In 2015 I was invited to speak at a summit called Self-Love Revolution. Of course, I spoke on the subject of Toxic Free Living as an Act of Love.

Since it’s Valentine’s Day this week, I thought I would offer you the giveaway as a Valentine’s gift.

I hadn’t read it since then, but I loved reading it just now. It warmed my heart and I want to share it with you.

Here is an excerpt from the ebook.

DOWNLOAD FREE EBOOK HERE

What Self-Love Means to Me

I want to tell you a story about something that laid the foundation for me about what love is. It happened many years ago, in 1985, when I was 29 years old. It was one year after my first book about toxics in consumer products was published—actually it was the first book about consumer products ever published.

Now I have to correct this story. I told it one way in the Self Love Revolution Summit interview, but as I am working on this giveaway, I am realizing some of the detailed were incorrect in my memory that day.

I was living in San Francisco at the time, not Marin County, and I decided to go for a drive. Some days, you know, you just feel like you just have to take the day off. And I got into my sporty little Volkswagon GTI and I just started driving.

I drove north over the Golden Gate Bridge and just started driving the backroads up into Sonoma County where they all have the vineyards, and I ended up in a little bookstore. As I was looking at books in the bookstore, a book fell off the shelf into my hand. It fell off the shelf into my hand, honestly.

The book was The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. And I bought it. I thought, “If the book is going to fall off the shelf into my hand, I better buy it and I better read it.”

I just want to share a little portion of the book to you because it touched my heart. And here it is:

When we love something, it is of value to us. And when something is a value to us, we spend time with it, time enjoying it and time taking care of it.”

Observe a teenager in love with his car and note the time he would spend admiring it, polishing it, repairing it, tuning it. Or an older person with a beloved rose garden and the time spent pruning and mulching and fertilizing and studying it.”

When we love, our love becomes demonstrable or real only through our exertion, through the fact that for that loved one, we take an extra step or walk an extra mile.”

Love is not effortless. To the contrary, love is effortful.

I have probably read this a hundred times in my life. I always come back to this. The book is still available. It’s such a beloved book. It’s a classic book.

I had never heard anything like this before. I always thought love was romantic. It’s what you see in the movies and it happens between a man and a woman or a mother and a child or something. But this was such a universal definition that it’s like . . . when you really love, when you truly, deeply love, it sparks you to want to care for that which you love.

And so if you don’t love yourself, you won’t take care of yourself. It’s really love that is the motivating thing within you that makes you want to be the best that you can be, to make you want to take care of your body, to make you want to do all those self-exploration things, to find out who you are and how you can be a better person. It comes from love. And we all have that. And so health comes from loving yourself and taking care of yourself is the result.

You feel better and then you get reinforced and you want to continue to do the actions once you start taking them.

DOWNLOAD FREE EBOOK HERE

It turns out that love has many health benefits, including:

* longer life
* fewer colds & flu
* better blood pressure
* healthier eating habits
* better stress management
* less depression
* less pain
* faster healing

And more…

Here are some articles with more information on love and health:

THE GOOD INSIDE: 5 Surprising Health Benefits of Love

WEB MD: 10 Surprising Health Benefits of Love

NATURAL HEALERS: 11 Unexpected Health Benefits of Love

Add Comment