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The only relationship that matters is between you and your higher self. This lesson is about loving yourself unconditionally and becoming your own soulmate.
Review
- You are the magician. Life design is about consciously creating your reality.
- Lifestreaming can help you design a better life. You can’t get it wrong and you’ll never get it done.
- Your mood is your work. Directing your thoughts should be your number one priority in life, because your thoughts manifest your physical experience.
- Practice feeling good NOW and it will get easier.
- Thoughts become things. Your environment is an indicator of your thoughts.
You are solely responsible for your experience in life. The more you care about your mood, the more enjoyable life is. When you feel only love, joy and appreciation, you are in control of your reality. Because we live in an attraction-based universe, if you choose to feel nothing but love for yourself, you will receive nothing but love in return.
You and you

You are the physical manifestation of your higher self (which you may think of as god, or the fourth dimension, or a flow of well-being, or source energy, or infinite intelligence, or true self). When you think positive thoughts about yourself, you feel at one with your higher self. You’re inspired, passionate, and happy. Your thoughts can then direct the evolution of your higher self, by attracting more and more ways to feel good, love, grow and experience life to the fullest.

When you think negative thoughts about yourself, you block your connection with your higher self. Without that connection, you feel lost, depressed, or angry. You feel like life is hard, and the world is against you. This is only because you are turning away from your source of well-being! Picture being in a river. When you think positive thoughts about your life, you are going with the flow, heading downstream. But if you start thinking negatively, it’s like turning around and trying to paddle upstream. You get water in your nose, you wear yourself out, and you start hating the river! It really is that simple–choose to feel good about yourself, and life will feel as easy and natural as floating downstream.
Love yourself first
You can’t rely on others to make you feel good, because when they shift their attention away from you, you feel bad. When you learn how to make yourself feel good, you alone get to control how you feel.
Your thought patterns about yourself determine your SELF. If you decide to only engage in loving thoughts about yourself, you will become that all that you love. If you only think about how much you love yourself, you’ll BE only love – attracting more love to you.
All longstanding issues stem from not loving yourself. For example, an eating disorder may result from not loving yourself enough to do what’s best for your body.
When you decide to love yourself, unconditionally, you will no longer have any “issues.”
To begin, try making a list of reasons why you love yourself. Not, “I’ll love myself WHEN…” but “I love myself BECAUSE…” Or browse Gala Darling’s inspiring articles on radical self-love, which are guaranteed to raise your vibration about yourself.
Relationships with others
Loving yourself helps your relationships. When you are really into yourself, other people want to get in on the action. When you respect yourself, other people have no choice but to do the same. When you are confident and happy and feeling good about yourself, you attract positive interactions with others. Picture trying to find a mate. Do you think you’d have better luck if you were out and about, laughing and smiling, doing what makes you feel good? Or would you have better luck feeling sorry for yourself with a crappy face on? People gravitate towards positive people, because they want to be inspired, they want to feel good, and they want to learn how to feel good themselves.
While you’re putting the romantic moves on yourself, you can also take more specific actions to direct your current and future relationships:
- If you feel like you’re lacking a specific relationship, focus on how much you LOVE, not how much you are loved. Your thoughts become things, so it makes sense that when you think about how much you love, you will only find more to love. You have an infinite capacity to love, so if you measure your worth in how much you love, you become invaluable! If you measure your worth in how much other people love you, you’ll always be looking for more. The love you receive from others will never feel like enough–because you have no control over it.
- Think only of the positive aspects of people you dislike. While we were camping the other day, I was about to tear into this girl I had a grudge against. Kelly suggested I talk about the positive aspects of her, and all the sudden I started liking her. Powerful stuff!
- Focus on what you like about the relationships you have. What do you like about your current friends? Make lists of what it is you value in your friendship. When you think about these positive qualities, you attract more relationships with similar qualities.
- Practice unconditional love with your pets. Animals never judge, never hate. They only keep loving you no matter what! They don’t care what you look like, they only want to feel love! And it goes both ways – you don’t get in a fight with your pet when they barf on your carpet, you just chalk it up to the wonders of pet-ownership ;]
- Check out Gay & Katie Hendricks. They say to just tell the truth and take responsibility in a relationship and you will thrive. Of course–you are creating your reality, so take responsibility!
Lifestreaming can help you love yourself more
Lifestreaming is a way to tell the universe how you want your life to be. When your lifestream focuses on positivity – documenting things that make you feel good, sharing your projects, etc – you are declaring what your life is about. The more you describe your reality and your self in a positive manner, the more those things become part of your reality. The more you focus on the good parts of your life, the more good parts there are. The better it gets, the better it gets.
Lifestreaming also gets you comfortable with self-reflection – figuring out what you want from your life. How can you know what you want without asking yourself?
Best of all, a lifestream is a magickal record of your experience. Like tree rings, you can see how far you’ve come. When you look back, you can see evidence of your powerful mind. Adding to your lifestream is like casting a spell – what do you want to happen? The more you document your journey into joy, the more active you become in creating your journey, and the better results you will have. As a magickal record, a lifestream can prove this stuff actually works. For example, I often describe how I want my day to go in my emotional hygiene posts. More often than not, my day goes exactly as I want. That’s enough proof for me right there. When I see evidence of my control over my experience, I experience joy and love for myself and my power.
When you are really into yourself, your projects and hobbies, other people take interest. Any really good blog can show you that. Lifestreaming attracts like-minded folks, because you are making your positive energy physically accessible by others. (My theory is this: we are all individual nodes of one consciousness. However, we have become so deeply rooted in our individual, physical realities that we don’t pay attention to our inherent oneness. The Internet has manifested as a way for us to see in physical reality how connected we really are. When we reach the technological singularity, we will all become aware of our oneness again.) So practice positivity with others. Spread the love.
Finally, by maintaining a lifestream of the positive aspects of your life, you are showing confidence in your ideas, and a commitment to finding solutions. What potential friend, romantic partner, employer or client could resist that? As you explore what you love through your website, you begin developing a record of positive experiences and a portfolio of inspired work.
Activity
Get comfortable in front of a camera. Loving yourself is all about appreciating your mind and spirit, but also your physical body. If you can’t learn to love your physical body, unconditional love will be hard to reach! So this week, obtain a camera of any kind (video or still) and go to town!
Do a photoshoot with your best friend in the woods. Take daily outfit photos. Start a video podcast! Do a series on your hands, or smile, or eyes. Start any way you can! Then, publish the best of the lot to your website and bask in how beautiful you are. Documenting your physical body is a great way to start accepting yourself–if you do it enough, you become used to seeing yourself from the outside. You stop hating your voice, or your hair, or your ass, or whatever other silly notion about yourself you may have. You are a BEAUTIFUL, UNIQUE, AND LOVING person who isn’t afraid to show off her incredible life!
Post a link to your images or videos in the comments, so we can all relish each other’s beauty!
To go deeper into this lesson, don’t forget to listen to the discussion MP3. This week, Kelly and I do a more complete review of past lessons and talk about examples from our own past and current relationships. We also go more into depth about letting go, thinking about yourself as your own pet, and how lifestreaming can really make this stuff real.
See you next time!
Lesson 7 is Designing Work. Designing Work is all about what comes after you’ve started feeling love for yourself–you go out & tell the world about what you love! And then massively cash in
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Thank you!
Designing life wouldn’t be nearly as fun without you! If you enjoyed this lesson, please consider a donation to keep the School of Life Design thriving.
Thank you for co-creating with me!









2010




What a great lesson! I really appreciate how you are spreading love and self-help for people to start recognizing and living what they want to be. I love how I was able to see the full picture of all the connections that were touched on when we were hanging out. I love how even though you are in a great relationship with Kelly, you are helping individuals help them selves so they can attract relationships (if that is what they want). I love your suggestions on how to promote self-love and how they really do work. Thank you for sharing! Stoked about lesson 7! Ps- are you going to have one for couples and how to help support each others efforts in keeping positive spirits and staying connected and on the same level? or do you think that would even be a necessary topic to discuss?
Thank you Betty! I LOVE hearing your feedback and ideas! As for your question, I think adding a section to this lesson for people already in relationships would be useful, but the main ideas are already there – focusing on loving yourself is still the most important thing you can do while in a relationship.
I think the best thing I’ve learned lately with Kelly is that we both have to do our own thing to feel happy, and we have to let each other do what we want. I can’t make decisions based on what I think will make Kelly feel good, because then I’m not taking care of my own vibration/wants. But when we both decide to follow what makes us feel good individually, we are able to enjoy each other’s company much more. It helps that we are rather open sexually, and that we now understand that if one wants to drink or get f-ed up the other isn’t required to.
Thank you for your input, I love our discussions!
Very nice. That is the perfect answer to my question. I am having trouble expanding on it because you answered it so well. Ha, that’s awesome.
GREAT lesson! i can’t wait to indulge some serious thought and creative energy into this fascinating area of Life Design! i can bet that it would be nothing short of exhilarating to design and create the springboard from which i’ll eagerly be doing my co-creating. oh, the right place to look for love is firstly within the expanded version of ourselves–Source flowing and responding in each of us.
Thank you Venus! I’ve had the pleasure of perusing your site, it is so uplifting! Yes, the right place to look for love is within, it makes life seem so much easier that way.
Which is some inspiring stuff. By no means suspected that opinions could be this different.
I LOVE THIS. All of the series. It’s just fantastically mind-blowing, all the hard work you’ve put into this and the incredible QUALITY of it. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU. And yes, capslock was necessary, TRUST ME.
Thank you Sharon! I’m so glad it resonates so deeply with you! You are making my day!