Why I struggled to claim self-loyalty (and what changed)
We can name something true and still not be able to inhabit it. For me, the term ‘self-loyalty’ felt like a concept I could define but not quite own. The reason turned out to be simpler and stranger than a self-worth problem. When the mind is running everything, it can't always hear what the rest of us already knows.
Why I struggled to claim self-loyalty (and what changed)
I built a brand around self-loyalty. I wrote the framework. I coached from it. I put it in my bio, on my homepage, in every article.
For a long time though, something about claiming ‘self-loyalty’ felt blank. Like reaching for something and finding the shelf empty.
It wasn't loud resistance. There was no clear internal voice saying this isn't yours. It was subtler. More like a quiet nothing where the certainty should have been. I said the words. I meant the concept. And still, something didn't fully land.
For a while I made sense of it the only way I knew how: I attributed it to self-worth. Who am I to own this term? Who am I to coin this like Brene Brown coined vulnerability? That framing felt logical. It fit a pattern I recognized. So I stayed with it for longer than I should have.
It was the wrong read entirely.
What self-loyalty actually requires for it to take root
Self-loyalty is the ongoing practice of choosing our own truth in real moments, in real time, again and again. The framework moves through four stages: meeting yourself, recognizing the override, choosing yourself anyway, and living from what's true. The stages make sense. The logic holds. But logic was exactly the problem.
I came to self-loyalty through the mind. A decade of deep inner work—therapy, somatic work, plant medicine, ancestral healing—all of it approached with a seeking, analytical energy. Understand the wound. Map the pattern. Fix the root. The mind was the instrument I trusted most, so the mind ran the show. Even the healing.
When you bring something to the mind to be claimed, the mind can evaluate it, organize it, build a framework around it. What the mind cannot do is feel it as true in the body. And self-loyalty, it turns out, was never the full picture. The version I was living was incomplete. My body and heart had registered that long before my mind caught up.
The previous version of self-loyalty I had been living by prioritized self above all else without fully accounting for how our choices land on others. That incompleteness has a felt quality. It never quite settled.
Real self-loyalty, as I understand it now, includes the capacity to act with genuine consideration of others. Living fully while holding deep respect for the feelings of others.
My body knew this before I did. Neurologist Antonio Damasio spent decades studying what happens when people lose access to their emotional and bodily responses. His findings were clear: the body registers knowing before the mind catches up. What tightens, what releases, what subtly says yes or no—these are real signals. We can understand something completely and still not know it in the body.
My body caught up. And what it showed me changed the definition.
The moment I thought it had landed
There was a specific moment I believed the claiming had finally happened. I did my own Release & Claim experience (the somatic practice I offer). In it, I released what I had been carrying and claimed what was true. I named the business. I named self-loyalty. I said it out loud, in my body, with intention.
And then I went back to my life and it still didn't quite stick.
That confused me for a long time. If claiming it in a somatic experience didn't do it, what would?
The body doesn't lie. And something in me kept registering a quiet no. Not to self-loyalty as a concept, but to self-loyalty as the full answer. I just couldn't hear it clearly enough over the mind's confident yes.
What was actually happening
Self-loyalty is real work. The framework is sound. The practice of overriding self-override is genuinely what changes the pattern over time.
What the body was registering is that self-loyalty as I had been holding it was still a mind-led concept. Serious. Heavy. Something to build and optimize and demonstrate. The version I was living was still filtered through the analytical, seeking energy that ran the decade of healing work before it. And it was missing something essential: the people around me.
The real thing is lighter. More alive. Less constructed. And it faces outward as much as inward.
Self-loyalty at its fullest is choosing yourself in a way that holds genuine care for others. It is delight and graciousness together. Following what feels genuinely good for ourselves while remaining present to how our choices land on the people we love. Creating from sensation rather than strategy. Choosing ourselves in a moment so small and so real that no framework is needed to name it. We just know we did it because something in us exhales. And nothing in us contracts from the weight of having ignored someone else in the process.
That version I couldn't claim because I hadn't lived it yet. I was teaching the map before I had walked the territory in my own body.
What changed is that I didn’t ignore my inner signals, even when they felt blank. And what it showed me was that self-loyalty had more room in it than I had given it. I recognize it now because I finally stopped trying to think my way into it.
Frequently asked questions
Why is it hard to claim something we believe in? Believing something is true and inhabiting it as true are two different experiences. The mind can evaluate and organize a concept. The body is where genuine claiming happens, through lived moments, felt experience, and the quiet knowing that something has actually shifted. When we're operating primarily from the mind, we can miss the body's signals that something isn't fully landing yet.
What does it mean to claim something somatically? Somatic claiming happens in the body rather than in the mind. It's the felt sense of something being true—a settling, a release, a sense of rightness that doesn't require explanation. It tends to arrive through lived experience rather than through understanding, and it often comes when we stop trying to force it.
