“Love cures people – both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.”

Of all the things in life to learn, what could be more important than learning to truly love and accept yourself, and to cultivate loving relationships with others.

Unless we can truly love, accept and understand ourselves, we can’t truly love another.

Our lack of self-love – our disconnection from loving ourselves – is at the core of what we struggle with in our lives. The quality of your relationship with yourself determines the quality of your relationship with everything else.

For example, how you relate to yourself influences your physical well-being, your food choices, the exercise you get, and your relationship to money.  It influences your emotional well-being, the pace you set for your life, the time you make for yourself, and how loveable you feel. It also influences your spiritual well-being, your creativity, and how happy you are.

The more you love yourself, the better your life gets.

When you know that the source of love is inside of you, you express yourself without trying to win approval. Your capacity to love yourself also influences how much you let yourself be loved by others.

When you feel loveable, you don’t need to ‘win’ love. You let love in. You allow yourself to receive love. You trust in love and how loveable you are.

The more you learn about loving yourself, the more you learn about everything else – including how to be authentic, how to communicate, how to forgive, how to enjoy your relationships and how to be truly happy.

Take a few minutes now to write down your answer to this question – what does self-love mean to me?

Self-love is a loving attitude from which positive actions arise that benefit you and others.

Love is within all of us and it’s for everyone.

How do you love yourself? How do you love others?

We can show love for ourselves and for others in the same way.

Consider these elements of Self-Love:

1) Knowing who you are – self-love arises naturally when you see past your outer shell – your body, your ego, your personality, the face you are showing to the world – and allow yourself to sense, feel and recognize the true spirit of who you are.

2) Self-love is knowing you are made of love – love isn’t part of you, it is you. Love is your original energy and the heart of who you are. Love is the consciousness of your true self – not of your personality, but of the true, unconditioned self at the core of your being.

3) Self-love is your inner knowing of yourself – you may experience a longing in your life for peace, wholeness, and an end to conflict. This is your self-love calling out to you. Your inner consciousness is free of judgment, unworthiness and lack. When you slow down, breathe and allow tension to be released from your body, you will connect to the deepest, most loving part of yourself.

4) Self-love is a sacred promise kept – self-love is a vow to ourselves that asks us not to get caught up in the outer appearances in life. There is so much more to us than our self-image, our body, and our story. Self-love is a natural feeling that we had at birth, but that we have forgotten. It’s a commitment that says, I will not forget who I am.

Your parents are your first teachers – whether they realized it or not, they taught you about love.

Reflect on some questions about love:

What did your mother/father teach you specifically about love?

As a child, how did your mother/father help you to feel loved or loveable?

How does your relationship with mother/father influence your relationship to love?

Your childhood messages are still at play in your life today.

How are the messages that you learned about love affecting you today? How do those messages affect your children?

Most childhoods are full of mixed messages about love. We learned that we are loveable when we get good grades, don’t make noise, don’t have fights, stay quiet, don’t cause problems, be a good little boy or girl. We learn to feel loved only for how we behave.

We learn in childhood that we need to adapt our true selves in order to feel loved. Being adaptive is necessary, but too much adaptation (brought on by too many conditions of love) can cause us to abandon our authentic self and replace it with a more pleasing image that hopefully gets us out of trouble and wins us more love. This is how we first experience a loss of our authentic being and how our true self is replaced by a persona and an act.

Many of us are gripped with fear, anxiety and stress. We are locked into patterns and ways of being in the world that are conflict-based, angry and full of blame.

It takes a conscious effort to remove the blocks to loving ourselves – to understand and to be compassionate towards ourselves.

We can unlearn the ways of fear, and choose love instead.

When we take a step towards love – for ourselves or for others – we face a lot of chatter in our conscious and subconscious minds. We judge ourselves and we become afraid. We tense up and distract ourselves. We lash out, get angry and blame each other.

We look for love outside of ourselves, because we don’t feel loveable. We often don’t take time to practice loving ourselves or make time for our needs and feelings. Until you change your mind about yourself, your only hope is to find someone who will tell you that you are loveable and overturn your own judgement towards yourself.

Finding love is about cultivating acceptance of all aspects of you and living with this attitude of acceptance in your day-to-day life. Then, you can let go of your theories about love and your old stories about why you feel loveable.

You can move towards love at any time – you can start now, right where you are. The journey is about knowing the love within you, not trying to find it outside of yourself.

What messages are you giving your children about love? How do you practice loving yourself?

Together, we will remember the love within you – and bring it into the light.

Let’s talk about love – If you want to uncover the love that exists within you, get in touch with the space inside of you where the bigger conversation of your life unfolds.  Deep down, you are searching for something deeper within yourself – what will you choose to do with those feelings?

Work with me – Individual or Couples Sessions – AND The Self-Love & Soul Freedom 10-Week Program – Loving Yourself Sets You Free – www.s3p.d51.myftpupload.com – [email protected] or 647 222-3086. 

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