What “Love Yourself” Means and 3 Ways to Get Closer To It
You’ve heard it before:
“If you don’t love yourself, nobody else will!”
“The most important relationship you have is the one with yourself!”
“Love yourself first!”
OK fine, you say, but none of these people or articles explain what “loving yourself” actually means. How do I know if I love myself? Do I really want to love myself? Doesn’t this make me a narcissist? What would it look like?
Visions come up of you screaming from the rooftops how great you are, dismissing anyone who disagrees with you, and refusing to believe that you could ever do wrong (making Kanye West look like he has low self-esteem).
Ok hold on. Back up. I said “love,” not “become obsessed with.” Is that how you would treat and feel about someone you love? Probably not, unless you were on a mission to a break up or have a restraining order placed on you. If you’ve felt love for another before, what did you think about—and how did you act towards—the recipient of your feelings? Chances are you thought the person was pretty awesome, enjoyed spending time with them, were compassionate and forgiving when they let you or someone else down (after ensuring you knew they had learned from the error), and practiced unconditional love towards them, leaving them feeling safe, supported, and secure. Maybe you didn’t love every aspect of them all the time, but you accepted, understood, and supported unconditionally.
Now turn that way of being in a romantic relationship inwards, towards yourself. You’re not infatuated, you still have expectations, and you’re not going to let yourself have free reign to fulfill every selfish desire; but, you have patience and compassion and don’t consider yourself to be a worthless individual if you make a mistake.
Make sense? If it’s a new way of relating for you intrapersonally, it’ll feel weird to begin with. It’ll feel anxiety-provoking and feigned and awkward. But, like most things, it will become comfortable and automatic with practice. Here are a few tips for learning and mastering the practice of self-compassion—or, as the rest of the world says, “loving yourself.”
- When you become aware of your critical voice, thank it for showing up with its good intentions. Congratulate yourself on noticing that it showed up, and ask yourself if you would say the same thing to a partner, friend, or a child in your situation. If the answer is no, try to think of what you might say to them, and respond that way to yourself instead. If you can’t think of something supportive that you might say, use the formula that I use with myself and teach to my clients:
“It’s understandable that I’m feeling (feeling) because (reason why it makes sense that you’re feeling that way), and it’s understandable that I did (behavior that you are judging) because I (reason anyone else in your shoes might have done the same thing). Something I can take away from this experience is (what will you know for next time due to this valuable experiential learning process?) and one reason why it’s good this happened is because (what is or might be a residual effect of this experience that is positive?).”
- Practice a compassionate meditation towards yourself. Find a comfortable seat. Close your eyes. Turn inwards—first to your breath. Focus on taking a few long, expansive breaths that make your tummy expand. Now go inwards into your experience. Scan what you’re feeling physically and emotionally. Notice your thoughts. Try to just watch these thoughts, feelings, and sensations without judgment. Don’t try to change them or analyze them. Just observe them and let them be. Now bring up feelings of warmth, patience, empathy, sympathy, comfort, and appreciation. This might take some time, or feel foreign or forced. It will get easier with practice. Now envision sending those qualities of compassion to yourself. Imagine them enveloping you like a warm blanket or a comforting hug. Picture the compassion traveling throughout your body and your mind, telling you that you are loved and worthy, reminding you that you are not alone so long as you have yourself. Once you feel competent practicing sending yourself compassion in this way, take it a step further. Find mountain pose in front of a mirror, and notice what thoughts and feelings come up as you look at your reflection. You might experience uncomfortable feelings that make you want to look away or be self-critical. Sit with those feelings. Once you are comfortable sitting in them, practice sending love to the person in the mirror.
- The preceding tips generally suggest how to react intrapersonally following transgression. But consider how you act towards yourself in response to success, compared to how you might react to someone you love. Our society overvalues modesty, to the point at which people feel guilty if they own or congratulate their successes. Just think about the last time you got a compliment, how you reacted to it. Or the last time you felt proud about something, then quickly squashed that feeling for fear of becoming complacent. Again, I’m not saying here that you should send an interoffice email around about how you’re better than your colleagues or would like to be addressed from here forward as “God.” This is saying give yourself space to enjoy pride, acknowledge your success, internally and externally, and try “Thank you, I worked hard,” or “Thank you, me too” in response to a compliment, instead of finding a deflecting or denying it.
If you’re not convinced you’re ready to give yourself space and compassion and support, that’s fair. Being self-critical has probably been at the root of a lot of your successes, and has likely protected you from a lot of painful feelings of rejection or failure. But how long will it be until you choose to love yourself unconditionally? What are your alternatives? Dislike? Hate? Reject? No one can make you make that shift but you. As Oscar Wilde says, “Be yourself, everyone else is taken.” You cannot change the person you inhabit, but you can change your relationship to them. Now get practicing, so can spend more of this lifetime with the one you love—you.
About the Author
Praying With Humility: How To Change Yourself And The World
It’s perfectly appropriate to defend our belongings, lives, and loved ones, and to yearn for specific relationships and life-experiences. It’s also suitable to desire titles, positions, gobs of money, and the highest levels of success. You might even have fantasies of domination or revenge. It’s all part of the play.
While goals and desires can be conjured through intentions and focused effort, prayers tend to require a separate set of conditions and attributes. If all whimsies and hungers were equal to prayers, then prayers for football team wins, stock windfalls, and military massacres would dominate the supernatural circuits, and crowd the fulfillment funnel.
For a prayer to be considered “fair trade,” it’s probably best it meets one or more of these conditions:
- Reflects a personal, life or death situation
- Is born from pure, heartfelt intentions
- Stems from a place of humility
- Reflects a measure of reverence
- Does not require that other living Beings be hurt, punished, or killed
- Results in improved conditions for one or more people, the results of which do not threaten other living Beings
- Enhances an individual’s or group’s health, safety, mental capacity, attitude, emotional state, spiritual wholeness, comfort, relationships, or general well-being, including yours
- Expedites a person’s psychological, emotional, or spiritual evolution, including yours
- Inspires and invites feelings of positivity, kindness, and generosity
- Provokes compassion or empathy from anyone who might hear the prayer
- Immediately increases the vibration of the person praying
If your prayer doesn’t embody any of the above attributes, it might be more of a hope, desire, or goal than a prayer. Authentic prayer does not generally involve the ego. For example: praying for a financial windfall is probably egoistic, but praying to receive money to pay for your Mother’s surgery, might have measurable appeal to the Universe’s vibrational, response-network.
How do we create and improve our realities?
To up-level our selves and lives, we start with a feeling or a sense, then we slowly churn it into an intention. Once it’s embedded in us, we imagine related scenarios, outcomes, and destinations. Within these elusive dreams, we form agendas and implement actions, thereby moving us toward the fulfillment of our desires.
To accelerate our journeys, we might use games, leverage, strategy, or cunning. We might also engage our friends, allies, and demons. These are the systems and rackets that rule our physical lives within our three-dimensional realities.
It’s perfectly moral to have goals, dreams, and fantasies that are self-serving. Even a measure of greed can produce positive feelings and outcomes. It’s also permissible to dance with shadows and invite devils to dinner. What separates goodness from evil is not our thoughts or associations; it’s the upshot of our efforts. If hints of our intentions, and hosts of our actions, produce favorable conditions, we still might be invited to sit at the right hand of the divine.
When we’re in the aggressive pursuit of achievement and position, it’s not necessarily harmful or bad, but it’s probably not prayerful. Prayerfulness requires our vulnerability. If our prayers are muddied with desires for pleasures and trinkets, they can become superfluous, even benign.
What if we wish to shift something unique, deep, and lovely? What if our desires are perfectly pure and egoless? What if we have the heart, soul-intention, and desire-base of a child? What, then?
Strangely, the Universe, born from light, has the heart of a child. This child is not infantile; rather, She is the embodiment of the deepest and most profound truths in all of reality, and throughout all galaxies and realms. Whether you see Her as a God, Avatar, Master, or Guru, or the embodiment of pure electromagnetic energy giving birth to matter and circumstance, She is truth itself.
When we beckon the Divine, we enter into courtship with eternal light. It doesn’t matter if we’ve named him Jesus, Buddha, or Elm Tree, and it doesn’t matter whether we’re rich or poor. What matters most is that we have chosen to bow to a Supreme Being, which is also us. As we embody the purest humility, we see through the eyes of the Divine, and into forever. It’s in this state that prayers are immediately fulfilled.
Once we are in a complete and humble prostration to the eternal Self, we can be anyone or anything. In this position, we can share every tidbit of our pain and let it all out. We can be sad, angry, or delighted. We can be full of love, rage or hate. We can be selfish, and we can beg. Most importantly, as we lay our hearts and burdens at His holy feet, we free ourselves. This is how every soul, regardless of religion, can be immersed in the bosom of eternal light, and be born again.
Genuine prayer is not easy. It comes at a price. To connect with and shift the fabric of reality through prayer, we must first admit that our self-identities and personas are temporary and barely real.
While we might not need to embody our purest selves at the start of our prayers, we need to be open to our unraveling. Without a doubt, to achieve a durable state of prayer, we must acquiesce to the All-That-Is, from the cores of our beings.
The Reality Of It All
When leading and participating in Native American and Pagan rituals, I’ve seen people heal themselves of hatred, depression, and disease. I’ve felt spirits exit bodies, and I’ve seen miraculous transformations in the most broken and horrid people.
Through deeply intentional and action-based prayers, I know that anything is possible. Even if for a moment, if we can strip ourselves of our false identities and desires, and open our hearts to the vibrations of pure light, we can co-create any reality.
To begin, sit in silence, and bow to the eternal master. Call out to your angels, guides, Gods, and helpers in all the realms. Yearn to be opened. Beg for the light to blow you away.
