How Much Do You Love Yourself?
We hear a lot about loving other people, but many don’t realize that this starts with loving yourself. How you feel about yourself plays a very large role in your ability to love others. It also plays a huge role in your ability to function effectively as a creator in your life.
Let’s look at a simple analogy to understand this more clearly. If you buy a plant that you love, you will likely take very good care of it. Because you enjoy its presence, you will probably be inspired to do whatever it takes to enhance that presence. You will be attentive to its needs, water it, feed it, and make sure that it has exactly the right amount of light. You will also freely open your heart to appreciating it, which will inspire you to continue caring for it.
This is not very different from what you will do if you love yourself. Granted, loving yourself as a human being is far more complex than loving a plant. But the principle is the same. If you love yourself, you will feel a natural inspiration to do as much as possible to cultivate a beautiful life. On the other hand, if you judge yourself negatively, inspiration to create a better life will be hard to come by. Likewise, if you dislike the plant, you will not feel the same motivation to care for it.
Loving yourself is not about being arrogant or egotistical
Loving yourself is not the same as having an ego that says you are better than other people. The ego always plays in opposites and duality. In order for someone to be good, someone else has to be bad by comparison. Without comparisons, the ego has no way to gauge anything. So if your ego is pretending to “love” you, it will always do so at the expense of someone else.
True love for oneself is unconditional by nature. It doesn’t need a reason. In fact, if you love yourself unconditionally you can take comfort in the fact that you are wholly agreeing with God! And what could be better than being on the same page with infinite love?
Surprisingly, to truly love yourself takes real humility. You have to have the humility to set aside all of your negative judgements about yourself. You have to approach your life with kindness and forgiveness. It’s important to realize that the ego’s negativity has no place in God’s world of infinite love. Wherever the ego is involved, everyone loses, and there is no love in that picture.
So humility and sincere, honest love for oneself go hand in hand. Self love occurs automatically whenever the ego’s negative voice is silenced. Self love is a state of being that is natural to who we are!
How does loving yourself lead to loving others?
Now let’s look at how loving yourself determines your ability to love others. This is pure science. The source of your love lies within your heart. Who is the person closest to your heart? You are, of course! Think of your heart as a radiant light of infinite love. You are closer than anyone else to that source of love.
Imagine that your heart is like a radiant sun within you. If you don’t like yourself, you will react to that radiant light of love by rejecting it. Your ego may tell you that you don’t deserve that love, and then handily provide you with all of the reasons why not. In agreeing with the ego and rejecting that light, you effectively block yourself from experiencing it. You put up a wall.
In order for that love within you to reach others, it has to pass through you first. If you cannot accept it for yourself, then you stop it at its source. By protecting yourself from your own love, you prevent that love from being sincerely expressed to others. Any negativity that you harbor towards yourself acts as a blackout curtain to that beautiful light within. Others may only experience a shadow of the true love that you are capable of giving.
How to Love Yourself More
If you have grown unconscious to loving yourself, then try something simple to reinvigorate that experience for yourself. Decide that you will no longer rely on other people to give you the love that you are not giving yourself. Instead try an experiment.
Choose an area in your life where you habitually depend on others for approval. That might be your job, your family, or your friends. Decide for one day that you are only going to rely on yourself for that acceptance and love. This does not in any way sever your relationships with others. In fact, it enhances those relationships because you stop pulling on them for your self-worth.
Next, you will learn some extraordinary things about yourself. You may find that it is much easier to rely on yourself for such things, because you can actually be 100% reliable. The next most surprising thing you may learn is that you have ironically just made it easier for others to love you because you are no longer needy and dependent.
And finally, you will realize that when you don’t require the approval of others, it is so much easier to love them. It is easier to accept them as they are because you are not personalizing everything they do as signaling something about you.
Altogether, you will find yourself feeling more relaxed, secure, and happy. And next you may find yourself inspired to create an extraordinary life!
What are your thoughts about self-love and self-acceptance? Share with me in the comments below!
Loving yourself is very hard if you have been continuously compared adversely to others by your mother and grandmother. Indeed my grandmother’s mantra was “You should be more like your sister”. So I grew up believing myself to be ugly, a failure and unlovable. I put up with a less than perfect marriage because I knew it was all I deserved. After my husband died I met a lovely man who really boosted my ego by telling me how lovely, good, kind ans accomplished I am. He was the best friend I ever had and we had 10 years together. But he died in June of a massive heart attack. You can imagine how I miss him. So this love yourself article is very timely and I thank you for it.
I’m so sorry to hear about your loss, Linda. But I’m sure he’s with you as your angel now. I am very happy to hear that you have been able to put all of that past negativity aside. And how wonderful that your husband was able to validate the truth about you! What a gift he must have been. 🙂
I’m glad this was helpful for you. Keep loving yourself. You are worth it!
It’s so much easier to love others than myself .. why is that? Does that mean that I must then actually love myself without realizing it?
This is really interesting, Rosita. It could be any number of things. Is it more that it’s easier to accept, appreciate, and approve of others than yourself? In other words, do you find yourself judging yourself more harshly and others in a more positive, accepting way? That’s what I meant when I said that the ego creates dualities where in order for you to judge yourself harshly, then it has to judge others in a much more positive way. That’s how it creates the contrast.
It’s also possible that you really do love yourself (as we are born to do) and the judgmental ego is preventing you from having that experience on a conscious level. And that could be manifesting as an ingrained pattern of thought and perspective.
Are you framing yourself differently from how you frame others? These are all things you can think about and ponder.
But to speak directly to your question in a very simple way, let me just say this: It is often easier to view others in a more positive light if the ego (the negative voice in the head) is targeting you as the one to be “suspicious of” in your own mind. In other words, the ego loves to cast doubt and suspicion on the idea that you could be as lovable as others.
Timely message. I’ve made a lot of progress through the years with this, but recently I’ve begun working on this around authority figures. I seem to think authority figures should be perfect at accepting and loving me – since they’ve got power over me (or seem to). I’m gradually moving into compassion for them as fellow imperfect humans. Your reminder to give myself the understanding and love I’d like from them was helpful.
I’m glad this was helpful, Linda. It’s funny how common it is to view authority figures as more perfect than we are. The truth is that they are no different. Perhaps the only difference is that they have made different decisions in their lives that put them on a different path. But we are all inherently human. There is no such thing as a perfect person in a finite, dualistic world such as this, that’s for sure! 🙂
Yes,it is wise,and I do love myself.It’s been a learning process.I have days when I catch myself angry at me for bad habits and procrastination and such.Then I snap myself out of it.I don’t quote the bible very much but it does say love your neighbor as YOURSELF.When young this confused me.TY you for all your sharing Saratoga.
Letitia, I’m certainly not an expert on the Bible, but you bring up an excellent point. “Love your neighbor as yourself” brings up the core principle that I am describing in this article. In other words, you really can’t separate the two, as a matter of science and principle. They go hand in hand. Such a simple quote, but so true!
I guess you could also interpret it as a directive to open up to the natural experience of loving yourself so that you CAN love your neighbor. In other words, allow that flow of love from God to radiate outwards unimpeded. Loving yourself is a state of being that was placed there by our creator. It is meant to expand and be expressed outwardly to others, because we understand that they, too, are valuable. I always think that Mother Teresa was a great example of this.
It’s also funny how we can think that beating ourselves up will help when we fail to do what we truly intended. I think this is very common. But it sure doesn’t help, does it? It actually has a discouraging effect, instead of an encouraging effect. What we really need is the encouragement to keep trying! 🙂
Thanks for helping me clarify a major pattern I’ve been burdened with all my life. On the outside, anyone looking at me would think I’m the pro at self-love because I’ve always taken good care of my health. Truth is, the driving force behind this was almost always a combined sense of never measuring up, and survival fear – relentlessly reinforced by the ego (mine and my family’s). It’s actually counterproductive to true health, because it’s held in my body like another of life’s stressors. Feels like I’m in a perfectionists’ boot camp. This also extends to my emotional well-being.
I have had the experience of self-care based on self-love and it feels dramatically different: relaxing, comforting, compassionate and tender. I now know which experience I’m going to live in.
Blessings to you, Saratoga.
Lucille, this is an amazing contrast that you have expressed here. I totally get what you mean. It’s really about self-care being fear-based or love-based, isn’t it?
If it’s fear-based, then it’s not genuine self-care at all, but rather all about measuring up. It then holds an insidious factor of intimidation to it. Naturally, this constant inner feeling of intimidation would take an emotional toll overall.
If it’s love-based, then it’s an entirely different thing. It’s self-contained and peaceful. It’s not measured against what others are doing or thinking. Then you can truly relax and experience the beautiful benefits.
Saratoga, this is so beautifully expressed. Everything you speak of resonates within my heart. When I was younger, and pretty messed up from many things I experienced growing up in a dysfunctional household (as I’m sure many people did!), I used to believe that I was a loving person but I was so needy that it never worked for me. And I couldn’t understand why. I had such approval issues that I would ignore my true loving nature and sell out to everyone around me, thinking if I made other people happy, they would love me, and I’d be happy too. Wrong! It’s taken me a lifetime of experiences to understand me, and I’ve learned to honour and accept myself for who I am, not as anyone else want me to be. It’s been a slow and painful process, but I can honestly say that all of the work I’ve done with Telstar has shed so much light on everything. Because love IS everything. I know now that the world reflects back to me what I give. It has to be sincere, and it must come from loving myself. It has to be authentic to who I am, and how I feel. The heart is the centre of my universe. The old cliché that you can’t love anyone if you don’t love yourself is true. It’s not an intellectual exercise. It lies in the centre of my being–my heart! It’s beginning to feel too big for my body… which is probably a good sign! 🙂
And thank you everyone who is tuning into this message for sharing your feelings and experiences. I really appreciate everyone’s perspective… and I’m inspired and moved by what everyone’s saying… so thanks so much!
Leigh
Leigh, thanks so much for expressing your appreciation for everyone here. I, too, very much appreciate the sharing that happens here.
The experience that you describe above is so common. It really is a deadly trap to feel that one’s worth must come from others before we can value ourselves. That is a true recipe for emotional disaster.
I’m so glad you have learned to turn this around for yourself. That’s awesome! 🙂
It took me a long time, to love myself & getting my self esteem back, after being verbally abused by my first husband for 10 yrs. After a divorce, I raised my girls on my own for 18 yrs. I had therapy with spiritual therapists, which helped tremendously. I am a very spiritual person! I feel connected to the Earth, send out love to all the world everyday, meditate, am kind, & caring to everyone I see, & am grateful for everyday God gives me to enjoy this beautiful Earth! Sending love & blessings to all!
Carol, this is amazing to hear about the transformation you have experienced in your life. I’m sure it was a lot of work and took some real courage. I’m so proud of you! This is really awesome. 🙂
How wonderful that you took some very bad experiences and turned your life into a real blessing. What a beautiful example of self love. xoxo
I love myself but I dont love anyone because I dont trust them.
Happy thoughts and keep it simple