Love Yourself

The world needs more love! 

If you're reading this, there's a good chance you can relate to this statement in some way or another. You or someone you love may have been bullied or excluded at some point. You may have had a heartbreaking breakup, lost your job, or lost a loved one. Or maybe the challenges you face are less dramatic. Maybe you're just feeling lonely and don't know why. In this post I aim to help you understand why we feel the need to engage in self-destructive behaviors and how you can use love as a powerful tool for self-healing.

People have been told that being mean to themselves will help them push through challenges and motivate them to be better. And while this advice might feel good in the moment, it simply isn't true.

The first step to living a happy, successful life is to accept yourself for who you are. That's it, that's the whole process. Everything else is just window dressing. Life is a constant struggle between acceptance and rejection. You can't love yourself unless you're willing to accept all of your flaws, and you can't be happy with yourself unless you're willing to love all of your flaws too. If you hate yourself for being lazy, then you'll never get anything done. If you love yourself for being lazy, then you'll do everything in your power to make the most of it.

Life is a mystery, and if you try to over-analyze it, it will just get away from you. You need to be open to new ideas and new experiences. You don't have to know what's going on right now, because there's no way that you do. All you need is to live yourself.

This really isn't about loving yourself because you're the warmest, coolest, or most interesting person you know. This is about loving yourself because without that love you wouldn't have the courage to go anywhere where you might fail at anything. It's not so much about loving yourself as it is about having respect for yourself. It's not this self-absorbed get it right or I'll never try anything again kind of thing. So much of failure comes from ignoring the warning signs and not being honest with yourself. The biggest failure of all is not giving it an honest shot in the first place. It might seem backwards but a big part of self-love is the understanding that there are things that we won't do well.

We are all constantly looking for love in our lives to varying degrees. We search for it, look for it, and even long for it. But do we really know how to actually love ourselves? Does the love we give to others come from a well we have first filled up ourselves? Love is a growth experience. It's not that easy to find the balance between being self-confident and yet humble at the same time to treat yourself as you would treat some one you're madly in love with.

Self love can be one of the most challenging things to do. Meanwhile, loving yourself is one of the most important aspects of life, because the more you love yourself the more you can love others. Love is always the answer.

Love yourself and you will attract great things your way.
Self love goes hand in hand with patience and forgiveness. Our relationships with ourselves are the most important relationships we have. A lack of self-love is a lack of respect for yourself and for your time here on earth.

Love yourself. This is very important that you love yourself, because if you do not love yourself, you will be depressed, and you will seek love from others. So, first love yourself. Let's say you have become a victim of a bad experience in your life, or you have been betrayed by a loved one. If you can not deal with your bad experience in the right way, or if you really can not deal with betrayal then you will take negative feelings within yourself. These feelings accumulate inside your mind, and it will take your mind to some bad places. Your mind will be like an unstable place, and every time it hits a little wind of negative feeling, it will collapse. You're taking steps to overcome your bad experience or betrayal from loved one from the wrong angle. You should be looking at the deeper meaning of your bad experience or betrayal for finding out some lessons in it.

Stop shaming yourself, be nice to yourself, learn to love yourself. Because if you don't love yourself, and if you don't treat yourself like you deserve to be treated, not only will you never get over the thing that's making you sad or upset right now, but people around you will have a hard time loving you either. We live in a world where everyone is busy and everyone is overworked, and everyone is afraid of not having enough money and not having enough time and not having enough energy. And we live in a world where we all feel like we get too much criticism, and we all feel like we give too much of ourselves away for free, only for others to take advantage of us. And we live in a world where every single person has baggage, and where every single person looks at their own reflection and sees something they don't like.

The problem with most people who want to help others is that they don’t love themselves. They feel that they need to prove themselves and show how great, smart and resourceful they are, so that at the end of the day, people will love them.
Think about it. If you care more about what others think of you than what you think of yourself, they can take advantage of this by using your need for acceptance against you. You have to be aware that there are people who will try and get you to feel like you are inferior in one way or the other. These set of people will tell you that something is wrong with you, or try and make you feel like everything comes down to your looks.

You may have heard this cliché before. Or maybe you've never heard it at all. Regardless, it's a saying I believe in and live by. And because I believe in it, I venture to share my own version of it with you.

Love yourself like you're the only person on earth. And love yourself as if you weren't going to die tomorrow.
Love yourself enough to put your happiness first.

Love yourself enough to no longer settle for average. And love yourself enough to not allow anyone to determine your worth.

Love yourself enough to accept your flaws and imperfections.

Love yourself enough not to be ashamed of your past mistakes and bad choices.

Love yourself enough to give your family, friends and loved ones what they need and not what they want or expect from you.

Love yourself enough to love others but not be a doormat for anyone else's actions or behaviors towards you.

Love yourself enough to learn how to say no and mean it.

Lead image by Giulia Bertelli