What does it mean to love yourself?
And how we love ourselves better?
I was having this conversation with a really good friend of mine recently,
and she asked me, "What does self love look like to you?"
I thought about it, and generally it boils down to these three things.
First of all, to love yourself fully is to accept and embrace yourself for everything
that you are,
including your strengths, your weaknesses, your flaws, everything.
You have to love yourself at your best and love yourself even at your worst.
It's about just embracing you who are and owning it, and not wanting to be anyone else
and have a different life, because you should love and accept your life.
Love is unconditional, so whatever happens, you still have to love yourself.
Number two is to learn to forgive, and this comes in two parts.
The first part is: You have to learn how to forgive yourself.
This means not being so hard on yourself.
If you ever make a mistake or mess up,
don't dwell on it.
Just acknowledge it, learn from it, and move on.
The second part of forgiveness is to learn to forgive others who have hurt you,
even if they haven't apologized or even if they don't deserve it.
This is hard and it's tricky but if you can do it, then it's extremely powerful.
When you have an argument with someone or you have a grudge,
or there's some sort of unsettled situation, that occupies space in your mind
and there's this negative energy where you're always hurting because you haven't
gotten over that situation.
You want to learn to forgive others, not necessarily
because they deserve it but because you love yourself too much to let yourself
keep hurting because of that situation.
It doesn't have to be a verbal connection,
you don't have to tell them that you've forgiven them.
It's more for yourself that you've forgiven
this person and let go of the situation, just so that you can have inner peace,
because forgiving yourself and forgiving others is learning to treat yourself well
and it's loving yourself, because you don't want to keep hurting over
anything that's happened in the past.
Number three is to take the time to really listen to yourself and do what's best for
you.
In loving yourself, you have to really know yourself and through that, you can do what's
best.
I do this through writing.
Writing is my way of talking to myself.
I have a bunch of journals
and I do stream of consciousness writing which means I just write whatever flows out of me,
whatever is off the top of my mind and I keep going.
I keep writing, writing, and writing
until the voice inside of me comes out.
It takes a while to peel off the layers
of what's on the surface.
On the surface, we think about our daily lives
and the things that we have to do, but if you keep listening to yourself and keep digging,
then you start to find the most honest core of yourself and the voice that is truly you.
So that's how I get to know myself, and I listen to what I'm really feeling and what
I really want.
Through that, I try to take action and do the things that complement
what I truly want and what's best for me.
Those are my three criteria for self love and how to love yourself better.
I'd love to know: what do you guys think self love looks like to you?
Please leave a message in the comments and don't forget to subscribe, share, and like
this video.
I'll be back with another one, but in the meantime, try to love yourself a little more.
Bye!