What It Means To Love Yourself

We hear it all the time – you must love yourself! If you don’t love yourself, no one else can really love you. The answer to all your woes is self-love. The love you seek outside of you, is the love you really need to give yourself.

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You get the picture. And I agree with all of the above but, it used to leave me with one question…

What does it really mean to love myself?

The way I have come to understand self-love is that we treat ourselves the same way we would treat anyone we love.

Think about someone you love, like a small child. We LOVE their uniqueness and we see so much beauty in them. We see their heart and soul. We congratulate them when they do great things and we celebrate their existence. We are gentle when they get something wrong and help them in trying again. We look after their physical wellbeing. We love their quirks and we want them to be free. We hold them when they are sad. We cheer them on and support them. We tell them ‘great job!’ and ‘I love you!’.

Our thoughts, feelings and behaviours are ones of:
• Acceptance and positivity
• Support and appreciation
• Nurture and kindness
• Empathy and compassion
• A deep soul connection beyond the body and mind

All of which can be wrapped up in the word ‘love’.

Do you offer the same to yourself?

If you do – that’s great! But I think many of us don’t. We beat ourselves up and we put ourselves last, we are never quite good enough and we expect too much of ourselves. This is and much more, is the opposite of self-love.

We all know that love is a great feeling, a source of life. So to give it to ourselves can only be a good thing.