Love Yourself to Love Others

If I were to ask 100 people if they love themselves, over 90% of them would say, “Yes.” Many people proclaim that they love themselves, but they really don’t.  Unfortunately, we were never taught by our parents or educational institutions, how to love ourselves and as a result, we are left with a society of dysfunctional personal relationships and lingering atrocities from bullying to domestic violence and suicides to wars. The recent news of the death of the legendary actor, Robin Williams, that stunned American movie fans and touched the hearts of millions around the globe, has taught us that love of self has nothing to do with success. It is, however, a prerequisite to happiness.

In religions all over the world, we are taught to love outside of ourselves, through noble acts of service or selfless worship. Yet, we are our own experience and, as such, the best relationship of all is the one with self.  As bestselling author of “Loving What Is,” Byron Katie points out, “It’s not your job to like me – it’s mine.”  

How does one love oneself?”  Before you can answer this question, you first have to define what love is and isn’t. Love is a strong, but light feeling emanating from the heart that makes you feel and act more alive in the present moment. Love is not predicated upon buying another diamonds or roses. Since the heart is the strongest electromagnetic organ in the body, 60 percent stronger than the brain, centering in your heart with the feeling of love, creates positive physiological changes to the body. According to the Heartmath Institute and many ancient cultures, the heart is the primary organ for influencing and directing emotions and the positive feeling of love improves hormonal balance and immune system response. We are biologically wired for love.

We are made up of feelings that come from our emotions (thought in motion).  Without emotions, we would not be human for it is the glue that holds the mind and the body together or tears it apart. The feelings from our emotions range from positive to negative vibrations. In order for us to know how positive feels, we have contrasting feelings and like a scale, we can weigh them, comparing and monitoring what emotions make us feel good or bad. As human beings, we strive to feel good. Take a moment to center in your heart and think about love. How do you feel? The highest of all feeling vibrations is love. In fact, this feeling of love, a whopping 528 hertz, is the basis of who you are. It is the frequency of creation that runs through all of the human cells and yet at the atomic level, it’s the same energy that holds up protons and electrons. 

Love’s dynamic power within our daily lives is often disregarded and downplayed as weakness because of a society that’s focused more on negativity. This attraction to negative emotions is coming from a belief system determined by one’s perception, which sometimes disguises itself as positive or love. The reason countries go to war is because their citizens believe that it will have a positive effect based on fear. This has made love seem to have a weaker value and conditional, but real love is powerful and has no conditions. A general rule is if you can’t love yourself unconditionally, you will not know how to love another without conditions. Self-judgment is the number one sign of not loving self. From the beginning, our sense of self is shaped by the environment in which we were raised by our parents and guardians. Between the ages of 0-7, our subconscious has downloaded without discretion, every experience we’ve encountered including all that was said and done to us. This is when the mind is mostly at a delta, theta or alpha state, and the subconscious, which is really running us, signaling our hearts to beat and our cells to reproduce, is most affected and highly accessible. Thus, who we are today is a result of this cumulative early programming.

Fortunately, there are many therapists and healers practicing various modalities to eliminate limiting beliefs and changes of perception to reach a new level of love mastery, but ultimately it is you who has to make the inner journey of self-discovery.

Some of the ways to love self more include:

. Buy yourself flowers

. Each day make a list of three things you will do for yourself and do it

. When you do something for somebody, such as buy him or her a gift, do the same thing for yourself

Loving yourself opens the road to loving others and actually attracts more love to you. The universal law of attraction has positively proven how this works. With a strong foundation of love of self, you attract to you the same energy. When you love yourself, you begin to know how to love another with freedom and without conditions. You know that you can give love at anytime and not lose yourself in the giving. Practice loving yourself on a daily basis and begin to love others as you love yourself. When we finally realize that love is all there is and that we are all one, then and only then, will we experience a new earth.