Self Love Magic! ?

Hello my lovelies,

I’m absolutely delighted to announce the launch of my latest book, Self Love Magic!

Paperbacks and hardbacks can be purchased from my website and online elsewhere, depending on your preferences. You can also pick up an ebook copy via Kindle Unlimited.

The messages I’ve been receiving from those of you with advanced reader copies have been heartwarming to read. I’ve shared some of the beautiful feedback I’ve received below along with an excerpt from the beginning of Self Love Magic.

I've been getting such a great response from this work, so I'm extending the launch sale for my Self Love Magic course until August 12th. This takes us through to the end of Mercury retrograde (a time of reflection, recalibration, and inner truth) moving through intuitive, heart-led Leo, with themes of self-trust and emotional courage

Blessings,
Iris xx

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? Order a paperback or hardback version of Self Love Magic direct from me!

? Grab a copy for your Kindle!

? Get a free ebook version! (Haversham tier and above)

~

~

And here's an excerpt from the beginning of the book...

Self Love Magic

You are enough...

Place your hand on your heart. Feel it beating beneath your palm. That steady rhythm has been with you since before you could think about it. Still going, despite everything that's happened. Sometimes that's all we need to remember, we're still here.

I want to tell you something that might sound impossible right now: you are not broken. You never were.

I know this might land like a sharp stone in the tender place.

I used to feel so broken. Every morning I woke to an ache that had been there since late childhood. It drove me to the small rebellions of cigarettes behind the school buildings, to the fiercer addiction of infatuation - that drug that promises to fill every empty place if only you can lose yourself completely enough.

The pain was real. The wound was real, and yet underneath it all, I was still whole. I believe the same is likely true for you.

I understand if these words feel impossible when the pain is so real, so present, so overwhelming

Think of a tree that's been struck but remains standing. The wound is painful. Perhaps it even changes how the tree grows. Over time, the bark slowly covers what was raw. The tree carries its story in its shape, but nature heals. It keeps living. We look at the tree and see the scars, yes, but we don’t say it’s broken. We see how it lives, how it grows. Scar tissue is stronger than ordinary skin.

Sometimes, when we’ve been wounded, we feel broken, and the old emotion around our wounds keeps us in that pain. It can feel strange to be told you are not broken when the ache still lingers, unhealed.

Perhaps you've spent years convinced of your fundamental wrongness. I know how it feels to carry it in your bones, this fear that you're flawed at the core. Not just that you've done wrong things, but that you are wrong. That your very existence requires apology.

I know because I lived under that spell for so long I forgot there was any other way to be. The labels came early and stuck like burrs: selfish, lazy, too sensitive, unreliable. I absorbed them into my bloodstream. By the time I could form thoughts about myself, the thoughts were already poisoned. This was compounded by not being naturally very good at a lot of things like sports or anything involving co-ordination! I wasn't particularly good at school unless something lit me up from the inside. I had no confidence. I didn't know how to trust the voice inside me.

After years of untangling this mess, I've discovered we are all living under an enchantment that is doing us no good.

If you're holding this book, some part of you is ready to stop the war with yourself and ready to discover what happens when you choose yourself instead of abandoning yourself.

This readiness might not feel like readiness. It might feel like exhaustion, you simply can't keep up the performance anymore. It might feel like desperation. It might even feel like rebellion, a quiet "no" rising from somewhere in your bones.

You don't need to believe in magic. You don't need to have it all figured out. You don't even need to like yourself yet. All those requirements that usually come with self-help, forget them. You just need a spark of willingness. The tiniest flame of hope that things could be different. I've seen people transform their entire relationship with themselves starting with nothing more than "I'm tired of feeling this way."

The Spell We're Under

It's the spell of perpetual inadequacy, woven so tightly into the fabric of our culture that we mistake it for reality. This spell gnaws at us constantly: You must earn your worth. You must perfect yourself before you deserve love. You must be exceptional but not threatening, successful but not intimidating. The contradictions alone could drive you mad.

We breathe this spell in with our first breath. It seeps through family systems where love was scarce and had to be earned through performance. Where affection came with strings attached. Where belonging meant being good enough, smart enough, helpful enough, invisible enough. It comes from billboards and screens selling us solutions to problems we didn't know we had. It echoes in classrooms where worth gets measured in grades, where we learn early that we are only as valuable as our latest achievement.

The spell has many names. Some people call it perfectionism. Some people call it capitalism or patriarchy. Each system reinforces the others. Underneath them all is the same message, you are not enough as you are. You must constantly strive, improve, optimise. Rest is laziness. Contentment is complacency. Self-worth must be earned through pleasing everyone else.

And we believe it. We believe it so deeply that we can't imagine any other way of being.

Living under this spell costs us everything. We lose connection to our bodies, treating them as machines to optimise. We push through exhaustion, ignore hunger, override pain. We evaluate our bodies like merchandise, too much here, not enough there, always requiring improvement. We forget that our bodies are not projects. They're the vessels of our aliveness.

We lose trust in our emotions, seeing them as inconveniences. Anger becomes dangerous, something to suppress rather than a signal that boundaries have been crossed. Sadness becomes weakness. Even joy becomes suspect; too much happiness and people might think we're naive. We learn to perform acceptable emotions while the real ones rot inside us.

We struggle to have authentic relationships because we can't show up as ourselves when we believe we're fundamentally flawed. We curate our personalities like social media feeds. We bond over shared complaints rather than genuine connection. We hide our struggles until they become too big to contain, then feel ashamed when we finally break.

Most painfully, we lose the actual experience of being alive. We're so busy trying to earn our place here that we forget we were born belonging. We miss sunsets while planning tomorrow's productivity. We rush through meals while reading about optimal nutrition. The spell keeps us focused on a future where we'll finally be enough, stealing the only moment we actually have.

When I say you're not broken, I'm not engaging in wishful thinking. I'm pointing to something real, your original wholeness that exists beneath all the wounds.

Think of a tree that grows bent because of the prevailing wind. It's not broken. It's adapted. It's survived. Its essential tree-ness remains intact. You are like that tree. Whatever shaped you, whatever forces bent you, your essence remains whole. The ways you learned to protect yourself, to make yourself small or acceptable. These aren't character flaws. They're proof of your ability to survive.

The Origins of the Wound

For most of us, the wound begins early. Maybe it was the moment a parent's face showed disappointment and you learned you could be "wrong." That flash of frustration or disgust that crossed their features when you were just being yourself. The first time someone told you that you were too much or not enough. Too loud, too sensitive, too demanding. Not quiet enough, not tough enough, not easy enough.

These moments accumulate. Each one teaches us to mistrust ourselves a little more. The wound isn't just personal, it's inherited. We absorb the unhealed pain of parents who were told they weren't enough, who passed that message on not from malice but from their own wounding. We inherit the fears of family systems where love was scarce, where belonging required betraying parts of yourself.

Sometimes the wound comes from broader systems, the teacher who said you'd never amount to anything, the culture that said your body was wrong, the society that demanded you fit into boxes too small to hold you. These wounds layer upon each other until we mistake them for our actual shape. Like a rose bush that must be pruned to bloom more magnificently, sometimes what feels uncomfortable to face and and cut away, is actually making space for new growth. The gardener's shears seem cruel, but come spring, the plant that was cut back severely often blooms most abundantly. This is not to suggest we cut off parts of ourselves, but that we release the old thoughts, stories, patterns and beliefs that no longer serve us, so that we can bloom again.

What the Spell Serves

That voice in your head telling you you're not good enough? It thinks it's helping.

The inner critic developed when you were young and needed to figure out how to stay safe. If criticism helped you avoid punishment, your psyche internalised it. If being perfect kept you from rejection, your inner critic became a perfectionist. Understanding this doesn't mean we let it run the show. But it helps to know it's not your enemy, it's a protector using outdated methods.

Who benefits from you believing you're not enough?

Industries that profit from selling you solutions to manufactured flaws. The diet industry needs you to hate your body. The beauty industry requires your insecurity. People often try to sell you something based on undermining you, telling you that you aren’t enough and need fixing.

Relationships that require your self-abandonment benefit from your lack of self love: the friend who needs you small so they can feel big, the partner who benefits from your self-doubt, the family dynamics that only function if you play your assigned role.

Your self-doubt is profitable. Your self-hatred is convenient. Your belief in your inadequacy keeps you controllable. Think about it: if you really knew you were already whole and worthy, what would you stop buying? What would you stop tolerating? What would you start demanding?

The moment we stop believing we're broken, we become dangerous to the status quo.

The Body Knows

As you read this, what's happening in your body?

You might notice tightness in your chest, the words you've swallowed. A clenching in your belly, the way you've learned to brace against criticism. Heaviness in your limbs, the exhaustion of carrying this weight. Or maybe numbness, the way you've learned to leave when things get too real.

Whatever you're experiencing is information. That chronic shoulder tension? Might be the weight of impossible expectations. That knot in your stomach? Years of swallowed anger. That feeling of disconnection? Maybe the only way you knew to survive.

Your body has been keeping score all along. It remembers every moment you abandoned yourself, every time you overrode your needs, every instance you chose external approval over internal truth. It's waiting for you to finally listen.

If you're feeling resistance, grief, anger, or even hope, good. These feelings mean the spell is starting to break.

Leonard Cohen sang about the crack in everything, how that's where the light gets in. Your awareness of the spell is the crack. Your willingness to question it is the light.

If that critical voice is loud right now, instead of fighting it, speak to it like you would a scared animal. "Thank you for trying to protect me. I hear you. I've got this now. You can rest."

Notice what happens when you offer this gentleness. Does something soften? Does something resist? There's no right response, only information about where you are right now.

Breaking the Spell

When the spell begins to lift, and it will, slowly, something extraordinary happens. You don't become a different person. You remember who you always were beneath the layers of conditioning.

You start to feel a different quality of tiredness, the good exhaustion from living your actual life instead of performing it. Your voice finds its natural register. Your shoulders remember how to rest.

Relationships shift. Some deepen as you show up more fully. Others fall away, they required your self-abandonment to function. You find yourself saying no without elaborate justifications. You say yes to things that previously felt selfish, rest, pleasure, creative expression, simply being.

The inner critic doesn't disappear. It transforms from a tyrant to a worried friend you can comfort. The shame doesn't vanish. It loosens its grip, becoming weather passing through rather than your permanent climate.

This becomes possible when you decide you're worthy of your own regard. Right now. Not when you're perfect. Not when you've fixed yourself. In all your messy humanity.

The spell breaks the moment you start questioning it. What if I'm not broken? What if I don't need to earn love? What if I'm already enough?

These questions are revolutionary. They challenge everything you've been taught. Every time you catch the critic in action, every time you notice yourself trying to earn worth, every time you choose tenderness over harshness, you're unravelling the spell.

The work ahead isn't about becoming someone new. It's about remembering who you were before the world convinced you that you needed to be different. It's gathering up the parts you've hidden, rejected, forgotten.

We'll move slowly. Those defences kept you safe. We honour them even as we begin to let them go. You've been under this spell for years. Of course it takes time to find your way out.

The fact that you're reading this means the work has already begun. That remembering isn't always comfortable. Sometimes it feels like grief for the years lost to self-hatred. Sometimes like rage at those who planted these seeds of shame. Sometimes like terror at the prospect of being seen without your armour.

All of it is welcome. All of it is part of your return.

Some days you'll feel progress. Other days you'll feel back at the beginning. Both are true. Both are necessary. You don't have to believe you're loveable yet. You don't have to feel ready. You just have to be willing to consider that maybe the voices that told you that you were wrong... were wrong.

That's enough. That crack in your certainty about your unworthiness, that's where the light gets in.

When you're ready, we'll continue with something manageable: learning to approve of yourself. Basic approval. Being on your own side.

It changes more than you might think...

~

? Order a paperback or hardback version of Self Love Magic direct from me!

? Grab a copy for your Kindle!

? Get a free ebook version! (Haversham tier and above)

~