Your relationship to everyone in your life (parents, lovers, friends) always stems from your relationship to yourself.
If you have a limited amount of love for yourself, it’s next to impossible to love anyone else with any real depth. You can only love the people in your life to the extent that you first love and care for yourself.
Self-love (which some people sometimes see as selfishness) has gotten a bad reputation these days, but by focusing on yourself you can be a more whole and loving individual for those around you.
The more compassionate and loving you are to yourself, the more love and kindness you can extend to everyone you cross paths with.
Here are seven simple steps to a more loving relationship with yourself.
1. Forgiveness
It’s difficult to start loving yourself if you haven’t cleared out the mental and emotional blocks that you have in your mental attic.
When we feel embarrassed, ashamed, or uncomfortable with elements of our past it is commonly a symptom of not having forgiven ourselves for our past actions.
Maybe you broke up with someone in a not-so-honorable way. Maybe you played small in your career when you wish you had just gone for it. Maybe you knowingly engaged in behaviour that was out of alignment with your integrity.
Whatever may have happened in your past, it will only ever stay in your past. You can’t go back and change it. Don’t make yourself wrong for having done what you did. You can learn from your past, and then let go of it.
If you’re having a tough time forgiving yourself for your perceived past errors, here are a few mantras that might help you in your process:
- ‘How could I have known?’
- ‘I did the best I could with what I knew then.’
- ‘Even though I did what I did, I fully and completely love and accept myself as I am.
2. Self-care
According to my honorary philosophical grandfather Abraham Maslow, it’s impossible to feel deeply loved and nourished on a soul level if our foundational needs aren’t being met.
The next time you hear your mental radio frequencies start to tune into negativity, make sure that your self-care is up to snuff.
Eat delicious, nourishing food. Have a relaxing slow bath or shower. Take a nap. Wear your favourite comfortable outfit and have a relaxing meditation session.
Whatever it is that makes you feel the most grounded and nurtured, do that first. Then see if you notice a drastic difference in your internal dialogue.
3. Self-love
If self-care is the gasoline in a cars fuel tank, then self-love is the heated interior seats, air conditioning, and the sparkling clean tire rims.
Getting your foundational self-care is a necessary step, but most people tend to stop there. Self-love is the act of taking your self-care to the next level.
Whether it’s a massage, yoga session, jog around the park, or taking yourself on a date at your favourite restaurant that gets your heart feeling warm, do whatever it takes to make yourself feel proactively cared for.
One way to test your self-love level is to ask yourself, at the end of each day, ‘How was I kind and self-loving with myself today?’ If it takes you more than a couple of minutes to dig up an example as an answer, then you might need to be caring for yourself with more intentionality.
4. Make time for stillness
We live in an increasingly stimulating world. Flashing lights, digital pings, and billboards are fighting for our attention non-stop.
If we don’t give ourselves time to get away from the noise and prioritize stillness, it’s very easy to feel chronically anxious and overwhelmed.
Even if it’s just a simple five minutes at the beginning of your morning, give yourself a space for stillness to let your mind breathe. You give yourself a chance to let your emotional awareness float to the surface. By focusing internally in a quiet space you get to run your day (and your life) from a place of choice as opposed to a place of reactivity and stress.
Whether you call it meditation, a mindfulness practice, or just sitting or lying down for a few minutes with no distractions, prioritizing a little sliver of stillness in your life will reap you huge benefits.
5. Listen to what your feelings are telling you, and honor them
When you start prioritizing a space for stillness in your life you’ll notice that something magical will start to occur. Your feelings, emotions, and gut-level intuition will start speaking to you with increasing levels of clarity.
It may start as a whisper, but eventually grow into a clear and assertive voice.
It might tell you to shift your work path, or spend more time with one of your favourite friends, or to drink more water.
Whatever your body/heart/mind starts telling you, listening to your intuition is a necessary step in having a more loving relationship with yourself.
A lot of the suffering in the world comes from people knowing that they should be doing one thing, and not doing it (with their health, in their work, their self-care, or in their relationships).
“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.” – Abraham Maslow
6. Keeping a self-recognition list
It’s so easy to go through our lives in the constant act of striving and reaching to become our future selves. If we aren’t careful, it’s easy to get caught in the trap of being overly future-minded and not reminding ourselves of the successes we have already accumulated or are currently living with.
One way to make sure that we are aware of our recent and current accomplishments is to keep a daily self-recognition diary.
Simply sit down with your pen and paper/digital device/diary/journal/etc. and answer the questions:
“What am I recognizing myself for today?”
“What is awesome about me?”
“What progress did I make today as a person?”
Whether you write one word, or one thousand words in reply to each question, the daily habit will reap major benefits for your self-esteem and self-love.
Try it out. Give it a week-long test and see how you feel about it after your seventh day.
7. Acknowledge that you are worthy of love and belonging just by existing
When a baby is born, it’s mother loves it just for existing.
As a somewhat contrasting point to some of the aforementioned points, you don’t need any logical-level reasons to fall in love with yourself. You are worthy of love and belonging just by existing.
People don’t need reasons to love. Love is abundant and available to us at all times. So don’t strive and reach for self-love, just relax and drop into it. It’s already within you and it’s waiting to be felt.
There can be a mild sense of anxiety when we let others love or care for us… but this anxiety only speaks to our discomfort with loving ourselves. So when we drop into our self-love practice first, then we can welcome our abundant love with open arms.
You are so worthy of love it’s ridiculous.
Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It
Learning to love ourselves is a journey. It’s not something (for most people) that happens overnight. Just like anything else worth having in life, it is a process that takes time.
Even if you extend loving kindness to yourself in a way that increases your self-love by 1% you’re still making progress.
Don’t let the above list overwhelm you… pick your favourite point and start with that. Start small and be kind with yourself in your process.
I wish you the best of luck in your journey.
You are loved.
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