The other day I came across a post on Facebook where someone argued that self-love wasn’t a viable magical practice in terms of protecting a person from a love spell or other forms of magical working where someone was trying to impose their desire or their malevolence on you. I see their point and I also think that self-love is often discounted and misunderstood because it’s treated as a surface level feel good approach to life, when it can actually be a significant spiritual and emotional well being practice.
Self-love has played a significant role in changing in my life. Up until my mid forties, I did not love myself. I looked for love from other people as a way to “fix” the emptiness and the unhappiness of my life, but that never worked. If anything, it was my needy co-dependence coming out and trying to get approval. I didn’t recognize it as such at the time or see the harm it caused me and the people in my life until I had a moment of realization, in the wake of a breakup that I didn’t love or like myself and until I got that right with myself I wasn’t going to get any relationship I was in right.
That moment of realization propelled me to make significant changes in my life. One of those changes was the relationship I had with myself. I read a book in September of 2022 - Love yourself like your life depends on it, which introduced me to a few simple practices I started to apply to my life.
It was hard at first to look at myself in the mirror and say “I love myself,” and believe it. The truth is that I didn’t like or love myself, but I knew that one of the changes I needed to make was the relationship I had with myself. I didn’t treat self-love as a panacea cure-all that would fix everything, but I did treat is as an invitation to explore my relationship with all the parts of myself.
One of the important realizations I had that came out of that practice was recognizing I hadn’t taken good care of myself because some part of me had felt like I didn’t deserve that level of respect, care or love. That realization caused me to to look at my magical practice differently as well, which led to some significant changes in how I handled protection magic, as well as various other spiritual practices.