Love Thyself

On the 8th October, Venus moved into retrograde in Scorpio, and will remain this way until the 18th November. In retrograde, Venus (the Light of Beauty) moves her focus to within, and her qualities become internalised. Venus is best known for her beauty, and therefore whilst in retrograde, it is always time to go within to honour our own beauty.

Venus’s celestial dance around the Sun weaves threads of learning, insight, self-discovery and challenges. How many of us, look in the mirror and pay ourselves compliments? It is easier to denigrate, to discount our beauty. There is a famous saying that beauty is only skin deep, well physical beauty maybe, but beauty comes in different shapes and sizes. After all who defines what true physical beauty is, the catwalk size zero models, or the glowing earth mother with lumps, bumps and stretch marks?

The key with Venus Retrograde is to see beyond the stereotypes, and to see the things about ourselves that are truly beautiful. Going deeper, we can look into our souls (the eyes are the windows to the soul after all), and see the beauty within. We need to truly love ourselves - every single bit from the cellulite to the grey hairs.

It all comes down to how we think – we need to think positively in order to create positives in our lives. Like attracts like, so any negative thoughts we have only create more negativity. It is of course hard to love excess weight, scars, stretch marks and other signs of wear and tear that our bodies experience, but even if we take small steps towards accepting ourselves, and changing our own inner dialogue to something much more nurturing and loving, then we are likely to see changes in the world around us as well.

Many of us take steps to address those aspects of ourselves that we struggle with from plastic surgery, to weight loss surgery and extreme dieting. My own journey has made me realise that regardless of what choices I make to feel happier about my body; until I truly learnt to love myself (regardless of appearance etc), I would never truly feel happy; and there would always be something else that I needed to ‘tweak’ or address. Whilst this does not mean that I disagree with surgery (for that would make me a hypocrite!), it does mean that it needs to happen for the right reasons. No amount of surgery can help us to love ourselves more...

So, truly loving ourselves is a profoundly important step on the path to honouring the beauty within...



We are in a time of accelerated spiritual growth and learning, of stepping into a higher consciousness. It is a time for Cosmic Truths, a time to Dance with the Universe in harmony, as one. It stands to reason then, that until we can be nice to ourselves, how can we truly step onto this path and embrace one another without judgement or ego. It is a challenging time, but it is also a time to finally step out of the shadows and shine…

Remember how important it is to have faith in ourselves and our dreams, and to have the courage to journey into the unknown without guarantees. This is the key to embracing life. A lack of faith in ourselves or in life means that we only cling on to what we know rather than open the doors to the possibilities of what might be. Very often in life our greatest failure is in aiming too low, so we need to work with Venus to love ourselves, to be open to the idea that we truly are a special, gifted, beautiful, talented individual – because we are!


So remember, love yourself, love your soul, and love everything about who you are. Weave a web of love within you and around you – you owe it to yourself after all…