You can transform your life by giving yourself permission to truly love yourself—emotionally, practically, spiritually, and physically. If you prioritize self-care in all its forms, you’ll more easily clear the obstacles in your path, you’ll go through your days happier, bringing positive energy to others and helping to make the world a better place. Loving yourself is the way to conquer suffering, find enlightenment, and begin to transform the world for the better.
Once I escaped the abusive situation I was mired in for almost four decades, the first epiphany I had was about the importance of taking care of myself. I finally understood I was worth the effort, and the best thing I could do for my wellbeing was to take care of myself in all of the ways I’d felt others had failed me. It’s not up to others to make us feel okay—that’s up to us. We define our reality. We define who we present to the rest of the world, and who we are when we’re alone with ourselves. We control our health choices. We control how much we accept ourselves. We control our thought patterns.
Maybe some people in my family didn’t want me to be happy with who I was, but I wanted to be happy with who I was. Maybe they wanted me to feel bad about my personality, or the way I looked, or talked, or all the things that made me who I was, but I could rise above all of that through self-acceptance, self-care, and self-love.
No matter what outside forces in your life get you down, YOU control the love you have for yourself. Don’t let anyone else poison your self-love. Recognize how incredible you are. Care for your own needs—the obvious and the most private ones. Combat your suffering with the most powerful thing in existence: Love.
Emotional Love
This means feeling your feelings in the moment rather than suppressing them, so that we can more quickly move through things like grief and anger. When we deny ourselves the ability to face what we feel at the deepest levels, we tie our soul up in knots. Then we carry those knots with us. They cause us pain and remain until we untie them and process our truths. All challenges we face in life are intentional. They each bring lessons. We cannot escape our lessons. They will linger or reappear in our path until we find the courage to pay attention to them.
If something is really pissing you off, stop and take a closer look. Figure out WHY it’s pissing you off, underneath how it may appear on the surface. What is the underlying issue? If something is causing you grief, like the loss of a loved one, you will move more quickly through pain into peace so by embracing the waves of sadness when they crash into you.
Try seeing the things that upset you as gifts, enabling you to pinpoint things to work on in yourself. If you accept these challenges as they happen, you will discover yourself stronger than you think, capable of doing more than you expect. If you dodge and avoid your problems, they will haunt you like ghosts, never giving you real peace until their secrets are unearthed.
We waste too much energy worrying about how others perceive us, and spend not nearly enough on independently taking care of our own needs.
Practical Love
No one knows what you need better than you do. Pay attention to what is required to take care of yourself. Do you need more rest? Healthier food? Less stress at work? A different morning routine? A break from an irksome friend or family member? Permission to indulge in a passion or hobby? A visit to the doctor?
Don’t expect others to magically know how to take perfect care of you. You need to learn to do the job for yourself. If each of us really took proper care of our needs, the world would be a much happier place to live. In truth, healing ourselves and learning what it means to love (ourselves first), is the true meaning of life. It’s what we’re here to do—learn to better love ourselves and each other.
Don’t underestimate the importance of making kinder practical choices when it comes to your wellbeing. Choose to give yourself a break. Find new ways to make your life easier. Scrutinize your daily choices for ways habit is getting in the way of contentment. You can try new things if they might make things easier on you. I’m well aware of the mental traps we set for ourselves, thinking we HAVE to do something a certain way. That we HAVE to tolerate discomfort, toxicity, negativity, or abuse. This is wrong! You always have the ability to choose to stop tolerating anything that causes you pain.
Yes, we each have our responsibilities. Yes, you can reorganize them at any given moment. Make yourself more of a priority in small practical ways. Do the little things that will bring more joy and comfort to your daily life. Make conscious choices to pursue bigger goals that will make things better. When we set an intention, the universe feels it and responds in kind. Intend to love, and to be happy.
Spiritual Love
At the heart of it all is your soul, and your relationship with it. We’re not usually told this in the normal course of life in this day and age. It’s too common to go through decades of life—in the institutions of childhood, school, work, adulthood, without ever being encouraged by the outside world to pay attention to your inner life. What a tragedy this is! Religion is the closest most of us get, but it tends to wield guilt (fear) as a way to control and subjugate, rather than motivate us to recognize our own eternal power.
This life, this very moment—it’s all about your soul. Everything is. Behind all fear is truth, and the truth is love. We are made of this love. Consciousness is love, and consciousness shapes our whole universe. Within our bodies, within our minds and hearts, our souls sit in stillness—untouched by the emotional tides and struggles of each moment. Try it. Let everything fall away. Quiet your mind. Breathe. There, in the silence, is the peace that defines your soul. It’s the false distractions of the material world that blind us to this reality. You can work to clear away the distractions. Practices like meditation help us purge “thought noise”. Look within your being every day, peering constantly deeper, and this will do a better job than anything else at revealing what really matters, who you really are, and what your purpose is.
Once you see how crucial it is to understand your soul is the true reality, and everything else is temporary, you’ll be amazed at how many people in this world go through their days blind and lost. How can we begin to know what the heck we’re doing without first knowing who we are? Do YOU know who you are? You’re not your labels. You’re not your body, or age, or status, or bank account. In the peace of your heart, behind thought and emotion, you are the silent Watcher. You are a vibration. A light. You’re a portal through which the universe studies itself.
Find a quiet space alone, away from gadgets and distraction, and spend time with yourself. Go for a walk in nature. Listen to music and clear your mind. Dance. Write a journal. This is the most important work you can possibly do. It’s the way to self-acceptance. It enables your guides to reach you and keep you on your best path. It reveals all the ways the universe signals to you in every moment that it sees you, hears you, understands you, LOVES you. You can choose to block it out, or you can open your heart and discover the wonder of existence.
Physical Love
This isn’t about sex, though that is one way to satisfy some types of physical need. It’s our responsibility to take care of our bodies as best we can. None of us are perfect, and we’re not meant to be. We’re in the bodies we selected before beginning this incarnation as the best vehicles to learn our particular lessons for this lifetime. You can make things easier in many ways by taking proper care of your physical needs. That means rest, healthy food, exercise, hygiene, medical and mental care.
This is the only body you get for the remainder of this life. It’s up to you to care for it. You can give it fuel filled with nutrients, or you can fuel it with junk and poison. You can do what you can to stay physically fit, or you can tax your system with extra, unneeded stress. You can choose to rest when tired, or you can work yourself to exhaustion. These choices are up to you, but if you want to love yourself, the better paths become clearer. Choosing to sabotage our own health always has consequences. Unhealthy choices will shorten your life, bringing discomfort or agony that could have been avoided. By taking proper care of yourself, you’re gifting yourself with an easier experience as you age.
Don’t stand in your own way. Don’t let fear cause you unneeded suffering. Choose to really love yourself, in all the ways you can.
Love and blessings, friends.
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