What is Self Love?

It is of value to truly practice self-love as it plays a huge role in enabling an individual to lead a fulfilling life. Self-love awakens the deeper significance of the choices you make in life and the energy you broadcast to the world. What you need to know is that your mission in life is to create as much happiness as possible and that isn’t through wealth creation but rather to love yourself, what you have and who you are. One may wonder what self-love really is; it is not about creating time for yourself or feeling good but a state of appreciation for oneself and that grows from actions that enhance your spiritual, psychological and physical growth. With self-love an individual acknowledges both their strengths and weaknesses. When making efforts to practice self-love, you should know that it is built out of both thoughts and actions.

Perhaps you feel like you are leading a pretty mediocre life. Perhaps, you expect very little of yourself, and as a result, you are never truly happy. Maybe you are the kind of individual who believes that “survival” is just good enough. You don’t need to love your life, heck, you don’t even deserve to.

This is how people fall into deep depressions; bearing in mind that most individuals never fully recover from depressions, there has to come a point in your life when you can decide to make certain life-changes. Despite the triggers that drive one to desire life changes, at some point in life, you need to start challenging yourself. If you challenge yourself over time, you’ll slowly begin to lift yourself out of the pit.

However, starting today, your confidence has to grow; your curiosity has to increase, but, most of all, you need to experience more happiness. More self-love than you ever knew you were capable of feeling.

Before we devolve further into a deeper discussion on cultivating self-love, you need to fully comprehend the true meaning of self love, to appreciate the most out of it. Feeling good or taking time to appreciate yourself grows or evolves into actions that support your psychological, spiritual as well as physical growth. Ultimately, having self-love will enable you to know your strengths as well as accepting your weaknesses; you will start to feel compassion for yourself, you will strive to find fulfilment as well as personal meaning.

How to Cultivate Self Love

Your life is your signature creation, you need to embrace it. You need to be true to yourself, to live with integrity and be open about it.

The question that you need to ask yourself is this, how will you be able to give to others love without giving love to yourself first? If you feed and nourish yourself, then you will automatically feed and nourish others, unless you have different intentions. There’s an old saying that says ‘ teach a man to love himself, and he will forever be able to love others.’ Love for other people creates unimaginable possibilities because it allows the creation of a sound foundation.

Apart from this simple question, you also need to ask yourself these questions;

1. Do you love yourself enough to forgive others?
2. If so, do you love yourself enough to forgive yourself?
3. Do you love yourself enough to exercise regularly, to build your physical strength, and continually improve your body’s conditioning?
4. Do you love yourself enough to nourish your body with nutrient-rich food, or do you continually feed yourself processed foods?
5. Do you love yourself enough to forget the past and just live in the moment, or do you worry about the future instead of being truly present to make use of the opportunities within every moment?
6. Do you love yourself enough to commit to your decisions, or do you just take actions that serve your spirit? Because, if you want to achieve certain life goals, you’ll only get halfway with half your heart in it.
7. Do you love yourself enough to consistently expand your mind? Through learning new things, you can continually grow your expertise about life; you’ll have the ability as well as a greater awareness on how to deal with any event.
8. Do you love yourself enough to have fun? You need to allow your soul to be joyful; to be able to do the things that you love doing. At least this way, you can relax your mind-body-soul, release stress, and take the time to rejuvenate yourself?
9. Do you love yourself enough to get sufficient rest; you need to get enough sleep.

9 Steps to Help You Cultivate Self-Love

The following points discussed below can help you to expand your consciousness and rejuvenate the feeling of love that already lies within you. You need to take your time to practice these tips; let them lead you through the path your mind would never have even conceived. I’m certain that they’ll be times when you’ll feel the urge to do certain things, but your conscience should stop you from acting. From today, start taking baby steps towards the direction of your passions.

1. Put love in everything that you do

This involves giving your loving attention to each task that you do. The more love you put into your day-to-day actions, the more you will be able to cultivate a love-filled consciousness.

2. Practicing Self-Care

You need to take good care of yourself; by committing yourself to healthy activities and a balanced nutrition, you’ll set the foundation for genuine growth and living an authentic life.

3. Setting Boundaries

You need to set limits in your life; you also have to be able to say no to activities that will reduce your chances of truly progressing in life. Avoid interactions or work that will eventually deplete or harms you physical, spiritual, or emotional state. Avoid interacting with individuals who incessantly stress you out, bring you down, or inflame you; just take a break from such people. Instead, you need to create space that will help you evaluate your relationships and commitments; by doing so, you will be able to decide which relationships are useful in your life.

4. Following your intuition

You need to begin taking steps toward those dreams and passions that you have. I know you might have heard this so many times, but actions outweigh mere words. Your intuition should direct you towards being action-driven. Whenever you start to give in to those negative feelings, you become afraid of even taking baby steps…you otherwise forget that there’s a whole new another universe; one that is full of open possibilities.

5. Surrounding yourself with love

At all cost, move away from the people, places, or things that channel negative energy towards you; leave things that drain you of your energy. Instead, surround yourself with love as much as possible; always be around people who are loving and supportive.

6. Have compassion for others

This tip has to be stressed enough. Most people like to use the word forgiveness, without really appreciating its true meaning. Your true essence never gets its feelings hurt, just the mind; if you think about it, there is nothing to forgive if you have compassion for others;

7. Understanding the true meaning of love; knowing that you are love

A human, our true nature, is an infinite nature of love; starting today you need to recognize your infinite nature by retreating into stillness as much as you can. One effective way to practice stillness is by placing your attention to your own mind. This method can prove to be effective, especially in the beginning stages of this practice.

8. Live Intentionally and Never forget to Forgive yourself

You need to have a purpose in life; if by now you do not, it’s time to make one up! Keeping in mind that you’ll be making decisions that support your intentions, you are assured of feeling great about yourself when you accomplish your true purpose. From this moment onwards you need to set intentions of living in a healthy and meaningful way; only by doing so will you be able to actually take actions that support your intentions.

9. Caring For Yourself

You also need to start caring for yourself today. First, start by accepting and loving yourself more; this is the only way through which you will able to exercise actions of self-love naturally. In life, it is important to take responsibility for your own actions; it is also vital that you learn to grow from your mistakes, avoid punishing yourself. Let self-compassion aid you through those moments when you make a mistake. Use mistakes as lessons, and let your mistakes teach you how to grow.

The more you practice these tips, the easier they’ll become. Eventually you’ll feel a general sense of peace that you have never experienced before. It’s normal to expect some resistance at first; but since you want to do away with the old way of thinking, I’m sure it’ll all be worth it in the end.