How To Practice Self Love While In A Relationship

The personal development world and spiritual growth worlds provide a lot of great tools to build your core stability, build your center in yourself, and help you ground yourself.

When you’re alone.

And it’s relatively easy to use these tools to find internal peace when alone.

But what about in relationships? It can be tempting to blame relationships for the reason you’re taken off your center and out of peace.

But the relationships you find yourself in are the relationships that are here to help you see where you let yourself be taken off your center.

A different toolset is needed to practice self-love WHILE relating with others and caring for them.

It requires regulating your nervous system not just while meditating but also while triggered, feeling fear, and in conflict with another..

When the nervous system gets activated and there’s a flood of energy and emotion, how do you stay true to yourself? How do you stay centered in yourself while still remaining open and loving to another?

The first thing to note is that, when you’re with any other person, there’s a third aura that gets created between the two of you. This transpersonal aura has a flavor of its own, neither you or them. This is why you can experience yourself very differently depending on who you’re with. You’re actually operating within the transpersonal aura.

So self-love in relationships is a balance of staying true to your Individual Truth and surrendering into the Truth of the relationship.

It’s a dance.

And the first step of that dance is determining the boundaries and space you need in order to stay centered in your Truth while sinking slowly into surrender of the greater Truth of the relationship. Only you know how much space you need to stay centered. And you can determine what that is by giving yourself enough space to return to emotional center in between dates or experiences. For example, if you find yourself leaving behind practices or commitments that are important to you to chase the high of hanging out with the person, that’s a key indicator to take a little more space.

For me, growing up with abandonment wounds and anxious attachment, re-centering can sometimes take a few days or even a week to really come back to myself. There’s no rule about this. It’s a practice to discover how much time you need.

Most importantly, it’s a practice of dancing at the edge, both allowing yourself to stay True to what’s important to you individually AND letting yourself sink into the love and intimacy.

It’s also about finding what level of compromise is honoring of both your Truth and the relational Truth. And to not rush this process. Take space, move slowly, let the love sink in.

What you don’t want to do is get into situations where you’re compromising yourself too much. A sign of this is if you’re beating yourself up and getting frustrated. Or if you have triggers like fears of abandonment or fears of not being accepted arising. Give yourself enough time and space to build a strong foundation within yourself and for the relationship where you can feel that self love, self centeredness, and that orientation around yourself while in relationships.

And once you determine the space and boundaries you need to set, it’s about communicating those boundaries compassionately and kindly. Your intimate partner, or friend, or business collaborator, or fellow team member may be triggered by your boundaries They may not completely understand. And it may trigger their own wounding from their childhood.

It can be so easy to get defensive instead of staying in the uncomfortable communication dancing between the needs, wounds, and emotions of you and them. Self-Love in relationships involves the love of another as well.

Because if you don’t honor the other while honoring yourself (when the other person is available for that kind of conversation), then you’ll likely end up feeling guilty or having relationship challenges later. So setting the boundaries you need but being really, really compassionate with the other about their response to the boundaries and balancing those two worlds.

After that, it’s about practicing and building the capacity to be the center point of your reality and to orient around yourself while relating. This is about connecting to your truth and not losing your truth in a relationship.

It’s about being aware of your individual truth AND the transpersonal truth that is being created between you and the other person. It’s about knowing where your compromise feels like a loving surrender into the relationship and where it feels like too much of a compromise to the point where it doesn’t feel good.

Because, when you sacrifice too much for the relationship for whatever reason, perhaps because you think you need to to make it work, there’s going to end up being some resentment. And then, you’ll have never given the relationship a chance to see if it could navigate the uncomfortable conversation that happens when there’s two differing individual Truths. To see if a third Truth could emerge that felt good to everybody.

These are the conversations that are hard to have but are both self-loving AND loving to the other. Loving to the relationship.

So it’s about deep communication. It’s about being willing to communicate and hear the other and hear the impact your needs are having on them. It’s about realizing the impact their needs are having on you and being willing to have a really, really loving conversation about it.

This idea of self love in relationship is the real work. Yes, you can meditate by yourself for hours and really achieve that place of peace and come to that place of peace. It’s in those moments of trigger and fear, when you find the courage to stay self-loving AND loving to the other, that you truly transcend into another level of self-love.

It’s about finding that balance point, that point of harmony. And doing the dance around it and towards it, without attachment to what the relationship has to be. And practicing. There is no formula here, per se, it’s just practice and really making sure that you’re putting a priority on feeling centered when you connect with the other person.

Core stability can emerge in your relationship from a solid foundation of both you and the other each choosing your core stability in the beginning.

And then working out the kinks and exploring where each person feels okay to compromise and doesn’t, and then discovering if there’s a way to work with each other.

From having those challenging, loving conversations and working through the uncomfortable emotions that you may have around owning your boundaries and declaring space when you need it – is where self-love IN relationships is born. By working through the discomfort and fear that comes up in you in those situations, you get to love yourself more deeply. By working through that with the other and with yourself, you’re building such a strong foundation for the truth of the relationship to emerge.

If you build that energetic foundation, everything else flows from that.

This is what self love looks like in a relationship: this delicate, beautiful dance with the other and balancing your needs and theirs and the needs of the unit.

So I invite you to not just read this blog and shut it off, but to pause and journal on some of these questions:

What are your needs?
What are their needs, as far as you know? Or maybe ask them?
What are the needs of the unit?
What are you willing to compromise? What are you not willing to?
What impact is your or your needs and boundaries having on the other?
How can you have more compassion for them?

These kinds of questions can create a lot of openness for communication and just awareness within yourself. And if you’re struggling to connect to your truth or stay grounded into your truth, I highly recommend utilizing the Human Design System.

If you haven’t heard of it, it’s an amazing system that I came across eight years ago, have deeply studied, and have done over 250 readings. It helps you to reconnect to a Truth within you that needs no external validation. It’s beyond logic and reason. It’s the Truth before you learned who you “should” be and how you “should” view the world.

I believe in this system so much, I created a Report to introduce you to your Human Design Strategy, Authority, Type, and Profile in the context of The Phoenix Method, a method to help you tap back into the Fire of your Truth and build your capacity to stand in it, fiercely and self-lovingly.

I hope you take a moment to download it and enjoy it!

If this post resonated with you, I invite you to join the “Human Design Applied” Facebook Group where you’ll find support and inspiration to embody your Human Design, align to your truth, and trust yourself like never before!