What is honoring oneself to a woman? To a woman, honoring herself is the opportunity to put herself first, a chance to acknowledge the significance, importance, validity, and sacredness of her values, thoughts, beliefs, desires, life, and self.

– The Feminine Throne

When you don’t honor yourself, you let others choose how you will be honored. Granting friends, family, partners, groups, and social environments permission to make decisions for you and influence your choices. When we do this we forfeit our purpose for everyone else’s needs. Our experiences begin to reflect our disregard for ourselves in all aspects of our lives; we stay and nurture relationships and environments where we are not respected and honored. We recklessly decline to take care of our health and personal space, we abandon our own gifts, talents, expressions, and creativity for the sake of others’ discomforts. Never knowing the potential of your true self because you feel inadequate, meaningless, and unimportant. If you lack the strength to honor yourself you will feel disconnected from the world and your own life. If you don’t know who you are or what you want someone else will tell you, and most likely what they have to say will benefit their personal needs, wants, and desires while disregarding yours. This is not always because people are evil or want to hurt you, this is because if you don’t use the power to influence your own life, someone else will use it to gain an advantage in theirs.

This topic is very close to our hearts as women because we understand the social narratives that have made it hard for women to choose to honor themselves, women are taught to be selfless, cooperative, and unassuming at the expense of their happiness and potential. The world tells us that the only way to be of use is to sacrifice our own lives for the betterment of others but we know that “The greatest gift a woman could give the world is to honor herself through showing off her gifts, expression, talents, and creativity. She shouldn’t dim her light because the world could use the warmth.” When we as women nurture ourselves we honor our lives in an invaluable way.

Is honoring yourself A selfish act? 

No! But when a woman is unable to honor her wants, needs, and desires she can become extremely selfish. Asking a woman to sacrifice herself for the benefit of others can backfire big time. Honoring ourselves is one of the most generous actions women can take. Women who honor themselves are more aligned with the truth of who she is and what she wants. Helping her feel a desire to naturally nurture the world in the way she was designed to do. Giving her meaningful purpose and direction, but when women are asked to sacrifice too much she can become bitter, angry, depressed, hopeless, and uncooperative, exhibiting traits such as:

• Withholding important information.
• Not respecting other people’s time.
• Not nurturing, guiding, or teaching.
• Does not listen and lacks compassion or sympathy.
• Avoids responsibility. 
• Taking all of the credit for things she needed help to achieve.
• Brings others down to build herself up.
• She isn’t considerate and takes people for granted.
• She spreads negativity while lacking the ability to be peaceful in her environment.

This is because women are human before they are women, and every human being needs to have a personal purpose. Purpose to guide life decisions, influence behavior, shape goals, offer a sense of direction, and create meaning. For any human being to truly feel happy and content with their lives they need to live in their purpose based on the individual’s authentic self. There is no real fulfillment in helping others fulfill their purpose if you’re unable to fulfill your own. 

How does honoring yourself change you?

Honoring yourself allows you to honor others and the world around you. You will gain the perspective that:

• You’re worthy of risks and sacrifices.
• You trust that the risks and sacrifices you make will likely pay off. 
• You know the strength of your energy, devotion, and authenticity.
• People will respond to you, not everyone, but the ones who choose you will value your voice, your ideas, your interests, and your desires. 
• Your well-being and happiness will begin to matter in your life.
• You’ll begin to honor and accept the authenticity of others.
• You’ll unwittingly create distress in the world around you, but that will create meaningful change for the people around you. 
• You stop judging, denying, and suppressing your passion leading you not to do it to others.
• People feel safe to be authentic around you because you extend respect and acceptance to others.
• You lead by example showing others they deserve to honor themselves as-well

How does a woman begin to honor herself? Every woman should feel that her ideas, desires, thoughts, beliefs, experiences, and creations are worthy of honor and respect. The way we can start to do this is:

1. Start by noticing where in your life you have allowed people to control you, disregard you, or undervalue you. Changing every situation in your life where you’ve felt like you didn’t honor yourself will start to change the narrative in your life of you dishonoring yourself. Restructuring your experience around honoring yourself gives you the experience and strength to continue to do so.
2. Without permission, actioning your desires, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, experiences, and values shows the people around you that they are worthy of respectful consideration and behavior. People have no choice but to accept the way you honor yourself if you do it with confidence.
3. Honoring yourself means honoring the truth about yourself, so you need to discover what that; is explore, experiment, and investigate so that you can learn as much as you can about yourself. You need to know your beliefs, values, desires, and nature deeply to truly value who you are.
4. Honor what you’ve discovered about yourself and accept it. You can’t strengthen or change what you’re afraid to acknowledge.

Honoring yourself is a lifelong project but is deeply crucial in the journey of growth, expansion, and self-actualization. Honoring ourselves means that we look after and show ourselves as much love and kindness as we would show other people in our life.