Love affects EVERYTHING in our lives. It might be hard to see it at first, but love influences the kind of person we are, how we treat others, how others see and treat us, the decisions we make, the career paths we take, our relationships, our health. When we look closely we can see that everything stem from love and most importantly, our self-love.
So what is self-love? So often we misunderstand what self-love is. We think to love ourselves is a bad thing. We think to love ourselves means we are ‘up ourselves’ or think we are better than others. This is not self-love. To love ourselves is to see our own true beauty. It means we understand how incredible we are. It means we appreciate ourselves, we believe in ourselves and most of all, like ourselves exactly the way we are. When we learn to love ourselves we start to see our true potential, we see our own strengths, capabilities, and achievements.
To love ourselves is to fully support ourselves, back ourselves up and be our own best friend. It means we look at our accomplishments and achievements and give ourselves recognition and admiration for what we have achieved. Loving ourselves is the greatest thing we can ever do for ourselves and others. By loving ourselves we become better people, we become more caring, more compassionate, more confident and more able. We start to see the good instead of the bad in our lives. We become happier, more optimistic and more at peace with ourselves. We start to understand who we really are, and we begin making better choices because we focus on what is best for us.
By loving ourselves first, we learn how to care, trust and open our hearts to others. We learn that others simply add to our happiness, we lose the longing to ‘need’ someone else to make us feel happy. When we lose this need we are better able to love others whole heartedly without a need for something in return. Sometimes it is easy to think if we open up our hearts to others it means we are opening ourselves up to getting hurt. The truth is, the more we love ourselves, the less others can hurt us. It is when we don’t love ourselves enough that we allow other to bring us harm.
Loving ourselves helps us to set boundaries for how we will and wont let others treat us. To love ourselves means we value ourselves and know how we deserve to be treated. We know others should treat us kindly, supportively and respectfully. When we love ourselves we don’t accept anything less.
When we have self-love we take care of ourselves better. We look after our bodies and take care of our health. We eat better, exercise more and take time out to relax and do the things that make us happy. When we love ourselves we understand that we deserve the best. We deserve to feel good, have fun and be surrounded by good people.
There is nothing more inspiring than seeing someone who truly loves themselves. These people care about themselves and others in a way that is compassionate, welcoming and infectious. These kinds of people inspire us to want to be better ourselves. Can you think of someone you know who is a great role model for self-love? Someone who looks after themselves and is completely happy just being themselves? How can they inspire you to create self-love?
Your Daily Self-Love Declaration
Repeat to yourself throughout the day…
“I am full of love, I give love, I receive love and I inspire others to live with love”.
Next Love Blog: How to start boosting our Self-Love
