The Cost of Withholding Love From Yourself

This post continues the Egypt Codes — reflections and transmissions from a pilgrimage that profoundly shifted my understanding of consciousness, history, and my own soul. If you’re new here, start with Part One.

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Egypt Codes: Part Three

On the flight to Cairo, a random YouTube notification popped up on my phone that was titled “the most painful thing after death”. It got my attention.

If you have ever geeked out over near-death experiences as I have, you know the most consistent theme threaded through these stories is the life review. 

This clip said that during the life review, seeing where we “failed” in life isn’t painful (though we might imagine it would be). Seeing the moments we withheld love while we were living is the most painful thing we could experience. 

Withheld love from others.

Withheld love from ourselves.

Oof….that perspective hit me right in the belly and stuck with me.

We have this one chance to be who we are in this life. We have endless opportunities to love and share and connect. Not only with each other, but with ourselves and nature and this beautiful world around us. 

And there are so many moments we withhold it. Withhold it because of conditioning, judgment, comparison, or fear. 

To me, one of the grandest aspects of being alive is the simple act of loving and caring. 

Not only each other but ourselves. 

So to hear that the most painful thing after death is seeing all the times we withheld love, intentionally or unintentionally, really landed with me. I don’t want to live that way. 

This morning, as we were heading to the pyramids, some very familiar inner stories came out to play.

Comparison.

Self-judgment.

That feeling of being excluded and not “good enough”.

It wasn’t necessarily dramatic or loud, but the thoughts were there. Things were happening that didn’t make me feel good. 

I watched the thoughts move through me. I wasn’t tangled in them, but I also wasn’t trying to make them go away. I was simply witnessing them.

And then I saw it clearly.

THIS is what withholding love from myself looks like!!!

I was withholding love from myself by allowing myself to feel excluded. I actually had complete control over my feelings of exclusion in that moment. What do I want to feel in those moments? Included. 

So I sat on the bus and created an experience where not only did I feel included, but so did everyone else. I turned around and asked everyone what they were most looking forward to in the day. I went around one by one, bringing everyone into the conversation. 

When it was my turn, I spoke honestly. I shared that my intention was to give love to all parts of myself, especially the ones I usually judge or push away (or, in other words, the parts I exclude).

One of the women told me how deeply that landed for her. She was moving through her own childhood wounds around exclusion that morning, and hearing it spoken aloud helped her feel less alone.

That moment stayed with me.

In choosing not to withhold love from myself, I unknowingly offered it to someone else. My heart exploded.

By the time we arrived at the pyramids, I had completely shifted my energy from feeling sad, left out, and alone to radiant, happy, and like I belonged. My heart was so open from taking intentional, aligned action to create different feelings for myself and discovering a powerful perspective shift along the way.

And when I finally stood before them, I fell to my knees.

Literally.

Awe brought me to my knees.

Gratitude poured through me. Tears uncontrollably flooded from my eyes. It was reverence in its purest form; a full-bodied recognition of something ancient, sacred, and far greater than my individual life.

And as I knelt there, hands on the earth, sobbing as I bowed to the pyramids, it hit me:

What if we learned to hold ourselves like this?

What if we met our own lives, bodies, stories, and imperfections with this kind of reverence instead of judgment?

What if the ache so many of us feel isn’t because we’re broken… but because we’ve forgotten how to bow to our own existence?

Standing (well, kneeling) there, I realized how costly it is to withhold love from ourselves. How it shapes our confidence, our relationships, our ability to receive, and our sense of worth.

And how deeply life shifts when we don’t.

As this calendar year begins, I feel more devoted than ever to this work within myself and also within the lives of my students. Teaching self-love and self-image not as concepts, but as lived experiences. As something practiced in the body, in the nervous system, in the way we speak to ourselves when no one else is listening.

Because when we stop withholding love internally, everything else reorganizes around that truth.

Next time, I’ll share more about what unfolded at the pyramids — the reverence, the grief, and the responsibility that met me there.

But for now, I’ll leave you with this gentle reflection to carry with you:

Where might you be withholding love from yourself or someone else?