What Self Love REALLY Is - How These 3 Secrets Will Make Loving Yourself Easy
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Self love is an underrated topic. Self love is often just brushed over as just ice cream and pyjamas in the afternoon or “love yourself before you can love anyone else.” But even that’s not entirely true. Sure eating ice cream could be self love for some people but self love actually goes much deeper.
Self love is honouring yourself and recognizing your worth. Self love, like any true and genuine love, is unconditional. When you have self love, you see, value, understand, accept, and love yourself. You care deeply about yourself and can recognize things, people, thoughts, and energy that does not serve you. With self love you are unstoppable because you know that you can do anything. Self love is putting yourself first and taking charge of your life.
Most people don't have self love because they have over complicated it. They put up all these walls and barriers keeping them from being happy. I will love myself when I lose these last 10 pounds. I will be happy when I get a raise. I will love myself when I do this or have that or am this or that kind of person. And you’ve probably been overcomplicating it too. What have you put in between yourself and unconditional self love?
What if all you had to do was love yourself to get everything you want? How do you know that loving yourself is not the only thing you need to do?
Think about that for a second. What would change in your life if you just chose to love yourself right now?
Self love is simple. It can be broken down into three main things.
Self Acceptance
Self Trust
Honouring Yourself
Self Acceptance.
Too often people start their day by looking in the mirror and jumping straight into picking themselves apart. You look tired. Is that another pimple? Your teeth are too yellow. And so on. How do you feel about yourself right now? Are you unhappy with yourself or your body? What are you beating yourself up about? How do you talk to yourself? Are you loving or hurtful with yourself?
It is in human nature to look for faults and to compare yourself to others or your younger self. This is flawed thinking when you are trying to embrace and accept yourself because it is hyper-focusing on the negative aspects of yourself. What you perceive yourself to be lacking. When all you see are the negative things about yourself, it can be hard to feel as if you are worth accepting.
True self acceptance comes when you can see the person in the mirror and feel good about everything you see. And the person that you are or are becoming in every aspect. Accept the good and bad things, the problems and successes, all of it. Accepting yourself is easy. Just choose to see yourself as already whole. You are complete and perfect just as you are. Act out of deep love for yourself and know your worth.
Jump to self awareness to learn how to objectively view yourself, your habits, and your being. Blind self acceptance, accepting absolutely everything about yourself without determining the effects it has, can be detrimental to your commitment to self love. Self love is a commitment to do and be the best you can and without self awareness you will never know if you are just blindly accepting yourself or if you have true unconditional self love. Self awareness is key to owning your happiness and having self love.
Self Trust.
Self trust is honouring your word and doing the things you say you will do. How many times have you promised yourself something and not followed through on it?
A lot of the time it can be easier to keep your word to others but not to yourself. You promise that today will be the day that you finally start eating healthy or that you will not forget to wash the laundry. But you forget anyway because no one held you accountable. Every time that you don’t go through with your word, you are further moving out of self trust. The less you trust yourself, the worse you feel about yourself. How would you feel if a friend did this to you?
Acting with integrity is a key part of self esteem and trusting yourself. When you do what you say you are going to do, you move into self trust. You can trust yourself to take care of what needs to be done and it’s not a question of if you’ll forget or not. You take care of it because it is important for you to have a good rapport with yourself.
As you keep up with what you say you will do, you feel better about yourself and your abilities. You trust yourself and in turn have a better opinion of yourself.
Honoring Yourself.
Honoring yourself is knowing yourself and what makes you feel good. When you honor yourself you are protecting your energy. You only have so much energy and it doesn’t feel good to give it away to things that do not serve you.
If you know that you really don’t like going out with friends all the time, you honor yourself by allowing yourself to say “no” sometimes. If you know that you love to create art, you make time for it. If you really love ice cream and crappy tv shows, you will let yourself indulge sometimes.
Honoring yourself can be anything that you do for self care. From meditating to sleeping in, or calling your family. Honor yourself and your energy by doing things that make you feel good and recharge you.
Don’t hesitate to put yourself first.
Self love is an integral part of living your best and happiest life. When you work from a place of self love, you act with a deep desire to show yourself love and compassion. A huge part of the human experience is emotions and how you feel about yourself shapes so much of your world. By allowing love to flow through your being you open the channel for others to see themselves as valuable too. Self love is knowing your worth and honoring your being. So love yourself deeply and don’t be afraid for the world to see. The more we can love ourselves and tell others that it is okay to love themselves too, the more love there is in the world. And we can always use more of that.
