My Wardrobe, Myself

The intersection of clothing, emotions, and life

This post discusses the concept of “should,” as well as my insights from completing the “I Should” exercise from “You Can Heal Your Life.”

It is my intention to complete at least one exercise from Louise Hay each week and to share my experience and what I learn in this blog. These posts may be combined with the weekly lesson, or they may stand on their own.

Louise Hay presents an exercise in “You Can Heal Your Life” which is focused on examining our internal “shoulds” and how we can create a more empowering inner dialogue. The exercise begins with writing or typing “I Should…” and completing the sentence in as many ways as come to mind. Here are a few of my “shoulds”:

1. I should be more productive.
2. I should make more money.
3. I should get a real job.
4. I should get up earlier.
5. I should dress nicely more often.

Why Should I?

The next step of the exercise involves reading each “should” aloud and then asking, “Why?” The responses to this question reveal where a person is stuck in his or her beliefs and self-imposed limitations.

I just got back from a doctor’s visit concerning my most recent health challenge. I have a sore and scratchy throat and a cough, and I’m having ever increasing difficulty in swallowing. I feel as if I have a lump in my throat and have had a few experiences of almost choking in recent days. Needless to say, this is both troubling and scary. Unfortunately, my general practitioner could not ascertain the problem or its cause, so I now have an appointment to see a specialist next week to explore the matter further.

This is just the latest in a long litany of health issues for me. I have come to feel that it’s always something. Just when I feel that things are improving, something else seems to crop up! The main reason I started my “healing project” a few months ago was to try to overcome my laundry list of health woes.

I recently completed an exercise on beliefs from Louise Hay’s “You Can Heal Your Life Companion Book.” The exercise was straightforward and consisted of sentence completion for nine topics. The objective was to uncover hidden beliefs which may be holding me back in certain areas of my life. In this blog entry, I will share some of the insights that I gained from completing the beliefs exercise.

The topics which were explored in the beliefs exercise were: Men, Women, Love, Sex, Work, Money, Success, Failure, and God. For each word, I wrote the various thoughts which popped into my head. I tried not to think too deeply about the “right” or “best” answers for any of the topics. I spent about twenty minutes uncovering my beliefs and then took some additional time to review my answers and look for insights or “aha moments.”

With this post, I begin working through the exercises in Louise Hay’s “You Can Heal Your Life Companion Book.” While you can definitely read my blog and benefit from my insights without doing the exercises yourself, I encourage you to follow along and gain and share your own insights. Not all blog posts will be associated with YCHYL exercises, but these exercises are an integral part of the Healing Project.

Defining the Concept

We all want many things in our lives and we often wonder why we don’t get those things. A big part of it has to do with the concept of deserving, or as Louise Hay terms it, “deservability.” If, at the deepest core of our being, we don’t feel we deserve to have what we wish for, that belief will block those things from coming into our lives. We end up settling for less than what we truly desire as a result of our limiting beliefs. To achieve our goals in life, it is necessary to work on our beliefs as well as take concrete actions toward that which we want.

This post outlines the final three key principles from “You Can Heal Your Life.”

“We must be willing to learn to love ourselves.”

Many years ago, I first heard the saying, “You can’t love anyone else unless you love yourself first.” At the time, I despised this saying and vehemently disagreed with its sentiments. Although I was clear that I didn’t love myself much back then, I believed that I was a loving person and fully capable of loving others. Now I am much more open to the message, except that I would qualify the saying by adding the word fully, as in “one cannot love another fully unless he loves himself.” If we are mired in self-criticism and self-hatred, there is much less of ourselves to give to others, which makes us less able to love others to full capacity.

Yet, the ability to love others fully is only one reason for us to love ourselves. When we treat ourselves with loving kindness, we experience a number of other benefits.