Your Relationship with Yourself: Do You Love Yourself?

Sound and safe relationships are a source of life energy. When our relationship with ourselves is not healthy and safe, all of our other relationships suffer. These include, your relationship with your partner and family, your work and social relationships, and your performance in all areas of life. This post is about how to love yourself.

Enjoying life and feeling deeply happy becomes impossible; either we become depressed or we start to project our inner conflict outside by blaming others and clashing with them.

On the other hand, when we have a healthy and safe relationship with ourselves, it has a positive effect that manifests through constructive experiences in our lives. Daily miracles that may seem like coincidences occur. When we can deal with our inner conflicts we don’t need to project them onto our partner, children or colleagues and create problems with them.

This is a great source of peace and energy that helps us enjoy life.

The Devil’s Triangle: Shame, Guilt, and Worthlessness

Many people have suffered emotional neglect and different types of abuse during childhood. You may be one of them. The feelings of SHAME, GUILT and WORTHLESSNESS related to these experiences form the largest obstacles to be able to love yourself.

Such feelings are triggered by ambiguity about our boundaries and our lack of confidence toward others. Additionally, we have a tendency to judge ourselves for our feelings of inadequacy, lack of control, unwanted emotions such as jealousy, envy, lust, and hate, or such addictions as pleasing others and material acquisitions.

Knowing Yourself to Love Yourself

You need the courage and self respect to really love y ourself in order to be able to have constructive experiences. This is only possible by knowing ourselves and facing every single one of our parts.

Yunus Emre says:

“Wisdom comes from knowing wisdom.
Wisdom means knowing oneself.

If you do not know yourself,
what is the point of reading books?’’

Believing that happiness depends upon external conditions and trying to appraise yourself based on destructive and judgmental criteria you’ve learned from others are limitations stemming from the Mind Area and they will turn you into an angel who doesn’t know it has wings.

Here is a verse arguably attributed to Rumi (but is not):

                                    “Come, come, whoever you are,

                                      Whatever you have done, come, come again.”

My interpretation of this verse is an invitation to embrace yourself at your worst, with all of the traits you deem most negative and most destructive; and to return to yourself.

Daily Practice to Love Yourself

Whenever possible, arrange to wake up before you have to get up and out of bed immediately in the morning. It’s best to wake up with the sunrise, when daylight begins. While still in bed, stretch, yawn, and smile. Repeat the following affirmations to yourself:

“The world is a better place this morning because I live in it.”.”

“I deeply love and embrace myself, body, mind, and soul, in all my ways.”

After you get up and out of your bed, look yourself in the eye in the mirror, smile and repeat:

“The world is a better place this morning because I live in it.”

“I deeply love and embrace myself, body, mind, and soul, in all my ways.”

Hug yourself first, and then the others around you, and salute their souls with yours. If you’re alone, hugging them in your mind would do. ☺

Repeat the same practice before you sleep at night.

Do you have a hard time accepting and loving yourself? Then you can use the Ho’oponopono Method of Self Cleaning and tune your energy into a constructive frequency by saying “I love you, I’m sorry, Please forgive me, Thank you”.

My wish and ultimate goal for all of us is to experience a peaceful, joyful, vibrant state of happiness regardless of external conditions, and thus to be in a constructive interaction with the larger systems within which we exist.

 

You can listen to the soundtrack of this video from here.