How do I love myself?

Last week I wrote an article on the dynamic between the masculine and feminine that emphasized developing a strong sense of authenticity through practicing self-love. I received letters from you lovely people wondering how to do that, because after all, it is quite an ambiguous statement.  How many times have we heard “Love yourself,” “respect yourself,”“honour yourself,” and “your problems will melt into rainbows and butterflies when you can just finally appreciate who you are”? Then obviously, the person writing this disappears into the moonlight and we never see them again and have no idea what action steps we can take to actually love ourselves. I didn’t want to be that person so here is my best attempt at explaining how to love yourself.

Love is an energy you can hold within you and build your day from.

First off, I struggle with this. Last Tuesday I had a “fat day” where my jeans didn’t fit, and I didn’t have any clean yoga pants, so I wore panty hose around the house and pulled them up really high like a girdle. I am 30 now and it’s getting pretty real over here. Anyway, what I have learned is, that loving yourself is a feeling, an energy reinforced by thoughts and actions. I personally begin by holding a feeling of love in my heart chakra and I allow it to fill me until it rests just below the surface of my being. I allow it to be palpable and accessible for me to filter my experiences through. I check in throughout the day to make sure that I can still feel the sensation of love in my heart, and if it has been overshadowed by stress or fear, I expand the love again. From there, throughout the day I try to remember to make decisions from the space of love that I have built, to respond to the people around me from there, to work from there, to eat from there, to walk from there. Sometimes I layer in specific aspects of love like gratitude, peace, and excitement. I have noticed that my actions are very different when they are from love compared to when I find myself slipping into anxiety or fear. This is not about perfection; it takes time and patience to train an aura of love to be your default.

Keeping love at the forefront of your energy consciously makes the feeling of love a live, spinning, and interactive part of your bio-energetic field. Why is this important? Because having that as a serious tone within your personal sound allows you to respond and interpret reality in a way that is based in love more easily, which also boils down to you treating yourself with love.

For example, some of the ways in which holding love as a vibration in your heart affects you are:

You become assertive.

Yaaasss child, when you love yourself you become assertive. You understand that your voice and your needs are not petty or insignificant they are in fact offshoots of your purpose. They are your heart telling you what you need to bring balance and happiness to your life.  That feeling of being suppressed does no good for you or anyone else involved.

You feel inspired to care for your body.

Love can immediately bring you into your body and make it feel good. You will feel inspired to exercise, nurture it with healthy food, or whatever else you feel it needs. It is easier to understand where we are physically when we have the connectivity and clarity of love to perceive through. Love also allows the body to begin healing and realigning in places you didn’t even realize needed it.

Your intuition strengthens.

Love is actually the sensation or the energy that connects us all; it is the matrix of the divine. This means that when you raise yourself up into love you tap into a very powerful conductor. You have the ability to interpret, intuit, and decode everything around you.

You begin to see and feel beauty.

Colours become vibrant and you notice that everything around you has beauty and purpose.

You feel calm, connected, and trust yourself and the world.

Love is the feeling that allows you to actually feel your purpose. If you are out of the emotional spectrum of love you will not have access to your life purpose or feel connected to the world around you. This is why when we sink into depression we isolate ourselves, as we can no longer feel our connection with the world. When we are stressed and anxious we cannot sense solutions to problems. This is why stress generally builds until we get knocked back into a blank slate and can feel our direction again. When you feel love, peace, or gratitude, you reach zero point and have access to all that you need.

You manifest faster.

Love is conductive and magnetic. It allows all that is resonant to you to find you, as it is a beacon. This is simply because love contains the spiritual DNA of who you truly and therefore brings you to who you are, which is what you feel as your life purpose. This is what you know to be joy. You are also plugged into divine timing, which means that you will be at the right place at the right time accomplishing things more quickly.

You become more creative.

Love naturally inspires openness. You notice that creativity fills the places where there were once blocks. Solutions to problems pop into your head when you don’t expect them to, and inspired ways to express yourself, make money, or heal become apparent.

You realize that you are in service and drawn to service.

You notice that even if your purpose/job is not in direct service to others you can see how what you do affects the whole in a positive way.

People are drawn to you.

People and animals are drawn to you. Having such an intense flow of love gives you a glow that inspires and attracts people to you. You become magnetic and find that people that can help you simply stumble across your path. Connecting with people also becomes easier and more genuine as your compassion and empathy build allowing you see the good in others.

So, loving yourself is not just about taking long bubble baths with the door locked or cooking a good meal. It doesn’t begin with actions or even thoughts. It begins with sensation and feelings.  If you are having difficulty connecting with this feeling you can reverse engineer feelings of self-love through self-care rituals. This is why people generally talk about self-nurturing when they are explaining how to love yourself. Nurturing ourselves immediately lights up our hearts and brings forward love. Once that feeling of love, which is a very real and powerful energy, is consciously brought forward you can begin to expand it and play with it in your consciousness.

Love is a detoxifier.

Ok, so, we have been talking about love and how it is a miraculous, transformational force, but there is another side to that as well. There is a side effect to self-love that we have to talk about. Love is a detoxifier: the energy of love will push forward anything within you that is not love-based. That means that all of those belief systems that are crappy and the negative self-talk are potentially going to become more obvious. You will feel the clash of who you truly are, which is divine love, and who you have wrongly been told you are, as well as who you have falsely believed you are, which is not divine love. All of your distortions will be asking to be removed, which is why many people do not stick with their self-love regimes. They say to themselves: “ this is getting deep, and hard, and kinda dark. This is not what I signed up for. No.”

Well, (I am going to get lovingly assertive here) I am telling you that if you genuinely want to love and value yourself and have a powerful life of purpose, you have to move through this. If you do not, you will attract situation after situation that brings you right back here, over and over again. You will live in a loop with different faces and names but the same old crap. The good news is that you can do this. If you couldn’t it wouldn’t be in front of you right now. And, the first few times you begin to release the pain and trauma you carry is the most difficult, because after that you begin to process these things faster and more subconsciously.

Of course you can release these belief systems and emotional traumas without consciously being so involved, but for most of us conscious presence helps ground and understand our personal process. This process can also deepen creativity, which is why many artists insist on dwelling in their emotional pain.

The good news is that love will expand and grow within you all that is love-based, such as: peace, gratitude, happiness, joy, inspiration, creativity, confidence, warmth, beauty, life purpose etc. In fact, this is why you are coming face-to-face with such painful feelings. These feelings are being pushed out. Our purpose is expansion and growth, and that is why we have come to this planet. Love builds on itself, it intensifies, it purifies. Trust its path. I promise you that if you stick with it, if you surrender and listen, it will get easier. Love is who we are. We do not need to chase love, we need to identify it within us and grow it. When we do this we need to surrender, trust, and honour its process.

That is how you practice self-love. You realize that love is self.