4 simple ways to build self-love
Are you kind and gentle towards others, but strict and harsh when it comes to yourself? Then it’s time to bring self-love into your life. We think love means romantic love or loving family members and friends. For many years, I, too, thought the same. I did not know anything about self-love or its importance in life. Thirty years back, I read a beautiful book called “You can heal your life” by Louise Hay. This book has introduced me to the concept of self-love and taught me how important it is to love ourselves. The word “self-love” may amuse some of us and bring various questions like – What is self-love? What is the importance of self-love in life? Why should we love our self? I will share with you the answers to these questions through my own journey with self-love. Once we fall in love with our own selves, life truly becomes magical. But how to do that? In this blog, I will also share with you 4 tools that can help you fall in love with yourself.
What is self-love?
Self-love means loving and being kind to our own selves. It means forgiving our mistakes and accepting ourselves as we are. One of the toughest things in life is to forgive ourselves. Being humans, we make some mistakes in life, but we are very harsh when it comes to forgiving ourselves. I was no exception to this.
My journey with self-love:
Self-love is something that I had even before I read Louise Hay’s book. I was comfortable with who I was. Many times, I felt a deep connection with myself, and I felt comfortable in my skin. I cared for myself by eating right and exercising. I had self-love, but it was not unconditional. There were some moments and events where I was disturbed when things would not go the way I expected. In such situations, I blamed myself and said things like – “oh Manju! How stupid are you? You could have done differently. Why did you do it this way?” And so on.
Because of that, over the years, I developed this relationship of being hard and strict with myself. Sometimes, the way I talk to myself, I would not talk like that to anyone. I treat my friends, my family members, my helpers, and everyone around me well. I don’t treat anyone as badly as I treated myself when things go wrong.
I was very harsh on myself. I realized that every time I scold myself or find fault with myself, the connection with myself becomes lesser. By scolding myself, I did not gain anything. It did not change me in any way. On top of it, it made things only worse and brought in more negativity.
Why is self-love important?
Over my years of journey, I realized that self-love is the first step to love the world. Without self-love, we cannot really understand what love is. Love has to start with our own self – from within. And one more important thing I learned is our external world mirrors our internal world.
Life is an echo. If a person keeps telling himself that he is unworthy and useless, everyone around will also tell the same. On the contrary, if the person keeps telling himself that he is worthy and amazing, everyone around will echo the same. Our life echoes what we tell our own selves and how we treat our own selves.
So, self-love is extremely important for a happy and beautiful life.
4 tools to build unconditional self-love:
Four tools greatly helped me in my journey of building self-love. It did not happen in a day. It took me time, but I worked on it consistently and saw a great transformation within. Below are the 4 tools that helped me.
- Inner child practice: “You can heal yourself” book taught me that there is an inner child or an inner self within us, and this inner child needs our love and forgiveness. This inner child is the child-like nature within us. It blooms when nurtured with love and adds creativity, joy to life when it is taken good care of. So, I started saying words of love and kindness to my inner child, such as – “I love you. I am there for you, no matter what.
- Mirror work: When we look at ourselves in the mirror, most of the time, we criticize ourselves like I became fat or my skin looks dull, etc. What we say to ourselves while we look at the mirror goes deep inside us. Mirror time is a great time to practice self-love. When I look at myself in the mirror, I say positive and loving words to myself like – I love you. I forgive you. I am proud of you.
- Affirmations: Saying affirmations is a great way to train the mind towards positivity. I say and write positive affirmations like “I love myself,” “I am amazing,” etc. These affirmations reinforce positivity towards me.
- Meditation: Meditation has helped me profoundly in the journey of self-love. It helped me to forgive myself and accept my mistakes. I am not implying that we should not learn from our mistakes. We should definitely learn and not repeat the mistakes. But when we make mistakes, we feel guilty and go on blaming ourselves. This is what we need to overcome because mistakes are part of life. They help us grow and evolve. And we are all work in progress. So, mistakes tend to happen. My meditation helped me to accept these mistakes. My self-love grew deeper and stronger as I progressed in my meditation.
These are the four tools that helped me make my self-love deeper and unconditional.
Self-love is essential to stay light and joyful in life. If you never practiced self-love, start it from today. Now is the right time. Inner child practice, mirror work, affirmations, meditation are 4 tools that can help you in your journey of self-love. Take your mirror and say – I love you – to yourself. It’s a beautiful journey which you will enjoy. This simple step brings loads of joy into your life. Want to read more about self-love? Check out my favorite book – Louise Hay’s You can heal your life.
Happy journey 😊
