Worthy of Love — Jayna Russel

The other morning I went for a walk in our neighborhood. It was really early, just as the sun began to peak over the mountains, and the world was stirring to life around me.

We live in a pretty rural area, so I saw wild turkeys and heard roosters crowing- I even had a peacock cross my path. It was gorgeous.

But you wanna know something? I was miserable. And why, you might ask? Because while the beauty swirled all around me, I was engaged in an inner battle with the negative voices inside my head. It was like this nagging, vociferous chatter storming between my ears, and I couldn’t get out from under the heavy wave of self-criticism.

Totally sad, huh?

It took about two-thirds of the walk for me to catch my breath and push the pause button long enough to consider what was going on. And here’s the first thing that came to my mind: this kind and compassionate voice emerged from the cackling and posed a question, which went something like this.

“How can you expect others to be transformed by the message of your writing if you don’t allow yourself to be transformed by it first?”

This stopped me in my tracks, and then the sweet voice added, “You, my dear, are worthy of love.”

As you can imagine, these words were a soothing balm to my weary mind, and it occurred to me that I might need to start taking my own advice. I need to find ways to let freedom reign inside my head.

My first conclusion was that I could make a New Year’s resolution to practice using positive affirmations throughout the day. You know, like three or four months from now.

As in, later. Not now. Maybe some other time.

But the persistent voice urged me on, “You need this now, mydear. You don’t need to go another day without the restorative power of love in your life.”

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m making a commitment to speak back to the negative voices in my head with a message of love. And I invite you to do the same. I’ll share my affirmations with you for the rest of this fantastic year, so that we can be transformed by the healing power of love together.

Now, before we close our time together, I want you to do something. It will take all of six seconds, so there’s no excuse not to.

I want you to take a nice, deep breath, and repeat after me:

I am worthy of love.

Super simple, right? Take it with you this week, and repeat it every time the negative voices rear their ugly heads.

You matter, and you are worthy of love.

Cheers to all of you, my sparkling, magnanimous fly girls. Go out there and soar this week.