What if self-love isn’t just a nice idea — but the most important shift you could make in your entire life? 

Not the kind of self-love that’s about pampering or trying to feel good all the time, but the kind that changes the way you relate to yourself at the deepest level. 

The kind that makes you stop running from who you are. 

Because when self-love is missing, we don’t just feel bad — we start to believe that we are bad. And from that place, we try to fix, perfect, control, overachieve, or numb our way to worthiness. 

In this episode, I want to show you why self-love isn’t a luxury — it’s a return to truth. 

I’ll share what self-love actually is, how the ego ties into this, and how to begin practicing self-love in a way that feels real and embodied. 

If you’ve ever felt like you’re never enough, this might be the beginning of everything shifting.

The Invisible Belief That You’re Broken

For many years of my life, I was carrying the belief that there’s something wrong with me.

A self-directed hopelessness.

Because of this belief, I tried to control life in different ways by striving for perfection. This showed up in my everyday life and made my existence pretty miserable.

It was a form of self-hatred — because perfectionism is exactly that: self-abuse. And it was rooted in the false idea of my self being fixed and solid.

Perfectionism became my way of coping with that belief.

Perfectionism: The Mask We Wear When Self-Love Is Absent

Perfectionism isn’t about having high standards. Having high standards isn’t the problem. Wanting to deliver high-quality work is beautiful. 

But the problem is when we set standards that are higher than what is required, that aren’t achievable, and when we make any “failure” mean something about us. 

Every single performance becomes about life and death.

For me, the most obvious form of perfectionism was overworking. Putting very much weight on my grades in school, and later on my work performances.

But perfectionism, the need for control because we think we are flawed, is not only about work. For me it showed up in so many areas of my life:

• Overthinking to avoid finding myself in situations that would reveal my flaws. Being in my head when others were speaking, sitting in meetings and having a commentary in my head, analyzing everything, instead of actually being present where I was.
• Being in social gatherings and worrying about how I looked or how others perceived me. 
• Feeling I had to be “socially perfect”: worrying I wasn’t interesting enough, saving any awkward silences by making a joke or making myself the mood manager of the gathering. 

This would be extremely exhausting. And it prevented me from making real, intimate connections with people. 

If I did something that was perceived as awkward, if I made a joke no one laughed at, I would analyze that detail for hours following the event assuming everyone hated me and I’d never be invited again.

It also expressed into food, weight, and lifestyle. I constantly judged myself from the lens of “have I been good enough today?” 

Did I have a good diet, did I get all my things done, did I meditate, did I do it well enough, did I get distracted, was I a good friend, is my home clean enough, do I look weird in this outift? 

I wasn’t asking these questions to self-reflect, but rather trying to determine if I was good or bad, safe or in danger.

The Illusion of Control and the Moving Goalpost

Ironically, perfectionism also manifested when I craved change. I wanted things to change, but the change was always in a future state because I never felt ready. 

As you probably can see, there’s no winning here.

Because the need for control is rooted in a false sense of self — that the self can be bad somehow. 

Even if I met the standards, I’d just keep moving the goalpost, or find ways to sabotage.

If I didn’t meet the standards perfectly, I’d focus on that one flaw, that one thing I missed in a presentation and spend hours repeating the mistake and making it much bigger than it was.

This made me create a reality where I was always behind, I was always failing, and I was always feeling that I wasn’t doing anything well enough.

To try to get ahead, I would create stricter and stricter rules to follow, which just created more of the feeling I was trying to escape.

Perfectionism can lead to eating disorders, anxiety and constant comparison of others to check if you measure up. 

The latter used to be huge for me. Whenever I saw someone my age and I’d perceive they were ahead I’d feel like a massive failure. 

Most extreme example: comparing myself to the former prime minister of Finland, Sanna Marin. My head went: omg she is 3 years older than me and she is running a fucking country, what am I doing??

As you can see, this is exhausting as hell, it doesn’t make you safe, it prevents you from connecting with other people and makes you miss out on life.

Why We Don’t See Ourselves as Perfectionists

Before I move on, I just want to highlight that I didn’t see myself as a perfectionist. 

And I think that’s true for many people. 

Because the label itself can feel misleading — like it implies you see yourself as perfect, when in reality, it’s often the opposite. 

If you recognize yourself in anything I shared, but resist the label, that’s okay. 

I don’t encourage you to take on labels anyway — they’re rarely expansive. 

Instead, just notice if you’ve developed a set of behaviours and thought patterns to try to control your reality, how others view you, and how safe you feel. 

Perfectionism is just a psychological term for that kind of coping mechanism.

The Breakthrough: Love as Your True Nature

For me it all changed when I sat in a ceremony in Costa Rica facilitated by a shaman. In the ceremony I felt that we are all love, and all that is is love, and therefore I am loved. 

There’s no separation. 

It’s our ego that creates the separation. 

If you remove your ego — remove everything you think about yourself, your body, your experiences, your work, your title, your home, all of your things, your nationality, your culture — what’s left is the essence of who you are.

Understanding the Ego: Identity, Biology, and Protection

But what is ego, really? 

In simple terms, ego is your sense of self — the part of you that says, “I am this person,” with certain roles, beliefs, and identities. 

It’s shaped by your upbringing, culture, and life experiences. It helps you navigate the world by forming a sense of self.

The ego isn’t just a mental concept — it’s wired into your nervous system and shaped by how your body keeps you safe:

• The brain’s default mode network (DMN) is active when you think about yourself, your past, or future. It’s often linked to ego-based thinking — like ruminating, judging, or self-comparing.
• The nervous system plays a role too. When you feel threatened (even emotionally), the ego reacts to protect you — by defending, shutting down, pleasing, or attacking.
• Hormones like cortisol (stress) and dopamine (reward) also influence ego-based behaviors — like seeking validation or control to feel safe or successful.

That’s why the ego is so powerful — it protects us from danger and keeps our body alive.

The Healthy Ego and the Role of Integration

So, the ego isn’t “bad,” even if it often gets a bad rep. It’s not the enemy. In fact, a healthy ego is essential for living a grounded, purposeful life.

It’s helpful in defining your values, choices and personal direction. It fuels ambition, persistence and the courage to pursue goals. 

We use it to make decisions, organize our lives and function in communities.

And most importantly perhaps, it protects you. It helps you set boundaries and recognise unhealthy situations.

The goal is not to get rid of the ego, our protective behaviours or our perfectionism. 

The goal is to heal and integrate it.

Seeing with Compassion: A Mother’s Gaze on the Self

The insight I had there in the jungle was that if all my behaviours, if everything I judged and didn’t want others to see, was something that stepped in to save me, to keep me alive, how could I judge it? 

How can I judge something that shows up so that I can be ok?

I saw all of my flaws and felt so much compassion and love for all of it. 

I could FEEL the wholeness of who I was, separate from nothing, part of everything, and with this sense of wholeness, I could see my identity and look at it like a mother sees her child — flawless, regardless of the so-called mistakes.

Returning to Wholeness: The Truth of the Self

That’s the human experience. We come to this world pure and one can be. 

Then different things happen to us, we learn who we need to be in our family structures, in our culture and in society. 

We also carry experiences and trauma that is generational, some more than others. 

All of this makes us forget who we truly are. And when we forget, the ego takes over.

Your job is to return to our wholeness. 

You do this by opening up to the truth of your life, as objectively as you can. 

The secret to being objective is self-love.

Love doesn’t judge. 

It doesn’t look at an experience, a behaviour, a coping mechanism and say “that shouldn’t be there, you need to fix that, remove that, become more like this or less like that”. 

Love looks at everything with complete acceptance. It is what it is and it cannot be any other way than it is.

Without self-love, you are stuck in a fixed idea of the self, the idea that there’s something wrong with you. 

And when you have a fixed idea of the self, you won’t be willing to seek the truth. 

It will simply be too painful and too risky.

Before my insight with self-love, I was putting the majority of my life energy in avoiding the truth through perfection, control, manipulation and distraction.

When I saw the truth, I could stop hiding. It was like taking off a mask that I thought I needed. 

So Self-love isn’t about affirming how great you are or about feeling good all the time.

It’s about connecting with your wholeness, and from that place look at the ego with acceptance, forgiveness and love. 

You could say that self-love is about seeing the limitations of the self, how the self is not the full truth and, ultimately, an illusion

And while that might sound abstract or hard to grasp at first, it has very real, grounding effects when we begin to live from that awareness.

How Self-Love Changes the World

The cool thing is that when you start looking at yourself with more love, you start looking at the whole world with more love.

Why?

Because you see that everyone else is also just trying to protect themselves. 

Now this doesn’t mean that you have to or should accept everyone’s behaviour or avoid setting boundaries. 

Rather, you see that there’s no point walking around hating anyone, because ultimately what you’re doing is sending that hate right back at yourself.

We are not as separate as we think. The internal war and the external war are made of the same energy.

This is why few wars have ever been truly “won.” Everyone loses in war. 

And most often, the winners might even be the biggest losers.

Because winning a war often means losing humanity, internal peace, economic stability, or global credibility.

Spiritually — even karmically — war corrupts the “winner” just as much, sometimes more, than the defeated.

Just take World War I. Britain and France were technically the victors, but both were economically and emotionally devastated.

The UK lost almost an entire generation of young men. The trauma reshaped its culture into one of deep cynicism and disillusionment.

France was physically destroyed and emotionally broken, and would later fall to the Nazis in WWII partly because of this.

And the Treaty of Versailles — the “triumph” — planted the seeds of the next world war by humiliating Germany.

So yes, they “won.” But what they inherited was a fractured Europe, massive debt, and national trauma.

And I’m not telling you this to veer off into a history lesson. 

I’m telling you this because the same is true internally.

Every time we declare war on ourselves — every time we attack a part of us we don’t like — we think we’re “winning” by fixing it.

But what we’re really doing is reinforcing the illusion of separation.

And the more we hate ourselves, the more likely we are to hate others.

Judgment out there is always tied to judgment in here.

Whether the war is internal or external, the cost is the same: it keeps us from peace, from connection, from wholeness.

So to sum: When you declare war on yourself, in one way or another you’ll project that was outward. And the illusion is that either form of war creates safety or worthiness. 

This is why you literally change the world when you start practicing self-love

How to Start: A Practice for Radical Acceptance

Ok, so do you have to go to the jungle and sit with shamans or meditate for hours every day to feel the deep sense of self-love? 

Maybe. Probably not.

Something as simple as stepping into your body is a great first step. 

Connecting with the heart brain and gut brain (that’s a topic for another day but the body has several minds of its own. Our intelligence is not simply something that’s placed on our body).

When you can feel your body, your whole sense of self — write down these 3 questions:

• What I don’t want you to know about me is…
• You wouldn’t love me if you knew…
• You wouldn’t accept me if I told you…

Write down whatever comes up. 

Give yourself a break, and then look at the list as if it was your child who wrote it. 

Notice if what comes up is judgment, or love and acceptance.

Looking at everything you hide from others with love is the first step.

The Self Love Path: Choosing a New Direction

And know that self-love is a practice, it’s a journey, not a destination. 

It’s not something we fix and then it’s done. 

It is something that we cultivate and grow daily. 

That’s why I named this podcast Self Love Path, it’s a path you can decide to walk on.

Starting to walk on this path might be a decision you want to make. 

After that insight in Costa Rica, I remember making the decision to choose the path of self-love. 

That’s when things started changing for me in a real way.

Your Next Step Toward Self Love

If you have made the decision to start walking the path of Self Love, I have 1 spot left for my one-month offer.

My normal coaching program is 4 months, it’s an experience where we go deep into reprogramming your subconscious and connecting with the essence of who you are, so that you can truly create what you want in your life. 

Because as a coach, I don’t just help people to feel better.

I help you see the systems that you are trapped in, that taught you your worth had to be earned and unhook from them so that you can reclaim your autonomy — not through hustle or hacks but through radical self-compassion and trust.

 It’s not about making you more resilient to the narrow box you have been placed in, but about breaking free from the box altogether.

With thay said, I also wanted to create something for you who might not be ready to commit to a 4-month program BUT feel that you are ready to take the first step. 

Because I realize the first step, making the decision to go from the path of self-hate and pressure, to the path of self-love and freedom, IS so important. 

And as soon as you are on the right path, you’ve changed the course. The trajectory of your life has changed. And when it does, there’s no going back.

So if you have made the decision to live this life you have been given on your own terms, feel ready to take the first step, I’m offering a 30-day coaching container.

This is a space where we work very closely together for 30 days to help you take the first step of breaking free.

This is especially for you if you are someone who feels very stressed about everything you have to get done before your summer holidays. 

If you’re thinking that as soon as you go on vacation everything will be ok, and you just have to push through or maybe you think that “yes this sounds great but I have to wait until I have lots of time and can put lots of energy and effort into fixing this problem” – then this might be for you.

Why? Because that’s likely perfectionistic behaviour in action. 

First of all, both you and me know that the summer vacation won’t solve anything. 

Worst comes to worst you’ll spend the majority of your holidays just recovering rather than enjoying it. 

Second, there will never be a time when you have more time. 

That’s your ego playing tricks with your future self.

Remember that the ego thrives on control. This creates a constant forward projection, where the ego idealizes a future self as more worthy, lovable, or successful — and judges the present self as not enough.

That’s why you constantly see the future as better. “Once I have done this, I’ll feel at peace and I’ll be able to rest.”

But you never reach that future self, because when you do, the ego just moves the bar. 

When you reach that moment when you thought you’d have all the time, you have filled the empty space with more things to do. 

Because the ego is never satisfied when it’s operating from fear.

Signing up for the type of program that I’m offering is not about doing something more. 

It’s about meeting yourself exactly where you are, with compassion,.

It’s about letting go of who you think you should be and choosing aligned action from presence, not pressure.

I have 2 spots for this. 

Reach out to me at monika@nulltheselflovepath.com and we’ll have a chat and talk through your situation and if what I’m offering is the next step for you.

If it is, I’d be very excited to work with you. Just imagine what type of summer you could have when you step into it feeling more aligned and at peace. 

That was it for today! I hope you are having a grounded week, and if not that’s ok, there’s probably a reason for that. 

I love you, bye!