Yoga: A Path to Self-Love

By Nikki Fisher

What single factor determines every aspect of how we live and every relationship we have?

This provocative question is at the core of this raw and powerful book Yoga: A path to self-love. How much or how little we love ourselves ultimately determines the very quality and richness of our lives. This book explores how the practices of yoga and mindfulness help us develop a deep and unconditional love for ourselves.

The breakdown of her marriage, and a transformative experience on her yoga mat, led Nikki to explore the true healing power of yoga. Having practiced yoga for almost 25 years, Nikki shares what she has learned from her own journey with candid openness and wisdom. By drawing on personal experiences and the ancient teachings of yoga, Nikki shows us:

•What authentic self-love really means and what often blocks us from achieving it
•Easy techniques we can use straight away to increase our feelings of love and self-worth
•Why cultivating awareness through mindful practices like meditation is crucial to fostering authentic self-love
•How the physical yoga practice can lead to a deeper connection to self
•What the other limbs of yoga offer us on our path towards genuine self-love
•Why letting go of past hurts is key to loving ourselves wholeheartedly
•How forgiveness and perspective can lead to fulfilment

No matter where you are on your yoga journey, this book shows us what’s possible when we can forgive ourselves and others, tap into our own innate wisdom and support ourselves with kindness, compassion and love.

Praise for Yoga: A Path to Self-Love

Yoga: A path to self-love is a beautiful book for anyone craving the chance to live more simply, mindfully and with more self-love and care. Nikki’s book has personally given me the permission needed to see that looking after myself first is essential. Nikki herself is proof that the physical practice of yoga, along with regular meditation, can help us deal with all of life’s difficulties, in often unexpected ways.

It’s one of the most well rounded, practical books I’ve come across to make real, lasting change in the pursuit of inner contentment. A perfect life guide for anyone who’s too busy, stressed, anxious, or simply stuck in a rut. Nikki’s tips will help you create more space to simply enjoy your best life, whatever that looks like to you. I will treasure this book always, and read it time and time again.
Carly Flynn – TV and radio host, Yogi and Mother

Yoga has so many rich teachings to offer and Nikki breaks them down into simple tools we can all use to live a full life right now! The message of ‘self-love’ empowers us to do the inner work so that our outer world reflects that. I love how she shares her personal experiences throughout as examples of how powerfully the tools have impacted her life. Yoga: A path to self-love is both arresting and insightful. I read it in one sitting!
Jase Te Patu - Co-Owner of Awhi Yoga and Wellbeing, Creator of M3 Mindfulness for children, TedX presenter

I loved reading this book so much! It's filled with practical tools, research and powerful personal stories. Yoga: A path to self-love helped me learn how to be a better person and I feel like a weight of self-judgment has been lifted. I love how Nikki has distilled so many great teachings into one simple, short book. This is a must read for anyone who wants to learn how to be kinder to themselves.
Kristina Cavit - MNZM and founder of The Kindness Institute

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nikki Fisher
• Release date: May 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780473520984

Book preview

Yoga

A Path to Self-Love

By Nikki Fisher

This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as expressly permitted in writing by the author or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

ISBN: 978-0-473-52098-4 (E-pub)

ISBN: 978-0-473-52099-1 (Kindle)

ISBN: 978-0-473-52100-4 (PDF)

ISBN: 978-0-473-52308-4 (Softcover – POD)

Some of the names and other details of the individuals mentioned in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of those individuals.

Cover design by Antony Pelosi

Cover photo by Stephanie Greene on Unsplash

Copyright @ 2020 by Nikki Fisher

TO MY PARENTS

for showing me what love is

TO MY CHILDREN

for allowing me to feel it

Contents

Contents

Introduction: Loving Yourself Enough

Chapter 1 – Bumps in the Road

Chapter 2 – Leaning into Love

Chapter 3 – Digging Deeper

Chapter 4 – Cultivating Awareness

Chapter 5 – Self-Love through Yoga

Chapter 6 – Yoga Beyond the Poses

Chapter 7 – Forgiveness, Perspective and Letting Go

Chapter 8 – Walking your Path

Acknowledgements

Author’s notes

About the Author

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.

—John Lennon

Introduction: Loving Yourself Enough

My mother retired recently and relocated to another part of the country. While packing her house, she discovered a book she knew would be of interest to me as I had just embarked on writing this book. It’s titled When I Loved Myself Enough by Kim McMillen and her daughter Alison McMillen. In it, Kim says she lived with a guarded heart for her first forty years not knowing how to extend love and compassion to herself.

Sadly, and apparently unexpectedly, Kim died at just 52 leaving her daughter Alison to complete and publish the book. The last decade or so of Kim’s life had clearly been one spent learning how to treat herself with kindness, compassion and love.

The book is one of those coffee table style books with a simple statement on each page. As I flicked through her statements, I realised that they summed up so beautifully my very motivations for writing this book. These are some of Kim’s statements:

When I loved myself enough, I quit settling for too little.

When I loved myself enough, I learned to meet my own needs and not call it selfish.

When I loved myself enough, I began listening to the wisdom of my body. It speaks so clearly through its fatigue, sensitivities, aversions and hungers.

When I loved myself enough, I started feeling all my feelings, not analysing them – really feeling them.

When I loved myself enough, I started meditating every day. This is a profound act of self-love.

When I loved myself enough I forgave myself for all the times I thought I wasn’t good enough.

These are the things I wish for you. And much more.

The book you’re about to read, explores how mindful practices such as yoga and meditation can help us develop a deeper connection with, and unconditional love for, ourselves.

I believe that when we operate from a place of genuine love and compassion for ourselves, we show up in the world as the very best version of ourselves. With that comes the opportunity to lead a more abundant, more connected, lighter and more fulfilling life. I know this to be true through my own experiences and those of people I’ve seen undergo similar shifts through their choice to live more mindfully.

Having practiced yoga for almost 25 years, I will share what I know, feel, believe and have experienced about developing a deep sense of self-love through living more mindfully. Growing in self-love is an ever-continuing process of self-compassion, forgiving ourselves and others, letting go and accepting all the aspects of ourselves- the good, the bad and the really ugly. I believe that both yoga and meditation have much to teach us about these aspects of ourselves and have set out to articulate those teachings in this book.

I describe how a transformative experience on my yoga mat enabled me to finally release something I’d gripped onto so tightly for so long. And how in doing so, I was finally able to forgive, let go and find a deeper love for myself and my life in the process. I also explore the many ways that yoga and meditation can help cultivate self-awareness and self-compassion.

There is much more to yoga than just the physical practice of holding and moving through poses. In fact, the physical yoga practice is only one of eight limbs of yoga. This book also explores what some of these other limbs can offer us as we embark on the journey towards wholehearted self-love.

Before we get to those parts of the book, I unpack this concept of self-love and explore its nature. I offer some suggestions about what you can do to immediately start shifting your sense of self-love. There are many forces at work which hinder our ability to cultivate a genuine love for ourselves within our modern culture. Unfortunately, many of these forces adversely influence the way we feel about ourselves every day; yet many of us are not even aware they are doing so. I address some of these forces and offer some simple techniques to help cultivate your awareness so that you’re able to recognise and mitigate the effect that these forces may be having on your sense of self-worth. It’s this ability to cultivate awareness and notice our thoughts and triggers which can transform the way we feel about ourselves. Yoga, meditation and other mindful practices have tremendous potential to help us cultivate the awareness required to accept ourselves completely and love ourselves for who we are.

It is my hope that you take something from this book that will benefit you as you move forward on the path of unconditional self-love. How much or little we love ourselves really determines every aspect of how we live and every relationship we have. Particularly our most important relationship–the one we have with ourselves.

Chapter 1 – Bumps in the Road

You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection—Buddha

Having a strong sense of self-love gives us the very best base possible from which to make the choices and decisions in our lives that serve us best. The degree to which we love ourselves drives every aspect of how we live and every relationship we have. It influences our health, the romantic partners we attract, the work we choose to do, the ease with which we live and how we show up for our lives and the people we care about.

But having a strong sense of self-love is not something that just happens or something you can go out and get. Instead, it's a continuous and life-long process of accepting ourselves as we are in any given moment, forgiving ourselves for the undesirable