a secure sense of self
self energy, in the IFS sense
a friend recently asked me write on this topic, so here goes.
What I mean when I talk about self energy:
it feels like I have largely positive relationships with my parts/emotions
I can, at any time, tap into a large reserve of love, and access a deep sense of felt safety and peace and calm and warmth
I feel held by my self.
I feel a strong sense of inner harmony, cohesion, trust, and love. I love being in my own self, spending time with myself, exploring my inner workings.
when i scan my body, various parts of my body (my heart, my chest, my legs, etc) have positive responses to me, want to support me, have a role they are proud to accomplish, love me, and trust me.
where i don’t have a good relationship, I feel that we are getting there or allowing for space and holding awareness
There is a good notification system for when things are off, and I can then go in and try to figure out what is needed by what parts of me.
I journal to consistently check in on myself and smooth out kinks, tend to neglected areas, straighten up.
at one point I read that there is a way to hit “critical mass” or some kind of tipping point of self energy (read: No Bad Parts), at which point a larger volume of self energy will start rushing in. I devoted myself to developing enough of the characteristic traits of the 8 C’s (Compassion, Creativity, Curiosity, Connected, Courage, Confidence, Clarity, and Calm) to get to that critical mass, and allowed gravity to take over from there.
developing my sense of personal taste also helps me ground in who I am, what I like, what I feel, what I think, what I value. I can separate from other people’s frames and feel into what makes me me. I know— oh, that is a cool thing that you enjoy, but that doesn’t work for me, and I like XYZ instead.
I ask myself “is this mine?” when I find myself buzzing over some emotional message, and often times I find that the fear or insecurity came from someone else. It is not mine, and I can drop it.
I am not motivated by others that often. I would say I am strongly intrinsically motivated. Concepts like “doing things so that others like me” or “getting points” feel fairly distant/foreign to how I operate. My form of operation is more like, “wow look at this cool leaf” or “I feel strange right now”.
Similarly, I feel very little self coercion. I practice this idea I found in the article Productivity for Special Snowflakes where I line up the part that is present at the moment with the task that is best suited for them. If the part that is showing up wants to nap, then I nap. If the part that is showing up wants to focus, then I focus. If the part want to sing, I sing. This leads to me napping at random parts of the day and working through the night, but this works well for me given the way my life is set up (remote work, okay with breaking routine, etc).
I do solo mdma trips that help me feel my emotions and access closer presence to the larger self. Over time I have found that I can tap into the large reservoir of love and sensation of being “self held”
Over time, self love and self energy compounds.
That’s all I have for now— let me know if you have any questions or comments and I will add to this article!
Homework
look at yourself in the mirror and observe your limbs. thank each limb for what it does to support you, purely from a functional, not aesthetic, level.
map your parts (in IFS sense), acquaintance yourself with your main cast, develop awareness and then trust and then love/care/affection
ask yourself, “Is this (emotion, fear, etc) mine?”
ask yourself, “who am I?”. If it feels good, ask regularly.
collect things you like, mix and match them, find patterns and pull out themes to find your taste
you can recite to yourself: I matter. My needs matter. I like my needs. My needs like me. I love myself. My self loves me.
You can make variations as feels fit.
do stream of consciousness journaling, then read what you wrote