When I had first started my therapeutic journey, I asked my therapist a question. “How do I love myself?” Little did I know, I had already begun too. Taking a step towards improving yourself is an act of self love.
I learned the basis of self love while in the process of being disrespected. You don't learn social skills by speaking to yourself, right?
So what is it to love yourself? To love yourself is to unconsciously stand beside your boundaries and demand your needs be met without compromise. Loving yourself is standing up for yourself when you are put down, not acknowledged, disrespected or not appreciated. It is checking people when they are careless about how they make you feel. To love yourself is to discern the actions of others so you don’t take them personally. Defensiveness is fear. Obsession is envy. Aggressiveness is feeling a lack of control. Projection is rampant. It is knowing that when someone does not value you- it is not a personal fault of yours but an issue within them. To love yourself is to quiet that clamoring voice in your head that indulges in negative self talk. To put up energetic barriers that make you untouchable… To love yourself is to stay authentic to your being, to be aware of what differentiates your self from convention. To come naturally into your essence.
Self love is a natural experience. It is something we are born with. When we are young we have needs and we stand beside those needs, demanding they be met through tears as an infant. Through repeated disappointment, we either learn the art of silence, or the desire to yell to receive attention into our pre-teens. Either of these habits rule and dictate. But overall still a child with needs to be met- we learn we have to succumb to the leisure of others. We begin to forget and forfeit our own needs. We cover them with fear, anger, mistrust and shame. When we are children, we search for love in others. Without secure attachment we build our future relationships on what if’s, on potential rather than receiving, on how we allow ourselves to be treated rather than how we deserve to be treated. When we are with others that make us feel fear, anger, mistrust and shame, it shields us from loving ourselves because our nervous systems are too un-regulated and distracted to find peace within ourselves. We are too busy stuck in survival mode.
To gain a secure attachment we need to be in relations with those who are willing to heal alongside us. Attachment can only be learnt through relations. So a big part of the healing journey, and journey towards forfeiting domestication driven by ego, is a support system. Self love is rooted in the self, but self love can also be sabotaged by outside force. So a large component comes down to your surroundings.
"I can do nothing for you but work on myself.
You can do nothing for me but work on yourself." -Ram Dass
You can either become your own parent or continue to be the eternal wounded child.
We choose to heal our inner child by indulging in the things we loved as a child. We look at old photos of ourselves and send love and care to the child in us who felt unloved. We look back upon past versions of ourselves and feel sympathy, empathy love. We promise to always take care of the wounded child within us and protect it from harm, from ourselves and others. We ask the needs of that child in us and determine if those needs are being met today. We take note of how much we have grown and how much room there is to still grow. We applaud ourselves for how far we’ve come from our darkest days. We proceed in love for whatever struggles we face in the future.
Be the light you are constantly seeking. When you start to emit your own frequency rather than absorbing the frequencies around you, you will feel it. You will become essentially you. A you that you can love. Then you can love yourself in the presence of anyone. Major emotional vampires however, can overcome any energetic barriers you put up and dig their claws into your psyche. The only way to escape is to reject their energetic hold on you like a disease and remove yourself as soon as you can so their thoughts don’t become your own.
“You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control.”
-Elizabeth Gilbert
When you begin asking for your needs to be met, you will be met with a lot of refusal and accusations. There will be people that insist on intervening your boundaries and dismissing your needs. They will accuse you of being selfish and try and convince you that what you want is not what is best for you. When realistically, everyone knows what's best for themselves whether they follow it or not. Everyone has a right to speak up about what they need. Those are the people that are showing you outright that they don't respect you, and those types of people need to be gutted from your life if you want to progress on your healing journey. Otherwise you will begin to lose sight of yourself.
Through social conditioning and domestication we already become strangers to ourselves through the process of growing up. So when someone comes along and tells you who you are when you are already unaware of yourself- you listen. If anyone tries to tell you who you are with unwarranted and unhelpful criticism, beware of them. Those people wish to distort your vision of yourself and have authority over what you are to become.
“Remind yourself, ‘No one can implicate me in ugliness.’”
-Marcus Aurelius
Look to your passions, preferences, boundaries and values, it will lead you to your self. Imagine its the first day of your life and disassociate yourself from the things that hurt you. Hold on to the lessons learned but don’t let your trauma determine your self.
“Negativity is totally unnatural. It is a psychic pollutant, and there is a deep link between the poisoning and destruction of nature and the vast negativity that has accumulated in the collective human psyche. No other life-form on the planet knows negativity, only humans, just as no other life-form violates and poisons the Earth that sustains it. Have you ever seen an unhappy flower or a stressed oak tree? Have you some across a depressed dolphin, a frog that has a problem with self-esteem, a cat that cannot relax, or a bird that carries hatred and resentment? The only animals that may occasionally experience something akin to negativity or show signs of neurotic behavior are those that live in close contact with humans and so link into the humans mind and its insanity.”
-Eckhart Tolle
To love yourself is not only a state of mind but a practice, it is a way of living and a philosophy. It is something you can embody and incorporate into your existence. It is undebatable and non-fluctuating. It is a constant that begins to come naturally with practice and exercise. But only if it is something you choose at any cost, even if that means changing your life style or changing who surrounds you. When someone leaves you, don't allow your sense of self to be so dependent on them that they take you with them when they leave.
"Though love cannot be forced on anyone, it can be awakened in him through love itself. Love is essentially self-communicative. Those who do not have it catch it from those who have it. True love is unconquerable and irresistible; and it goes on gathering power and spreading itself. Until eventually it transforms everyone it touches." -- Ram Dass
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