Learning to Self-Love

The term self-love or love yourself phrasing has grown in popularity in the past few years. These are tossed out when someone thinks you need to live a life that is more fulfilling or someone is trying to create such a life. Self-love is important when it comes to living well because it influences everything from a choice in mate to dealing with obstacles that arise in life. It is of such great importance that everyone should understand self-love.

Self-love is not about a total head to toe makeover or finding the perfect mate or even reading the ideal inspirational quote. These things can bring love into life and make you feel good, but they are just activities. Self-love is actually a feeling, a good feeling that comes from appreciating oneself. This feeling comes from actions that support our growth spiritually, physically, and psychologically. This is a dynamic feeling that comes as we mature and act in ways that can further this growth. We learn to accept our strengths, weaknesses, and short comings for what they are, part of us. We learn self-compassion for our humanness and discover personal meaning. This leads to finding our life purpose and values that we can use to live fully through personal efforts.

Prescription for Self-Love

Be Mindful – Those with the most self-love tend to know what they want, feel, think, and believe and act on this personal knowledge, not what others want.

Need not Want – When you truly love yourself, you can walk away from things that may be good in the moment because they are not what you need. We may want certain things, but in that time it is not a need. Through such focus, we learn to avoid troublesome behavior patterns that can bring us down.

Self- Care – Self-care is of vital importance when it comes to self-love. Care for your basic needs with healthy activities like proper sleep, nutrition, and social interactions.

Boundaries – Learn to say no and set clear boundaries for yourself and others. Anything depleting needs to be limited.

Self-Protection – Learning who should and should not be in your life is self-protection. If someone is bad for you, leave them behind so you can flourish.

Self-Forgiveness – We all make mistakes, yet we are often hardest on ourselves for these mistakes. Take responsibility, but then move on leaving it in the past. Accepting our own humanness is part of self-love. Failure is part of life, learn from it, grow from it, and move on.

Intentionality – Live with a purpose and design, accepting that whatever happens can be dealt with because you are you. Even if your purpose is not totally clear, live a healthy life until it becomes clear. The more you love yourself, the more you will accomplish intentionally.

Choose a couple of the actions to start with and build on those areas so you become more self-loving. Then build other areas while maintaining the first couple. The more you love yourself, the more you will be able to love others. This encourages them to do the same and you can both grow in the amount of self-love that exists.