Nurturing Others Versus Self-Love

When you think about the balance in giving and receiving, how do you see yourself?

Do you give more than you receive?

Do you feel okay with that?

Sometimes we can't see ourselves as nurturers who gives much more than we receive. It is, more often than not, a blind spot.

So let's dive into this.

The first thing you need to know is that nurturing others more than you should is an imbalance in energy.

This is common among most women, but it happens with men too.

Some of us tend to be nurturers by nature, right? It's in our DNA and our cells. It's part of who we are.

As women, we have wombs, we have breasts, we are naturally designed to be nurturers.

But Nature also intended our nurturing abilities to be balanced, and not to deplete us.

There is something in life called the law or principle of giving and receiving, which has eternal and intrinsic balance.

This principle guides Mother Gaia, which like all women is a feminine energy, and which also holds the balance of all forces.

This balance is what we sometimes do not respect - consciously or unconsciously

It's usually very unconscious, and I do see a lot of us women giving more than we receive.

To illustrate this, I'm going to tell you a vey simple personal story, just so you can see how this kind of behavior may seem very subtle, but it really has a deep rooted reason.

I want to share this and see if it resonates with you.

When I was in my twenties, before I went to individual therapy, I would do a lot of group healings. At that age, I was already immersed into all that. I'd been deep into the
Enneagram, Tarot reading, and belonged to metaphysical study groups. It was awesome.

But I had this behavior in which every time I went out with a friend, a female friend for coffee, tea or lunch, whatever it was,

I would always pay their bill.

 It was weird because there was no reason why I should do that, but I just felt this really unconscious impulse, this urge, to pay their bills.

And they would say, "that's really nice of you. You don't have to do this. I except it, of course, it's always a treat!"

But... it's not that it wasn't natural, but it was an emotional void I was trying to fill. 

I was feeling the emotional void and I was trying to fill it in some level or way by "compensating" the friend just for being there with me.

So later, still in my twenties, I was in already individual therapy. I was in therapy for four years, I would have individual sessions with a psychologist. Every other week I was there really trying to dig deep into my soul to heal these imbalanced behaviors.

Too much giving and not enough receiving. Not enough self-nurturing. And in my case that was a huge lack of self esteem.

I then asked myself: "Why did I have to pay the friend to be there? Why did I not have a sense of worth that we are just sharing wonderful time together?"

And that was a major wake-up call for me.

I did not have a lot of self-esteem at the time, and I really worked hard on it.

It's gotten much better, but it can still be a wound.

So with this in mind, pay attention to your actions.

Whenever you feel like you're nurturing too much, and that you're giving too much, you're not really respecting the balance in receiving law, or principle of Nature.

Right?

So I want to ask you, how is your balance in loving people? 

I know that you're a loving person, and that you give your love, and that love is infinite, so it always just keeps growing inside our hearts.

But what's your relationship with others when it comes to giving and receiving?

And it all adds up to love and being loved when it comes to material things, for instance. And when it comes to your time.

So do you give too much of your time and feel drained?

Because that's the thing, if you're dealing with people who do not have the same impulse as you, you may attract energy vampires, for lack of a better word. Or people who drain you, or takers, because

it takes two to tangle. If you give too much, you're going to attract people who take too much.

So the healthier we are on the emotional level, the better. This is what this whole video and the blog, the YouTube Channel and Ranova Healing Center are all about:

Emotional healing and emotional health. Being happy and balanced as a human being.

I'm sure you want to have healthy relationships. So if you give too much, you may be in relationships in which others take too much, or they just accept too much of what you give. And it may enable people.

Even if they're healthy, they're with a giver.

You start putting other people around you in a comfort zone.

Your kids, your significant other, and often your parents, because those who reach old age and don't have a self-development practice, don't really want to grow as human beings and dive deep into the soul, as they grow older, they tend to become childish.

I see a lot of people having a hard time with elderly parents because the parents become children again.

And then you have to nurture your parents emotionally, which is, again, not very aligned with the healthy flow of life and the principles of life. So ask yourself:

how do you balance your loving?

I'm not saying you should measure the love that you give to other people. That's not what I'm saying at all. It's just to be mindful and live in your truth.

Are you filling a void by giving - or not?

What happens is that in childhood, up until age seven, if you don't get enough emotional nurturing, you either become an excessive giver, or you become a taker. It's the same wound with different reactions.

So if you give too much and you attract takers, you both have the same wound, and that's why you're entangled, but

in these different reactions, the relationship is to your disadvantage if you're an excessive give.

I know this seems confusing, because when we love other people deeply, all we want to do is give.

We want to give our love. We want to share the treasures of our hearts with acts of kindness, gifts, words, our presence, hugs, our touch.

We want to expand in our love and just show them how much we love them, right?

That's one thing. But when love becomes a compensation for deeper emotional wounds, then it's not okay.

It's time for you to dive deeper into your soul.

So giving more than receiving is what I call a "love imbalance".

How do you explain what a love imbalance is?

So I like to think of our centers in the body as wisdom, love in the heart and power in the gut. So as children, we have infinite love in our hearts, right? But children are relatively powerless. Human babies cannot survive on their own. And though there is a wisdom of the soul that we're born with, depending on the person, a human baby cannot yet express his or her wisdom verbally. They can with their presences. But the love is just there, and it's infinite, and instantaneous, it's just a given when we're born as human beings.

So what I want to ask you is... when you love without wisdom, you don't see clearly, and when you love others without loving yourself first, you're giving away your power.

So these are two things that you need to look at.

Do you love other people with a clear mind and with open eyes, or do you love blindly?

Do you turn the blind eye to flaws?

Do you turn the blind eye, or turn your back on wisdom?

If you do,  that is not mature love. It is a needy, wounded inner child kind of love.

The other thing is, when you love others and give... and give... and give... and don't receive - and don't even allow yourself to receive. When you give too much, I see this as a pattern. I saw it in myself so many times! And I still have to watch out.

Don't think that I have all I have it all figured out because it's not true. I've become much better because I have done the work. It doesn't mean that I've healed at all.

But when you give and give and give, you're giving away your power.

It's not just love anymore. When you give too much, you're not only giving love away, you're giving your power away, your personal power.

And power is not a bad word. It's not a bad thing. It's not something that should be damned and not ever mentioned because we tend to confuse the meaning of personal power, or what Deepak Chopra calls the soft power, with abuse, right?

So power is not abuse. Power is a whole different story. We all have our dignity, our personal power, our honor, and our healthy boundaries. That's all related to healthy power.

Distorted power is usually what we tend to see as power without any qualifications or any adjectives, right?

So when you love other people more than you love yourself, you're giving your power away - period.

This is a big one. If you're a self-sacrificing person, if you become a victim or a martyr, it's because you're giving up your personal power. It's because you don't love yourself enough.

And let me tell you this, whenever you want to love other people in a healthy way, you need to love yourself first. You need to really be whole and happy and healthy and connected to self so that your love for others can be healthy too.

Otherwise, your love for other people is just not going to be as healthy as it could be.

So in the Cardinal Method, I always say this to all students and all clients. There's a threefold love in the heart of every human being.

We have love for self, love for others, and love for humanity - in this order.

Love yourself first.

Choose yourself.

Don't sacrifice yourself.

Otherwise you're going to be a victim or a martyr.

And I'm sure that's not what you want to be as a person in this incarnation.

So love yourself first, and with what overflows from your self-love, which will absolutely be a lot of energy because people who love themselves are healthy, happy, and have energy for others - healthy energy for other people.

You're not taking from yourself to give to others.

So be mindful of this, and this has a lot to do with your time too.

How much time do you give to others that you are taking away from yourself?

From your sleeping hours, from your eating, from your self-care, from your hobbies, from the activities that will align and support you as a self-sufficient, autonomous human being?

So whenever you give up on your time for self to give to others, it's out of alignment.

And I know this is not easy for people who are caretakers, for people who work too much, or work a lot to support their homes and families, for people who have a lot of children, but it is if you organize yourself, if you organize your inner world, you can be sure there will be enough time for everyone.

Yourself first, and after you've nurtured yourself, you can give to others - the people in your immediate surroundings, your husband, your children, your parents, your friends, whoever it is that needs your attention and time, but nurture yourself first.

Don't abandon yourself to love other people more than you love who you are.

So that's one thing - the balance in your love. Do you have a balanced love relationship with yourself? If you do, then you can have a balanced relationship with others, and a balanced a love relationship with humanity, because I see this a lot too...

Some people are self-sacrificing to help humanity.

They have caretaker jobs, which is beautiful. It's not just about the family and people they're close to in their personal and interpersonal relationships. It has to do with a bigger picture. It has to do with humanity.

But if it includes self-sacrificing, don't do it.

If it includes sacrificing your body, your diet, your exercise routine, your sleeping habits, you're not helping nature or humanity evolve, because no one's going to take care of you as well as yourself.

Unless you become sick or something happens to you, and then others will have to care for you.

And that's not a healthy life, or a free life, right?

You want to be healthy and awesome and full of love and energy so that you can contribute to the world and humanity.

For that to happen, self-love must come first.

And I'm not saying love yourself so that you can desperately love humanity, and putting humanity as the goal. It just is an organic, natural unfolding. And actually,

they become the same thing because the external world is a mirror image of your inner world.

The world outside of you reflects what you have inside.

So the more you organize within, the more you purify within, you're going to notice everything around you is going to start changing.

You're going to be in cleaner environments.

You're going to be around healthier people.

You're going to start attracting clients, or whatever it is your profession requires, everyone and everything around you will start raising vibration and becoming better quality, because you're really taking the time to change within.

So loving yourself will organically and naturally expand into loving others.

You're going to have more patience with other people.

You're going to feel more satisfied in having conversations and relationships.

It's going to become a virtuous circle, or an ascending spiral, or a benign expansion that cannot really be described in words.

You have to feel it and experience it.

So start with your time. Start with routine, making sure that you're protecting your sleep, as many hours as you need to sleep. Your movement routine, exercise, stretching, yoga, walking, whatever it is. Just move your body daily.

And also, your diet. Make sure you nurture yourself well. Please do not allow your diet to be a space where you lack self-love. Choose healthy ingredients, make time to create a meal, listen to high energy music while you're cooking.

Just create moments in your life, in your daily routine, in which you feel the self-love and that will for sure organically unfold and ripple-effect around you. Everyone around you will benefit.

You won't have to make any sort of effort, and you're going to be start creating healthy boundaries. That's the best thing - naturally.

So love for self ripple-effects naturally with people around you, and the giving and receiving balance is going to start happening organically, almost unconsciously.

Naturally and organically, you're going to start setting healthy boundaries just because you've decided to love and nurture yourself by dedicating more time creating  moments of self-care and joy at least for a little period of time.

It could be 20 minutes a day.

Do something you love. Read two pages of your favorite book, or contemplate a painting, or listen to music that is just pure pleasure and pure joy.

That is not included your sleep, or your diet, or your movement routine. That's an extra thing, okay? Be sue accommodate all four in your day.

And another thing that's very powerful, and very important for you to understand is that

love for others is our ability to give, and love for self is our ability to receive.

So the people who don't love themselves enough have a very hard time receiving.

They don't charge enough for their work.

They give too many gifts out of the blue.

They spend too much money trying to please other people, or too much time trying to please other people, or trying to accommodate other people's emergencies and demands in detriment of their own well-being.

So self-love is about receiving.

And you're going to say, wait a minute. This is counterintuitive because every time I hear these experts talking, it's all about "the more you give, the more you receive". 

That's true, but the more you give to yourself and nurture yourself, the more you're able to give to others.

And the trick here is to know -

do you allow yourself to receive?

Because the more you give, the more life is waiting to give back to you. Threefold. It's three times more, and I believe it's 10 times more, to be very honest.

There are these hermetic spiritual laws that say that everything you give will come back to you twice as much, or three times as much.

In my opinion, it's 10 times.

If we allow ourselves to receive, it's a game changer, and that's the greatest catch for givers - people who are givers are not very good receivers. We don't allow the receiving flow. That's very sad and it's very common.

Do you allow yourself to receive? Or are you too addicted to the position of being a giver? To the identity and the habit of giving, giving, giving, giving and not allowing yourself to receive? It is true that the more you give, the more you receive - if you allow the receiving to happen.

You can receive 10 times more than what you've given out, and that goes for everyone.

This is a Universal Law, but

do you allow Universal Law to work in your favor?

Because there's something we all have as humans have, which is free will.

And we can block our energetic circle. We can block our energy fields from receiving what life is dying to give us, what life has been waiting to give us (sometimes for years and decades).

Why do we build these medieval walls around ourselves that don't allow us to receive? Are we too addicted to the giver identity?

Do we think, on a deep unconscious level (and I know it's not easy to hear) we could be in a little bit of arrogance to think, "Oh, I can give all of my energy and I don't need to receive too much".

The people who receive the most are the most humble.

That's not just me saying.

Bert Hellinger, the creator of Family Constellation has said this, and many other authors have talked about this, like Abraham-Hicks, for example.

There are so many references that you can dive in, and they will say the same thing.

The more humble you are, the more grateful, the more appreciative of receiving, the more you will see the world with the eyes of a child, and the purer your heart is.

I know that, again, this is counterintuitive, and it's not easy to hear, but

the more your heart is blocked, the more emotional wounds you have, maybe even if it's unconscious, the less you allow yourself to receive.

So people who allow themselves to receive - and I'm not talking about takers, because takers are abusers that explore other people, and they also have a scarcity mentality, so they think there's never going to be enough to go around, so they need to hoard and take whatever it is, and dry everybody else and suck the energy of other people.
That's a whole distorted different mindset.

We're not, we're not talking about people who don't have love in their hearts. We're talking about people who have so much love in their hearts, but who don't know the balance between giving and receiving. So they give all their love to others and there is little left for self. It's a whole other ballgame that we're talking about here.

So don't create confusion in your mind. We're not talking about toxic people, or ignorant people. We're talking about good-hearted people who don't have enough mastery of self, or soul education to really balance their love and become healthy and happy on the emotional level.

And if that is your case, or the case of someone you know, I'm sure you can get a lot of clarity by understanding that the more you give to self, the healthier you are, and then you want to give more to others and more to humanity.

So self-care is the starting point to giving love healthily, and the second part is to allow yourself to receive.

Ask for it if you need to, because if you're surrounded by takers, or if you're surrounded by people who are also used to you being the giver and them being the receivers, they don't even have to be takers, but you've enabled or spoiled them, and you need to do some adjustments.

Everybody, the whole system, the whole group needs to readjust to a new mindset and  clarity of mind so that everybody is balanced in those relationships.

I hope this is making sense.

So again, when you give more than you receive, your tend to be abused.

So the first thing that's going to start happening, the more you start nurturing yourself and giving time to yourself, is that

the takers and the abusers are going to leave your life.

That's the best part, and if you use crystals for this, it can be any stone, but people always ask if they had to choose one single stone, or start with a stone, I always say to start with Clear Quartz.

Sometimes, if you're surrounded by very negative people, if there are too many negative influences around you, get an Amethyst too, which is a purple variation of Quartz.

So Amethysts transform all negativity into love. It's amazing. And Clear Quartz zeroes out the past and puts you in zero point field to create a brand new reality - starting now.

So I always say, choose Clear Quartz always, but you may need a little extra help to neutralize negativity, and then Amethysts will help immensely.

So the first thing that's going to start happening, the more you start loving yourself, the more you get the clarity that you need to love yourself first, is that abusers and takers are going to start leaving your life, and the people around you that were accommodated, or that were just enabled by your behavior will start changing and growing as human beings too, and balancing themselves out.

And I'm sure you're going to be more valued and appreciated by other people. So you start valuing yourself more. Your self-worth grows. And other people will start respecting you way more, because you now know how to set healthy boundaries and it's so easy, right?

Set healthy boundaries with your time.

Select a period of time in your day to nurture yourself.

Make sure you have enough hours of sleep.

Make sure you eat well and that you choose great ingredients and create great meals for yourself.

Make sure you move your body at least half an hour a day.

That's not so much to ask.

Do something joyful for yourself daily.

Read a good book, watch a movie, watch something awesome on YouTube.

Don't get addicted to screen time on your phone, but just do something that you love.

And the good news is you will heal your soul emotionally because feeling emotionally abused is going to go away.

It's not going to depend on others.

It's going to be your choice. It's going to be your shift.

It's going to be your change in behavior so you don't depend on anyone else.

That's why I tell everybody,

do not complain.

If you are being victimized, if there is a villain in your life, if someone is terrible to you,
breathe deep, change your behaviors, set healthy boundaries instead of complaining, take inspired action, and these people will go away.

It all comes from strengthening your core, living from your heart, and loving yourself first.

And everybody, I'm telling you, everybody is going to benefit. You can be absolutely sure of this.

And you will also understand that loving others and caring for others, if it's a disguise not to own your power, the key is now to own your power.

The key is now to not be afraid of your power, and your power right now in this present moment, in this conversation is one, two letter word, which is "no".

You really establish healthy boundaries and use your power when you say the word "no", just to say "no" to whatever it is that is not aligned with what you want to do in that moment, or to what you feel is abusive.

So don't fall in the trap of thinking of yourself as a very loving, giving person who's in an abusive relationship. That can very, very easily be a disguise for not owning your power.

So we've talked about love, and especially self-love today.

I hope it was clear.

I hope it has helped you.

Please share this video with anyone you believe will benefit from this content, and next week we'll talk about power.

I'll se you here!

Much love,

Paola.