By Anita Moorjani —
One of the biggest lessons I learned from nearly dying of cancer is the importance of loving myself unconditionally. In fact, learning to love and accept myself unconditionally is what healed me and brought me back from the brink of death. During my workshops and speeches, I often tell the audience to “love yourself like your life depends on it; because it does!”
Being at the brink of death taught me that my purpose in life is to be who I am and express my authentic self fearlessly. But I also learned that I would never fully express myself unless I am able to accept and love myself unconditionally.
The extent to which I am fearless about expressing my authentic self is in direct correlation with how much I love and accept myself.
It is important you are aware of loving yourself. If you’re anything like me, you will feel that it’s one thing to know the importance of loving ourselves in theory, but quite another thing to effectively put self-love into practice. Most of us come from cultures and societies that do not promote, or even support, self-love, and we often feel judged if we love ourselves, value ourselves or put ourselves first.
Perhaps this is the reason why so many of us are struggling through life – we are brought up to believe in the opposite of what would really help us in life, and when we inadvertently stumble upon the truth of how to live our lives joyfully, we are judged for practicing it.
Below, I’ve listed three common myths that, if taken as truth, may hold us back from living our life fully:
Myth 1 – It’s selfish to love yourself: To dispel this myth, just look at its opposite: what does it look like if we don’t love or value ourselves? We feel unworthy, undeserving and unlovable, and the person we become is one who is needy, with a void that we believe needs to be filled by others because we believe that it’s selfish to fill it ourselves. This is the person I used to be. I was needy – and a people pleaser – because I needed the validation of others in order to feel worthy. However, I’ve noticed that when we love ourselves, we don’t need the approval of others in order to be who we are. Instead, we are able to bring our fully realized, joyful self out into the world – someone whom others want to be around – instead of a self that is needy, with a hole that needs to be filled by others.
Myth 2 – Being unconditionally loving towards another means allowing them to treat you as they please: So many people write to me and ask, “How can I love my partner/another person unconditionally, when they disrespect me and walk all over me?” My answer to that would be: we MUST learn to love ourselves unconditionally first, as loving unconditionally always starts with the self. The truth is that when it comes to relationships, it is actually very difficult to unconditionally love others until and unless we unconditionally love ourselves. Why? Because we are the ones who decide how others can treat us. The more we love ourselves, the less we allow others to treat us like doormats. Loving others unconditionally does not mean allowing them to walk all over us. It means treating and respecting others in the way we want to be treated and respected, and it also means being able to leave a relationship in a loving and compassionate manner when it no longer supports who we are. When we love ourselves enough to have the courage to walk away from relationships that do not work for us, we allow the space for a different kind of relationship to enter into our lives.
Myth 3 – Being spiritual means renouncing the material world, transcending the ego and becoming detached from emotional dramas: It is a common belief that “spirituality” is something that needs to be attained, and we need to work at it by transcending the ego and becoming detached from the material world. In a way, this attitude has become a type of dogma, a set belief taken as a given because it is so prevalent in our world. However, from my experience in the near death experience realm, I learned that nothing could be further from the truth. We transcend our ego and the material world when we die and leave our bodies, but as long as we are alive, breathing, and expressing through a physical body, the best thing we can do for ourselves and for those around us is to engage in life fully and to express ourselves authentically. To me, being spiritual and being ourselves is one and the same thing! I believe that our purpose is to be who we came here to be, and to live life to the fullest. Most of us take “spirituality” too seriously and try to make it something separate from our life here. Life would be so much more fun if we lightened up and realized we are not flawed! We are beautiful, magnificent beings. We don’t have to work at being spiritual. We are already spiritual, whether we realize it or not.
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