Learning How to Eat, Pray, LOVE—Part 3
"Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love" — 1 John 4:8
My first week on Bucerias Beach in 2026
January 12th, 2026
📍Bucerias, Nayarit, Mexico 🇲🇽
¡Saludos desde el desierto!
My relationship with myself has changed massively over the last five years—beginning in 2021, when God first awakened me to my True Self (my soul), distinct from my egoic false self, through a life-changing mystical encounter with I AM. In that moment, I experienced Unconditional Love coursing through every fiber of my being. There was no separation. No striving. No proving. Only Love.
In that ecstatic moment, God spoke—not in words, but in Presence—and the message was absolute: I AM Love.
The I AM—the One True God, the primordial Source and ground of all being—is Love itself. And being made in the image of Love (imago Dei), we are created to live from within that Love, our very being rooted in and sustained by it—born of it.
“The spirit of God is within us, in everyone of us, and it is part of the divine plan that it be born into the world.”
A Bucerias sunset.
When I started my nomadic travels back in 2024, I not only wanted to see the world and live an adventurous life, but also to break down religious barriers and experience God through cultures outside my American evangelical upbringing (my comfort zone and “mother tongue”). This past year in particular, my walk with the Lord has continued to include a healthy deconstruction of Western dualistic thinking—Self versus God, sacred versus ordinary, me versus them—and reconstruction of Oneness with Love. And my life will never be the same.
In traveling solo as a digital nomad, I’ve been invited into a much quieter, more demanding healing work: learning how to remain in loving relationship with my Self. Not in theory, in practice.
Travel stripped away my comfort zones and forced me inward, back into what I’ve come to call my Inner Sanctuary—that interior dwelling place where Love abides regardless of circumstance—A place I only truly learned to inhabit this year. Loving myself has meant returning there again and again, especially when old patterns of self-abandonment tried to resurface.
LOVE
Self-love, I’m learning, is not self-indulgence. It is fidelity.
It looks like listening to my body when it’s tired. Feeding it well. Letting it rest. Saying no without justification. Choosing Presence over productivity. Staying present with emotions when it would be easier to distract or dissociate. Offering myself the same compassion I once reserved only for others.
It has also meant grieving—grieving versions of myself I outgrew, identities that once kept me safe, relationships that could not come with me in this stage of my healing journey. Love does not rush this process.
What has surprised me most is that the more anchored I become in Love within myself, the less frantic my outside relationships feel. Love no longer asks to be possessed or proven. It doesn’t cling or chase. It allows intimacy without erasing boundaries. Devotion without Self-betrayal.
This is the love that emerges on the other side of deconstruction—not the absence of faith, but its maturation. A love that trusts God enough to rest. A love that no longer needs “others” or edges to define itself. A love that feels spacious, steady, and strong.
2025 taught me that loving myself is not a destination I arrived at, but a way of moving through the world. It looks like listening to my body and honoring its rhythms. Letting rest be enough. Choosing nourishment over punishment. Staying present when old patterns try to pull me away from myself. It looks like trusting my own inner knowing. Making decisions without outsourcing my authority. Remaining soft without collapsing. Strong without armor.
These images hold moments of becoming—of learning to stay with myself in unfamiliar places, to meet joy without bracing for loss, to let love be steady rather than dramatic. This is what loving myself looks like now.
If EAT taught me how to orient my body in the world, and PRAY taught me how to listen from within it, then LOVE has been the ongoing practice of remaining at home in my Self—wherever I go.
This is the Love I am carrying forward into 2026.
With Love, unconditionally—
Jennifer
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. If you click through a link and make a purchase, it may earn me a small commission, at no additional cost to you! See our disclaimer for details.
Keep Reading…
Dig Deeper…
