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.
