Last week, I asked you to turn inward and notice. To sit with a standstill — not as failure, but as the first honest moment. To let the borrowed map run out and feel the real territory begin.
I want to share something that happened to me this week — because it is exactly what I am talking about.
For quite a while, I had been feeling that my book’s title wasn’t quite right. It was too long. Something in it didn’t fully land. And yet every time I tried to untangle it, I couldn’t. I couldn’t force it into clarity. So I stayed with it — open, patient, not knowing what the stillness was holding.
Last week, I wrote to you about being still. About how a standstill is not nothing — how it can be the first honest moment, the place where something real begins to surface. What I didn’t know, as I wrote those words, was that the stillness I was describing was already working in me.
This week, something shifted. One morning, I awoke knowing I needed to add a chapter to the book — even though it is already in its final stages of editing. And through that process, through speaking about the book with others, working together as a team, something came through that I hadn’t been able to find alone.
The true name of this book arrived.
Your Loving Power: Heal Yourself, Heal the Earth.
I didn’t force it. I didn’t figure it out. It came through staying open, through connection, through collaboration — through trusting that what needed to come would come when it was ready.
That, to me, is self-love in one of its most profound forms. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind. The kind that trusts. The kind that stays open even when it doesn’t yet know what it is opening to.
And that is exactly where we are this week.
Self-love, as I have come to know it, is not something we arrive at. It is something we practice. Again and again. In the small moments and the large ones. In the moments when we are easy to love — and especially in the moments when we are not.
It is the willingness to say: I am worthy of my own attention. My own honesty. My own care.
Not because we have earned it. Not because we have finally gotten it right. But because we are here. Because we are a soul on a journey. And that alone is enough.
I want to share something I have noticed over many decades of this work — both within myself and alongside the people I have had the privilege of walking with. Most of us were never truly taught self-love. We were taught to be good. To be useful. To be strong. To keep going. And those things have their place. But somewhere in the learning, many of us absorbed a quieter, more painful lesson — that our worth was conditional. That love, even our own, had to be earned.
And so we learned to tend to everything and everyone else first. We became very good at giving. And somewhere along the way, we forgot to receive. We forgot to turn that same care, that same gentleness, back toward ourselves.
The body remembers this. The heart remembers. And when we finally turn inward — truly inward, without agenda — we often find not emptiness, but a tenderness that has been waiting. Patiently. For us to come home.
Self-love is coming home.
And I want to say something clearly here, because it matters: self-love does not mean we love others less. It does not mean we withdraw, or turn away, or place ourselves above those we care for. Quite the opposite. When we love ourselves more fully — when we tend to our own inner life with honesty and care — we have more to bring to everyone around us. We give from fullness rather than depletion. We love from strength rather than need. This is what I have come to know as our Loving Power — and it begins within each of us.
It does not require perfection. It does not require that you have healed everything, understood everything, or let go of everything. It only requires willingness. The willingness to be with yourself — as you are, right now — with a little more kindness than yesterday.
Some days, that looks like sitting quietly and breathing. Some days it looks like saying no to something that does not honor you. Some days it looks like asking for help, or crying without apologizing for it, or simply acknowledging — out loud or in the quiet of your own heart — that you are doing the best you can.
All of it counts. All of it is self-love in practice.
Here are a few questions to carry with you this week — not to answer, just to feel into:
Where am I withholding love from myself — and why?
What would it feel like to treat myself the way I treat someone I deeply love?
Is there one small way I could turn toward myself with more gentleness today?
We are continuing this conversation live — and I would love for you to be part of it. My Monthly Wisdom-in-Wellness calls continue this Wednesday, May 13th, from 6:00 to 7:30 pm PST via Zoom. These first two sessions are my gift to you, offered freely. Come with an open heart and a willingness to turn inward. That is the only invitation needed.
With love and gratitude,
Diane
Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86132964704