You have all heard Miley Cyrus’s latest song, “Flowers” by now, and if not, where have you been hiding? This SELF LOVE ANTHEM is catchy, it’s rebellious, an honest and lyrical ‘f’ck you’ that has been stuck in my head for days until finally, I have come to understand why.

February is known as the month of love, that time of the year to proclaim love, celebrate love and perhaps even remember the importance of love and loved ones. How you do it and how you feel about it will depend on your level of consciousness and your lived experience of and with love.
We all love to love. It’s written in the stars, in our charts, in our hearts and in the very fibre of our body and being. Some would say that we are designed to love, or at the very least, be social creatures who crave and thrive on, connection and physical touch.

Yes, studies show that without the nurturing and nourishing connection and touch, disaster awaits. The story of Frederick, King of Germany, crowned so in 1212, and his experiments on nurturing (Dias, 2017) is evidence enough that we require love in its varying forms of expression to survive, thereby and by extension, to develop, grow and thrive as humans.

To digress. We all love to love. So much so that we can romanticise the shizz out of anything!

This February, while everybody else is focusing their time and energy on relationships and connecting to that special person or persons in their life, I’m focusing on the proclamation, the celebration and the importance of love for ourselves.

As Miley’s song say’s so earnestly, “I can buy myself flowers”, and quite honestly, I can! I can buy myself things, I can do things by myself, I can be whatever I want, whenever I want and I can choose myself time and time again. And yet, we as women seem to forget that we can give ourselves all that we want to receive, and anything outside of that will be a bonus.

My experience and observations inform me that there is, by human, patriarchal and or systemic design, a wanting that is inbuilt into our cells, the fibre of our being. A wanting that has been nourished and nurtured throughout the generations handed from one woman to the next. A wanting so visceral that it in and of itself becomes an internalised form of self-perpetuating oppression.

The very beliefs bestowed upon us, instilled into every fibre and cell of our bodies and being are the very things that lock and keep us locked into unhealthy forms of attachment to and with partners that are simply not worthy to be up close and personal with the full feminine expression of us.

Limiting beliefs and systems passed through ancestral lines, intergeneration links, and social structures contribute to perpetuating, living, and experiencing unhealthy forms of attachment to love, to partners, that are detrimental to our very soul, and potentially dangerous to the point of physical harm and death. At the time of finalising this piece, 7 women have had their lives taken in the short time that we have occupied 2023. 7 Australian women, gone, in the name of “love”.

The minimisation, the oppression, through multilingual verbiage that sits within a high degree of women is expressed in acts of people pleasing, playing small, minimising the space we take and the expression of our being.

Oh, the layers upon layers of complexity when we dive into the depths of self-love, of loving our bodies, our hearts, and our souls, first and foremost. I fear I may have gotten lost in those layers of complex dissection and exploration of the importance of, and the need for, self-love on a deeply profound and genuine level as the waters are so deep, muddied and soiled that the challenge becomes not losing oneself.

On the surface, we have the kick-arse self-love themes like “Flowers” amping us up to walk tall in our skin and on our own, to release our need, our desire, and our attachment to having another love us. As we inch below the surface though, we are faced with more and more complexities, implications, and dangerous outcomes.

So, what is the reason for “Flowers” being ever-present now? Simply put, it is highlighting the need to love ourselves more deeply, more purposefully and intentionally. It is the beacon of guiding light illuminating the potential, the power, the perfectly imperfect prowess of womankind, the feminine divine, and how it is us whom we should rely upon, period. We don’t need to settle. We don’t need to sacrifice any part of ourselves or our self-expression, not for love and not in the name of love. To be honest, when we genuinely, truly, madly deeply get that about love, the love that comes to us through other human beings will be a love worth having.

For more on self-love, please visit the Conscious Connections FB for #14daysofselflove prompts.

If you haven’t heard Miley’s song yet, listen here: FLOWERS

Best Wishes,

 

 

 

P.S. Join the Conscious Connections FB for more conversations on relationships and self-love. 

References and Sources List

1. Dias, D. (2018). The ten types of human : a new understanding of who we are and who we can be. Windmill Books.
   
   
2. Australian Femicide Watch – @MapFemicide