#191: Guide To Consistent Self-Love (not just in crisis!)

0:00How do you love yourself if you don't even like yourself all the time? And most importantly, if we didn't feel unconditionally loved growing up. That's the big question that it seems most people struggle with these days, because we all know that self-love is one of the most important keys to happiness, to healing, and to feeling good about yourself. I mean, who doesn't want that? So today I'll be sharing my best tips on how to learn to love yourself, even if emotionally you don't quite feel like it. And a really simple question that you can ask yourself right now to start breaking the pattern right after this intro. Welcome to the Inner Child Podcast. Now with two million downloads, I help high achievers recover from painful relationships and childhood trauma. Let's heal together on season two of the Inner Child Podcast. Hello, Besties, and welcome back to the Inner Child Podcast.

1:01I'm your host Gloria Zhang, or as I've given you permission last week, some of you may prefer to call me Mother Gloria. I'm an award-winning author, therapist, and healer. And today we're talking all about the love. Love, love, love. Love is something we will never, ever get enough of. In fact, about 70% of songs are about love. Some of the most famous masterpieces and artwork and film were all inspired by love or the lack of love. Timeless poetry from all around the world, spiritual texts and novels. It seems that love is everywhere around us, yet at the same time love feels so elusive, doesn't it? How can something so simple and primal feel so complicated? And perhaps the answer is in that statement itself. Because I believe that love in itself is the most simple thing in the world.

2:08And it's actually trauma and fear and pain that is complicated. It is trauma, fear, and pain that seems to put this dark filter over love. And it seems to complicate things that are actually quite simple. And if you're listening to this podcast, it is very probable that much of your life has been so complicated so far that doing the simple thing actually feels harder than keeping things complicated. Isn't that right? Let me know if you resonate. But not to worry, we are going to have a wonderful heart to heart about this conversation today. But I'm hoping that by the end of this episode, you will be feeling the love. And even better, you'll have some fresh ideas in your head on exactly what needs to be done next. Now speaking of feeling the love, I really felt the love from everyone who listened to my two-part series from last week, which was titled My Spiritual

3:12Miracles, Part One and Part Two. Trust me when I said, we really put our hearts and souls into the production of those episodes. And by we, I'm also talking about my spiritual mentor, my friends who were there to witness some of these fantastic miracles that we all gave testimonies for. I really highly recommend checking out those episodes, not just to understand more about myself as a person, but to understand more about the role of inner child work and the spiritual development journey that many of us listening are on. And so you can find the video version of both of these on Spotify and YouTube, as well as Apple podcasts. And the whole point of those episodes was about love. And it was about my personal divine encounter where I was given the gift of the

4:13title Mother Gloria. And it's not a title for me because I've never really saw myself as having my own children, but the name is actually a gift for all of you. Because as I shared in those episodes, I received undeniable confirmation that my purpose on earth is to be a mother figure for people who didn't get to experience that kind of unconditional love growing up, where I truly feel that you are all my children, that all of my adult children are here. And anyone who wants love, you can receive it simply by listening to my voice, you know, pressing play, and you know that I'm I'm right here. And you know that I feel just the world for you. I love you no matter what, whether we end up meeting or maybe we'll never meet in this lifetime. I know that everyone has suffered

5:18unique things and I know that everyone has a lot of good still inside them and that potential there. And I want nothing more than for you to heal and for you to learn to love yourself, which is what the purpose of today's episode is all about. I find that in the mental health space, it's almost like we talk around the thing, then we try to extract love through techniques and tips and skills and tools. All of those things are great and helpful, but they seem to beat around the bush on what the actual missing thing is. And it's not a skill, it's not a scientific tool. It is the energy and the presence of unconditional love. And it's the one thing that hurts the most

6:24in this world when we don't get it to not be loved and cared for and accepted and seen as we really are. And that's why we skirt around this thing in the scientific world because I mean, can you measure it with a ruler? Can you wait on a scale? And it's the same reason why we've written million, maybe billions of songs about love and we still can't quite capture it in a sentence. Now in spiritual terms, it's often said in so many places around the world that God is love. God is also something that is absolutely indescribable. There are no words that can truly do justice. It is ineffable. And if God is ineffable, then perhaps on some level love is as well. And so if we can't describe such an important concept such as love with words, then what can we do

7:29instead? We embody it. Because when you truly feel the presence of someone who is seeing you and holding you, they may not utter a single word from their lips, but you feel it in their presence. Have you ever had someone who maybe did all the right things but said all the right things? Yet your body just could not be at ease around this person. And logically, it makes no sense. You know, they're asking you how they are. They may they bought you a coffee, but you feel something, some kind of ulterior motive behind them. You feel a bit of resentment coming from them. And you can't pinpoint it to any one thing. And so maybe we should stop trying to explain everything in scientific terms. Well, that feeling of unconditional love is something that you can learn

8:30to cultivate from yourself. And so that's the parenting aspect. And that's really great. However, I don't think reparenting is enough. We are social creatures through and through. And you can spend 50 years reparenting yourself. And then you can sit in a room with somebody who has a regulated loving nervous system. And that can do more for you in 30 seconds. 50 years of always doing everything by yourself. And so you can call on me, you know, Mother Gloria, you can listen to my voice if it does help you regulate. So the first thing that we're going to do is talk about the stages of learning to love yourself unconditionally, even if you don't like yourself right now or even if you don't always feel like you like yourself. Right. So that in itself is a belief that we need to change right away. Does anybody here have a pet

9:32or have a plant even, right? You might a cat dog, a ferret, a bird, or succulent. Well, it's pretty accurate to say that we don't always feel like getting up and, you know, changing the litter box or watering the plant. We don't feel the excitement and the desire to necessarily do those things every day. Yet we still do. There are times where we might be really angry. We're upset at our cat for waking us up in three in the morning and we're grumpy and we're grouching. And we don't feel like it, but we still do the thing. We do the action. And that is critical here. The key is you can still choose with your own free will to do something even if you don't feel like it in the moment. Now, it's not always the case that we feel the affection towards

10:35an object, but sometimes after building the habit of meeting those needs, then the feeling comes with it. So you can think of it as having a slow burn, you know, a slow burn love rather than having a passionate to crush right away on yourself. And I'm going to go through the exercise together. But first, to really drive the message home, I want to read a little passage from my own book, a woman's guide to inner child healing. And just cheating a little bit today because sometimes I write something perfectly and I describe it just perfectly and I never seem to find the right words again. So instead of reinventing the wheel, I'm just going to read the same words that I wrote. And this is on page 105 for those of you that have my book called How Healed People Behave Differently. The difference between a secure individual and an insecure one is that a secure

11:36person, never or very rarely, lets the little things slide. You get that? Truly taking care of yourself means doing so consistently, not just when you're having a crisis. How many of us need to let learn that one? A friend named Diana was a role model for me in this area. Diana would take full breaks all of the time. Diana prioritized a good sleep over working extra hours all of the time. She set boundaries at the first sign of an issue every single time. And they taught me that the only person now who's stopping me from living a truly enriched and full life was myself. Now, despite what social media says, self-care is not about expensive spa days and meditating. Self-care is about asking yourself what you need in this moment and fulfilling it. And the best

12:40way to illustrate this is using a Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So that is a very important point. So many of us, because of the way that we feel about ourselves, we let the little things pile up and pile up and pile up until it gets so overwhelming and until that last straw finally breaks the camel's back. And then we're in a crisis. And now our cholesterol is high and now we have good problems from not taking care of our food. And we go through a big radical change only during crisis mode. Now, sometimes that is necessary. Most people need a rock bottom in order to significantly change. But if that becomes a recurring pattern, and maybe there's something you're missing to this story. At Diana's a real person, she was a good friend that I had back when I was studying at the University of Western Ontario. And this was very much true. She was probably one of the most

13:41regulated, the best boundary person I'd ever met in my whole life. And you can learn from these habits too. And so let's pull up the screen and show you the Maslow hierarchy of needs. When you have what this pyramid shows is literally a hierarchy of different needs that humans require in order to feel healthy and fulfilled. It is over simplification, you know, sometimes the spiritual needs overpower the rest of the bottom of the pyramid. But it's still useful as a tool. And for people who really struggle to love themselves, I usually like to start with this first. And as you're listening to these following questions, I want you to type out the answers and comment them below on this video. And the first question is, well, how does your body feel right now? Are you thirsty? Are you hungry? Are you tired? And if so, that tells you right away what

14:44you need to do in order to love yourself. You need to get some sleep. You need to drink a glass of water. Don't let the little things pile up. Just because you can handle it doesn't mean you should. Just because you can get by and you can survive on five hours of sleep doesn't mean you should. Hey, you deserve to feel well, rested and taken care of all the time. And you're certainly not winning any medals for running on empty. The next question is, what emotions are you feeling? If you sit silently for a few seconds, are there any sensations, any particular feelings like mad, sad, glad, scared, hurt that are coming up to the surface? And so what do these emotions need from you? What exactly is it that you need to do? Okay, the next question is, do you feel safe in your environment? Right? An environment can mean so many different things. It could be the

15:47neighborhood you live in. It could be your workplace. It could even be the people around you. Is that making you feel safe or not? The next question is, have you met your social needs today? Are you lonely? Do you need a serious conversation or do you need a more light-hearted night out of town? Or does it feel like it's time to expand your circle of friends? Or maybe it's time to get a mentor and work with a professional or even get some help? The next question is, are you inspired to do anything creative or fun? Did you receive any sparks of inspiration that you can channel through writing, drawing, dancing, or singing? And finally, do you feel connected to something greater than you? If you're not a spiritual person, maybe it's more about connecting to nature, a barefoot walk along the beach, really feeling the wind in your hair, finding that

16:51symbiotic relationship with mother earth herself. And if you are more of a spiritual person, have you spent time with God today? Do you feel the pull to spend more time in meditation, in communion or in prayer? And so take some time to write down your answers, but most importantly, reflect on what those answers actually mean. And you'll find that most of the time the answers are within yourself because you are powerful, my love. And you have everything that you need already inside you. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Now, I hope you found those questions helpful. You can get a full list of them on page 108 of the book if you're interested. Now, that pretty much covers the first leg of it, which is doing things for yourself. And

17:52getting into the habit of asking those questions every day. Now, the second thing is, well, how do I actually feel the emotion of love for myself? And that's why I love inner child work so much. Because when we are connecting with a younger part of us, we get to see and remember who we really are. We get to remember that part of us that was either robbed from us in childhood or was buried away somewhere or the part of us that was beaten or conditioned out of us that we were told we were not allowed to be ourselves. There's nothing I want more for you than to be yourself. And all you have to do is take a moment to remember what you looked like as a little kid. And you'll find that it is so much easier to find that love for that little person

18:52when you remember your true nature. And the best part about that is, when you do this often enough, you know, as I tend to do with my students and my clients, you do it so often that you start to realize that's not a separate person at all. That is still me. I am still that child. I am still a child of the universe. It's just that that child's shoe size got a little bit bigger. They got a little bit taller, but it's still me. It is still me. And it is never too late, never, ever too late to start learning to love that part of you. All right. Now that you've made it this far into the episode, I'm going to take that as a sign that you're ready to go a little bit deeper. And now I want to share what self love and love really is. And if you paid attention to how I structured

19:53this episode, you'll notice that I started with the doing part of love. We're doing certain behaviors to meet those needs. Now that all stays very much in the mind where we're thinking, analyzing, examining, and it's all very helpful at the beginning. But then I asked you to see yourself as the child, to see the inner child self within you. And what we're actually doing is we're slowly transitioning from the mind into the heart. And why the heart? Why is it that if we are trying to decide where we feel love inner bodies, instinctively everybody says the heart. And interestingly, if you ask people, where do you feel your inner child? People also say, my inner child is in my heart. And that's no coincidence because the heart is not only where we access love,

20:55but it's the place that we access our intuition. It's the place where we access the kingdom within us. The heart also represents the fourth chakra. The heart center is also what we associate with the Christ consciousness. And that's depicted in a lot of pictures and paintings with Jesus, right? The flame within the heart. The heart is like a portal to our inner world, to the feeling and the sensing and the wisdom that we get from our heart is very different from what we can gather with our logical brains. Now I started this episode using an analogy that God is love and that itself is a bit of paradox because how can someone or something be both the action of loving, but also the identity? And that's because the goal is to not perform actions of love, but it's actually to become love itself, become the oneness, become compassion, become that unity. And unity

22:04begins to happen when we move into our hearts and we recognize the divinity within each and every one of ourselves. And it becomes a no-brainer that we want to take care of this person. And ironically, the more that you take care of and love yourself, the easier it is to have healthier relationships with other people to have better boundaries and to even love and show up for other people more. It is a bit of a paradox. And so even as you're trying the tips and exercises from today, never forget that the ultimate goal of self-love is to become love itself. Never forget that every single person has that spark of divinity of source within them and that makes you important and worthy of being taken care of. And it also means that you are not alone and you are never alone.

23:07Now with that being said, and since it is September and everyone's asking me when's the next event, Gloria, what's happening to the community? We have one coming up in about three weeks. And it's the perfect follow-up to this episode because I will be actually guiding you to meet and work with your inner child during this workshop. So I am offering this completely free, powerful healing event to all of my listeners. You don't have to pay a single thing and it's happening on Wednesday, September the 23rd. It's a two-hour event starting at 1pm Eastern Standard Time. But I still encourage you to sign up even if you can't make it live because we're going to record it and we'll send you the recording. However, of course, if you've been to my events, you know

24:07that nothing beats the live experience, right? Because you have this beautiful collective energy knowing that you're there at the same time with other people. So please try to make it live if you can. It's going to be two hours long. It's online so you can join from anywhere around the world. I'm doing some live teaching to show you how to clear those childhood wounds. I'm also performing a live sound bowl session using healing frequencies tuned at 432 hertz, which is it's an angelic frequency and it's one of the most powerful healing frequencies and it just cuts through all the biological crap and I've found just phenomenal results from using these bowls with clients. So you'll get to experience some of that and also a prayer session. I talked a lot about the success of my prayers during my two-part series last week and I've been praying for a lot of people

25:12and been having phenomenal results. But you do have to sign up, okay, since it's a Zoom event spots are limited. So you can go to bigloryazang.com slash workshop to save your spot. And if you're listening to this in the future, you know, chances are I've probably ended up doing more workshops. So go to that link and sign up anyways. So my loves. Here's the call to action for today. Number one, love is actually very simple. The presence, it's the meeting of needs, it's seeing the oneness and the connection between you and yourself, you and someone else. So keep it really simple. You can use these questions based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs to check in with your physiological, emotional and spiritual needs every single morning when you wake up, okay. We tend to start to feel affection towards things that we take good care of, including yourself.

26:15Number two, if it's hard to feel the feeling of affection with your adult self, try visualizing yourself as your inner child and you will find it so much easier. And number three, if you want to experience all of this with me, come to our free workshop, the first workshop that we're running after the summer called heal your inner child workshop. It's happening in a few weeks. And it's all free for this community. Just go to buy gloriazang.com slash workshop to sign up now. Otherwise, the spots will probably be gone. And the final little little thing for you is that next week, we are finally launching the brand new segment on this show called sessions with gloria where you will see live sessions with real clients and you'll get to witness and watch their entire transformation from beginning to end. And right now, if you wait, if you listen to the

27:20end of this episode, you'll see a teaser, just a short clip of the episode that is coming up next week featuring an amazing real estate agent who survived a very difficult childhood growing up with a narcissistic mother who also had borderline personality disorder. And it was an incredible session and I can't wait for you to see it next week. So mark that on your calendars. Have a beautiful day and an abundant life. One day when I came home from school in grade three, I noticed a black garbage on the front lawn and I just knew something was up. Though I went over to the garbage bag and I opened it up and it was like all my porcelain dolls were smashed. I just remember my heart going into my stomach and dreading walking in the door because I knew there was going to be yelling,

28:22screaming, who knows. My healing journey started in 2012. I noticed a pattern of me getting into these relationships with men that were just not good and also not being able to form solid friendships. Right? Growing up with a mother with borderline personality disorder, you know as a child you don't really know what that means. I never played and I think the more times those actions happened with my mom I kind of just cut off that part of myself because I don't want to get hurt. And so as I'm sitting with this beautiful soul in front of me, Alexis, I want to call upon the higher power that connects all of us as we help Alexis recover a part of her inner child. And inside your heart there's a little girl there and what I want to say to this little girl is that there are some grown-up things that she doesn't quite understand yet that makes you're

29:26not able to be the kind of mom that this little girl needs but it's not her burden to bear. And that we are here to help her feel like a little girl again. Fortunately your mom is just not well right now and that has nothing to do with you. I know how much that you love these dolls. Just because they're broken doesn't mean that we won't be beautiful. Her turn, right? And show her that even something like this we can fix and it's not hopeless. She's always with you. She's the cutest. The walk. You did amazing. I mean just tears of like joy that are able to repair that. Honestly I thought that it was irreparable. Moving from feeling that dread and hurt and anger to pure joy.

30:32I didn't know that that was possible to do with them. So I'm just really happy. You don't matter where you're out within your journey. It's never too late to do this work. It's so proud of you. Thank you so much for having me Gloria. You're amazing. You're amazing. Thanks for tuning in, Bestie. I've got something for you. If you think this show deserves a five-star review we'll send you my free inner child starter kit as a thank you for your support which contains exclusive wallpapers and resources for you to download. To get your kit just upload a screenshot of your review on Apple or Spotify to my web page by GloriaZang.com slash reviews. The link is also in the show notes. There you can also check out my healing sessions and programs at by GloriaZang.com. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast and I will meet you in the next episode. Mwah!