Come Home to Yourself - A Workshop on Self-Love

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This class is about knowing what you feel, how to change your feelings to feel better, and how to keep on feeling better.  We will go over the mechanics of feelings to help you better take charge of them.

Beliefs are ideas about your reality that become the rules by which you experience life. But, beliefs are more than just ideas; they are held emotionally in memory and reinforced by imagination. They become the patterns from which our reality is both created and perceived.  

Shame is the choice to disapprove of yourself in some way.

Guilt is the choice to disapprove of something you have done.

Forgiveness is what heals guilt. Self-love is what heals shame.

Another way of talking about self-love is to see it as self-approval. In this era of self-help and personal development it is a radical notion to approve of yourself as you are right now. Improving yourself is not what approval is all about. Truly approving of yourself is to feel good about who you are in this moment. You might want to change things later, but you’re fine as you are now.

To understand what you want, you must first understand your values. As can be easily seen, there is a very strong motivation for something within us that shows up as a yearning for things like purpose, destiny, or fate. Part of it is related to the urge for belonging. Part of it is about a desire to be who we are, whatever that is. And part of it is a craving to let some aspects of ourselves go out into the world to make something new.

In this class we will focus on the importance of how we tell the stories of who we are and how we got here. Each story we tell makes us feel a certain way and affects how we create our own reality. We can tell our story any way we like, so why not tell it in a way that contributes to our happiness and power. Change your story, change your world!

How we tell our stories affects not only how we feel today, but also how we create our future. This important subject demands sufficient time to grasp and implement. Telling the story of our future is a great was to shape it!

We have a lot more influence over our forthcoming experiences when we understand that we have the power to choose or not choose most of what we are experiencing. Taking up our power means deciding how we will react to things and deciding where we want to go.

One of the most important choices we can make is the decision to trust. Trust not just the Universe, but also ourselves. A lot of things happen magically when we let go and allow them to occur in their own time. It may seem counterintuitive, but by letting go of trying to control things, we make space for the things and experiences we desire.

It often seems like we have lost a part of who we are. Things like trauma, loss, intense experiences seem to rob us of an essential elements of our being. Shamans have long used soul retrieval to bring back these pieces of ourselves. But, you sent these pieces away for your own good reasons. And you can bring them back when your ready to reintegrate them into your whole sellf.

Self-confidence begins when we have a sense of the context of our lives. Without an understanding of who and what we are, we flail in the wind like leaves in a storm. In this class we will look at ourselves from a wide-angle lens to see more of what's going on here.

Your future is created in this moment. It is not a function of what has happened up to this point. Your feeling habits have been built up over time, but they can be changed at any moment. 

You create the next chapters in your life by how your think, by what you feel, and what you believe about yourself. Basically, you create your life by how you see your identity. That means that what happens to you next is in your hands.

This class will start on Wednesday, January 15, 2025 at 9:00 am HST. Zoom invitations for the class will be sent out 2 or 3 days in advance of class.

The cost for this class is $450US. There are limited scholarships available for those who ask.

For more information for this course contact Tracy Matfin at tracy@permaculture-hawaii.com.