The Path To Success Is Paved With Self-Love
A Valentine’s Day Ritual To Honour Your True Desires
There is a popular saying that diamonds are a girl’s best friend.
But if you ask me, I would say it’s flowers.
Flowers are a girl’s best friend!
Both diamonds and flowers have now been over-marketed as “romantic” gifts for women (usually from men), but if I had to choose between the two, I would choose flowers.
I know some people are into gems. But this girl is into stems!
Today I share a story of my love of flowers and a beautiful Valentine’s Day ritual using flowers to deepen self-love by honouring your true desires.
I grew up in concrete city—an overpopulated and overpolluted major city in Southeast Asia—with very little nature to be found. As a little girl, any and all of nature was precious and magical to me, because I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to travel to places that were more nature-filled.
Today, I’m so blessed to live in the Pacific Northwest, in close proximity to the wonders and beauty of Mother Nature right at my doorstep—literally and only within minutes and hours from home.
Giving flowers as gifts weren’t really a “thing” when I was growing up. I don’t remember my father giving my mother flowers, nor did I see it practised among the couples around me, married or not. I did, however, notice flowers at weddings and funerals or at business grand openings.
Regardless, I always thought giving and receiving flowers was something precious, special and magical. And it didn’t matter which gender was doing the giving and receiving and for what occasion.
Thoughout my twenties, I dated young men who were interesting and intelligent, if not somewhat eccentric, and they had their ways of showing their affection, but for some reason, none of them were flower-giving types.
One of them gave me plants, however, which was the closest thing to me ever receiving something with stems, leaves and potential blooms.
I can’t remember exactly when I started buying myself flowers, but it was around my early thirties after I had spent a good five years consciously single at my prime dating and marriageable years.
I decided that instead of waiting for a man—or anyone—to give me flowers, I was going to give them to myself.
And it was the best decision that I ever made.
Today, I buy myself flowers whenever I feel that I want some beauty and magic in my world. Or whenever I want to affirm my feminine heart and all the desires it holds and wants to express in the world.
On Valentine’s Day in 2015, I did a ritual to honour my period of five years of conscious singlehood and stated my intentions to begin dating again, and to love myself first, no matter what.
It was also the year I launched my first coaching brand, The Conscious CEO Experience™, which took a lot of guts—and love.
The path to success is paved with self-love.
Yes, you need the other stuff too: the right mindset, being connected to your purpose, a compelling vision, and supportive people who have your back. But it starts with you deciding to love yourself more and saying YES to what’s true in your heart.
Valentine’s Day is widely known and marketed as a romantic holiday, but it is so much more than that.
Its origins also represent virtues and values of justice, inclusion, standing for what you believe in even in the face of persecution, and honouring of the beauty and fecundity of Mother Nature, our ultimate source of unconditional love and nourishment.
Today, I share this simple ritual in hopes that you can connect with the place of origin—the place of unimpeachable love inside yourself, no matter who does or doesn’t love you, no matter what else is going on in your external world that causes you to feel loved or unloved.
The ritual is as follows:
1. Set your intention to increase the connection to your heart space and deepen radical and unconditional self-love in the form of being true to yourself—where you have your own back, where you won’t betray or abandon yourself, and where you can hold a larger space of loving kindness for everything in your life, good or bad.
What could you make more time for, if you listened to what really matters?
What would you let go of, if you had permission to de-commit yourself from things that don’t align?
What could you hold more acceptance of, if you knew that you couldn’t change it?
What would you commit to or show up more for, if you loved yourself more truly?
2. From a stream of consciousness space, brain-soul-heart-storm 12 ways to love yourself more this year.
3. Buy a dozen roses (any colour that resonates with you) and keep it in your home or office for 12 days, allowing your intentions to fill your space.
4. On the 13th day, release your roses. Take your dozen roses to a body of water (sea, ocean, river, stream, lake, etc.), take each stem and say a prayer of your intentions, blowing your breath onto the flower, and release it to the water (throw the stem to the water one by one).
5. Give thanks to yourself and to all the elements for supporting your journey to deepening self-love.
If you feel inspired to share your list with me, I would be honoured to support you however way I can! You can do this ritual any time you are called to bring more self-love into your space, not just on Valentine’s Day.
Here’s my list for 2022.
1. Give myself more time than I think I need to do anything, so it reduces stress of not having enough time.
2. Yoga at home, before bed.
3. Write more, write often. Commit to my writing life.
4. More appreciations, less complaints (with myself and others).
5. Be conscious about where I’m making sacrifices and why, and be at peace with those choices.
6. Reduce sugary and processed foods.
7. Bi-weekly money dates where I am paying attention to personal finance activities.
8. Speak my truth more often and with more kindness than I believe the other person deserves.
9. Outsource everything that is not in my zone of genius.
10. Turn my worries into prayers—let go and let God.
11. Don’t stress about the little things. Instead laugh at them.
12. Acknowledge and celebrate my creative risks—even if no one else does.
I am so grateful you are in my world.
Wishing you a beautiful, heart-full and love-infused Valentine’s Day!
© 2022 Rosalyn C. RainDancer
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