situation and importantly about yourself.

And lastly, self love. This post has by no means done it justice, but self love is the key. It’s all there is. Self love is ultimately about acceptance. Total acceptance of self. We are such wonderfully complex beings, made up of so many facets. Get to know your facets, for they are all beautiful. Even the facets you perceive as less than desirable. Wanna now why? Cause they make up all of you. And all of you is beautiful. It’s that simple.