July 13, 2017
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What is self-love?
It means very simply taking care of your 'self'! It is taking care of yourself so that you feel balanced and fulfilled from within, without needing love from without.
Self love is something you feel. You know when you are not loving yourself, that you feel drained and tired, and out of balance. Also feelings of anger and frustration is signalling that something is out of balance. It might be that you are afraid of speaking your truth and saying how you feel, so you keep it to yourself and suppress the emotion, which will result in pressure felt from within that might try to find its outlet in other ways. So your emotions come and go unpredictably and in numerous negative ways and you might doubt your decisions and procrastinate, because of it.
There are many indicators for the need of more self loving care-taking. Because when we love ourselves we are capable of truly loving others. We have more responsibility as one person than we think.
Self Love means loving and truly honoring everything that makes us be who we are! It is appreciating all that we have been given, our gifts, our talents, our ideas, our feelings everything that makes us uniquely us.
Loving yourself means, respecting your body! It is the most clever and loving mechanism there for you! It works in your favour! Thank it and use it wisely! Give back to it, so it can function for you at its best. What are doing to it? What are you feeding it?
How much are you listening to your body? We tend to get ignorant to the signals our body is constantly telling us. It is literally communicating with us all the time.
How much are you taking care of your thoughts? Cause thoughts affect your emotions and if they are let loose, your emotions will let loose and do whatever they want, and usually when this happens it is not good. It can cause anxiety, anger, doubt, guilt, all kinds of negative emotions. And what do emotions do? They lead us to behave in certain ways, 'reacting' to things instead of confidently acting proactively on things with love and care and kindness.
Self Love means taking control over your self and deciding over what you put into your body physically and what you choose to see, hear and later think. Most happens subconsciously
Here are 10 ways to love yourself:
(No one else but you can love yourself like this -It has truly lasting effects)
1. Watch and Notice your Thoughts - How are you responding to your own thoughts? Are you directing them to the negative or positive side? What is the quality of them? Is your thought process generally negative? - WE CHOSE OUR THOUGHTS - Becoming aware of them will help to strengthen our ability to take control of them and steer to the positive side.
If you notice that a lot of anxiety is coming from your thoughts it probably means that they are doing their own thing. And thoughts tend to pull towards the negative if we don't watch them.
2. Learn the difference between just Thoughts and Intuition - Since a lot of uncontrolled thinking is lead to feelings of fear, which keep us from being and doing what we truly actually wanted to do, it is important practice to strengthen the ability to differentiate between understanding a guided message to us through our Intuition, or a thought that we have filtered through our own uniquely created paradigm set up, now automatically connected to uncomfortable emotions spiralling wildly through our wildest imagination. 85% of our fears do not even come true and are simply our brain doing its very clever work of memorising all that has once affected us. Any similarities to past events, the brain might pick up on, that have previously hurt or scared us, will automatically be registered and very quickly realised into further feelings of fear as a way of 'protecting us against further pain'.
3. Realise that pain is your friend - Like explained above, the body (the physical side of us) tries to run away from pain. However, pain is a very vital part of living and a very vital part of loving yourself. If for example we let our fears overcome us and control us, we would not face certain situations that would be important for our growth, personal growth or business growth, whichever challenge it might be. On the other side of pain or discomfort is the reward. It is the same like going to work out in the gym or whatever sports you do, the satisfaction comes after working out hard and going against tiredness or feelings of weakness and doing it anyways. When you have an exam or when you have to perform, fear always hits just before. But how good will you feel if you didn't go on stage, didn't perform, didn't push a bit harder to see results cause of fear? Even the pain of separation or doing the right thing, feels uncomfortable but there is this knowing it will be good for us if we go through it. Don't be scared of pain. Its inevitable, suffering is a choice.
4. Go outside your comfort zones - What is your comfort? For me clearly I can be lazy and I can procrastinate very easily. I tend to comfort eat, I used to be shy and still am sometimes. So going outside my comfort zone would mean to be more proactive at speaking with people, not fearing to contact people. Sometimes its a matter of 'speaking up'. Not giving in to comfort food too much, pushing myself to go to the gym even when I'm tired,etc. We all have our comfort zones. So when it comes to self love, it is many times not only about doing what you want to do right now or what you feel most comfortable in right now, such as instant gratification comfort situations. They can be more damaging than pushing through to go against your comfort zones as it will show results for the long run. Ask yourself, how will this help me for the long run?
5. Reactive vs Proactive - When it comes to our day to day, how many times do you 'react' to situations? If it is reacting to a friend, your mum, your boss a passerby? We don't realise how much of our actions are on autopilot. Simply reacting and not slowing down to think about the repercussions this may have. Not just on the relationship with them or how they might feel, but on ourselves. Every reactive behaviour gets stored and will come back to us in some form or shape. Sometimes we benefit from simply taking our time to respond to an email that might enrage us or a telephone call that made us sad, a comment that frustrated us. If we let ourselves calm down before reacting and come from a calm place, usually that place comes from a place of love. Its always important to act from a place of love, as we never know what the other person might be going through right now and the more proactive actions we do, the more will come back to us. Tip: Let a minimum of 3 hours pass before answering, if it is a big thing, take 3 days. Just check yourself and see if you would respond from a hurt place or from a place trying to see both parts.
These are the first 5 steps to really help you to love yourself on a lasting and profound way. The other 5 steps will come in part 2.
Loving yourself takes many shapes, whatever makes you happy is important, be playful, be creative,think outside the box. Routine can become quite stale after some time so mix it up. Go out for a walk, spend time with your furry friends, meet up with your friends, go on a trip, take a bath put some music on, take a class, whatever is your type of fun, just do it.
Have a great week!
Best wishes,
Love and Light,
Maria