How to Cultivate Conscious Self-Love

The Radiant Threefold Path: Return+Reclaim+Receive — the framework I teach and use in my work with women — is a path for helping women cultivate conscious self-love.

Conscious self-love is not self-centered, narcissistic self-absorption. It’s a deep inner knowledge of your inherent worth, dignity, and beauty.

When you know that you have inherent value, the possibilities of what lies ahead for you are practically limitless.

If conscious self-love was a necessary nutrient for physical survival, the vast majority of women would need an emergency infusion to bring their inner supply of conscious self-love to a healthy, life-sustaining level.

The RTP (Radiant Threefold Path) framework unfolded and emerged from my life experience over the past 6+ decades, coaching hundreds of women in my private practice, and the thousands of women I have worked with in online workshops and courses, and whose lives have been changed through my boundaries podcast, and my first book.

The principles of the Return, Reclaim, Receive framework address the most significant obstacles women face as they attempt to create a life that fulfills and satisfies them.

The primary obstacles for most women include:

• Deferring to the reality or preferences of others as her default (and mostly unconscious) position.
• Not understanding her own personal power, or not knowing how to use it.
• Being unaware that she has been programmed by family, culture, and religion to believe that approval, security, and love come from the outside (rather than inside herself). Or, if she is aware of the programming, but she continues to seek outside herself for what she needs and wants, or she has no idea how to reprogram herself.

From these obstacles emerge all manner of thoughts, emotions, choices, and behaviors that do not serve her. The most significant being compulsive over-giving and other hyper-empathic, hyper-responsible habits that leave her depleted, exhausted, empty, and resentful.

The simplest way to describe the epidemic of our other-focused existence is that we give to others in order to receive.

This (largely unconscious) strategy is ineffective at best, and self-destructive at worst.

If you see yourself in this description, it’s not your fault. We come by our adaptations to life in courageous and honest ways.

Mostly, we have done what we were taught to do. And we often did it to survive.

The RTP framework teaches you how to become the Creatrix of your own authentic, hand-crafted and hand-curated life.

When you know the truth of who you are and practice the art of living from the inside out, you give birth to yourself.

Grounded in your inner knowing, you stand for your truth and name your desires — inviting everything that is meant for you. And from this abundant space of receiving, you have everything you need to offer to the world what you, and only you, can give.

This simple — yet heroic — process of Regeneration is the promise of The Radiant Threefold Path.

The Radiant Threefold Path of Return+Reclaim+Receive is a journey to the highest expression of You.

The RTP framework has three portals — Return, Reclaim, and Receive — and seven Invitations: Know, Stand, See, Speak, Give, Unveil, and Receive.

Portal 1 | Return

Return is the first of the three portals of The Radiant Threefold Path, and it has just one Invitation — to Know.

Returning means to know your authentic reality, which — for most women — has been denied, covered over, repressed, or ignored.

Reclaiming your authentic self begins with knowing exactly who you are — body, mind, and spirit.

Why must you Return? Because knowing who you are is the foundation and starting point for identifying and claiming your needs and wants.

If you want to get started with Returning to you, here are four simple questions you can ask yourself:

1. What am I experiencing right now with my five senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching?
2. What am I feeling — what are my emotions in this moment?
3. What thoughts am I thinking right now?
4. As I observe my body right now, what is the position of my body, or what am I doing?

Whenever you feel lost or you don’t think you know who you are, ask yourself these 4 questions. They will help you orient, ground, and re-center back into yourself.

Knowing you is the basis for every decision and every action you must take to create an authentic, peace-filled life.

Portal 2 | Reclaim

After Returning to the truth of who you are, you enter the second portal of the Path — Reclaim.

Reclaim contains three Invitations:

1. Stand
2. See
3. Speak

The first Invitation is to Stand and claim what is yours.

Standing for yourself means being your fiercest ally and your most loyal protector.

As Rabbi Hillel said,

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

In a word, Standing is about boundaries on all levels — including with yourself.

When you think about claiming what is yours and becoming your fiercest ally and protector, what do you notice inside?

For many women, these words resonate deeply because we want to know that we are safe and protected.

The second invitation of the Portal of Reclaim is to See. Seeing means to accept reality as it is and to fully embrace the truth—yours and others.

Although many of us would say that truth and honesty are important to us, we’re often not entirely honest with ourselves about what we truly want, or our intentions.

If you are not able to See reality as it is — in yourself and others — you will suffer.

We suffer when we don’t own our truth and when we refuse to see what we really see.

We also suffer when we don’t accept another person’s reality or truth. When we can’t accept the reality or truth about another person, we experience unnecessary tension and conflict. We may even attempt to persuade, control, or even manipulate them in an attempt to change them.

The third Invitation of Reclaim is to Speak — expressing your authentic truth as you have discovered it through knowing your reality, becoming your fiercest ally, and fully embracing your truth.

Speaking your authentic truth has the uncanny power of attracting to you the people and circumstances that are uniquely suited to support the manifestation of your desires — inviting everything that is meant for you.

When you have mastered the Invitation to Speak, you express yourself to others in an authentic, yet respectful and relational way.

One of the biggest mistakes women make around the Invitation to Speak is that we talk to the people who are most important to us in ways that are very difficult for our loved ones to hear.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received about communicating came from Dr. Julie Gottman when my husband and I did a 3-day couples’ marathon with her in early 2023.

I was talking to my husband about something that had happened in the past in our relationship. As I was speaking, Dr. Gottman interrupted me and said,

Describe yourself, not your partner.

If you want to immediately up-level your communication, try this one skill. It’s not as easy as it sounds!

Telling another person what is wrong with them, or how you they should think, feel, or behave is not only disrespectful, it essentially guarantees you will not be heard, and creates disconnection.

If we want to be heard, we must be mindful of how we Speak.

Portal 3 | Receive

Grounded in the foundation of Returning and Reclaiming, we enter the third portal of Receive.

The three Invitations of the Portal of Receive are:

1. Give
2. Unveil
3. Receive

The first Invitation of Give is not the compulsive over-giving with which most women are intimately familiar. The Invitation to Give means Giving to yourself. It means owning the power you have right now to manifest the desires of your heart.

The Invitation to Give is the necessary — and often difficult — task of taking empowered ownership of your happiness, rather than looking to others to fill you up.

Give means having a daily, high-quality self-care practice.

There are two type of self-care: self-care needs and self-care wants. The Invitation to Give is about self-care wants. These are activities that fill you up and create joy.

The second Invitation of the Portal of Receive is to Unveil, which is the heart of vulnerability and intimacy.

At your own time and in your own way, you are invited to reveal your mind (thoughts), your emotions, your body, your soul, and your desires.

The Invitation to Unveil is the next to the last Invitation because it requires so much of you.

You must Know yourself, be able to Speak respectfully, and be highly resourced with great self-care (Give) in order to feel grounded and comfortable enough for the intimacy of Unveil.

The final Invitation of the Path is Receive.

Receive is a particularly feminine and embodied experience. Yet most women are not gracious Receivers!

Recall the last time someone gave you a compliment or expressed appreciation for something you did. What did you say?

If you replied, “Thank you,” you know how to Receive. Unfortunately, these two simple words are not most women’s typical response when receiving.

When you Receive from yourself (the Invitation to Give) as well as from others, you create the conditions for feeling whole, abundant, and radiant.

And when you are filled up with your own abundance, you have the power to offer to the world what only you can give.

Offering your unique gifts from this place of deep inner knowing, claiming, and receiving, you Regenerate yourself, your family, community, and the world.

© Victoria Priya (2023)