There are many that speak of “self-love” including myself! Essentially, loving yourself means knowing who you are and accepting it fully and it is said that you must be able to love yourself before you can truly love someone else. Learning to love yourself is the first critical step we must take before we are able to gain self-confidence and attract success. Not loving yourself may mean that you will have a deficit in self-confidence which could cause you to unconsciously push people and opportunities away from you and you won’t even notice that because you’re caught up in believing you’re unworthy.
Principally, your struggles might stem from the fact that at some point in your childhood, you were hurt (most children have this experience) and by blaming yourself for being the cause of the hurt, carrying this burden consequentially shaped your personality to ensure that you would never be vulnerable enough to experience that hurt again. For example, suppose you had a best friend in school and one day that friend decided that they didn’t like you anymore and no longer wanted your friendship. You may have then opted to always keep your distance from people (perhaps just of the same sex) in the future as a coping mechanism after this incident. The problem is, you adopted this belief for life. But the fact is that circumstances constantly change, you grow up and people around you mature, you no longer have a reason to be apprehensive.
I used to find it frustrating when people told me I was hard on myself and I needed to learn to love who I was. It didn’t matter how many bubble baths I soaked in or how much I let myself spend on clothes, I just couldn’t seem to cultivate this supposed “self-love”. Loving yourself gives you self-worth, self-respect and self-confidence. And if you don’t love yourself, you will never be able to truly experience the infinite joy of giving and receiving love. The more you love yourself, and draw on the infinite source of love from within your own heart, the more your heart expands and you begin to experience love and happiness for no reason.
We all start this journey from a different place and have different pieces of the puzzle missing. I am sharing with you keys that have helped me on my journey.
Having Compassion
Loving yourself is not about believing that you are perfect or having egotistical pride. It’s about discovering your authentic self, your passion, what gives your life meaning and purpose for YOU, not for someone else. Be vigilant of the critical and judgemental thoughts you have, let those thoughts pass by and leave you only with feelings of great compassion for yourself. Love yourself no matter what. If other people criticise you, let them. You can never please everyone else. But you can always please and love yourself. On the surface this might seem selfish but those who fill up their own well first have the most to give others, you only truly obtain self-love by having compassion for the self.
Taking Responsibility
A pivotal turning point for me was to take responsibility for what was not working in my life and stop blaming other people. As soon as I took responsibility I gained my power back and became the master of myself instead of the victim of other people’s manipulations. Look at the people and situations in your life right now. What do you see? Who/what do you not like? See if the people/situations you don’t like reflect something about you. We can’t change what we are not aware of and don’t acknowledge.
Being Courageous
Courage is not an absence of fear. Courage is rather the presence of fear, with the willingness to face it. Fear and greed live in the mind, so allow your heart to become the master and the mind the servant of the heart. You will be amazed at how the universe steps in to support you when you follow your heart. An excellent way to begin is to do something loving for yourself. When you treat yourself with kindness, it makes you feel good. The more you feel good, the more you want to treat yourself with kindness.
The writer is an astrologer and Vastu expert
