Self Love & How To Enhance It
Loving ourselves unconditionally is a pre-requisite for being able to love anyone else.
This statement shouldn’t be much of a shocker to you, as everyone nowadays in the self-help and spiritual world is talking about the utter importance that self-love has. Teal Swan calls it a ‘shortcut to enlightenment’, bookshelves of any spiritual store are covered with books on it, we use crystals and herbs and essential oils to enhance it… but what is it really? And how to practice it on a daily basis?
Here are 3 simple, yet, once you dive into them, you’ll discover they are much more profound than at first glance, tools for fortifying and reconnecting to that well of self-love that we have been given upon our arrival on Earth. Yes, the ability to self-love is innate and natural (just take a look at little children!), but over the time we lost our connection to it. However, it is never too late to roll up our sleeves, opt for a better, more loving life and relationship with oneself.
1) AFFIRMATIONS
Before you roll your eyes and give up without even giving it a proper go, please read ‘till the end of the paragraph.
Affirmations work ONLY, but only if they feel right. So, nobody here will force you to write or pronounce ‘I love myself’ until your hand drops dead tired or you lose your voice if that affirmation doesn’t feel right for you in this particular moment in time. If that’s the case, if the affirmation ‘I love myself’ doesn’t feel good at all to you, take one giant step back and try to find one tiny, teeny, a small thing that you actually love and appreciate about yourself and start from there. It can be: ‘I love my eyes’, ‘I love my wittiness’, ‘I love the way my hair falls on
my shoulders’ or anything else. It can even be: ‘I love my commitment to learning to love myself’. Then go on and repeat, sing, dance, rap your affirmations until they soak in deeply and when you feel ready, expand them a bit and add more to it.
Maybe, but just maybe, there’ll come a day when you’ll be able to say ‘I love myself’ and that will actually feel good! However, it is super important with affirmations to take them slowly and step by step, as our negative self-talk may have done lots of damage over the years and it takes time to spot and then eradicate all the negative self-beliefs we hold about ourselves.
2) LOVE LETTER TO YOURSELF
Just as the most important person you’ll ever learn to love is yourself, the same goes for a simple, old-school love letter: the most important person you’ll ever receive a love letter from should be YOU!
Find time and place when you’d be undisturbed, take a piece of paper, and start with ‘Dear (your name)’ and then relax, let the words of love flow through as if you are writing a letter to the most loved person in the entire Universe. I know it sounds super cheesy, but this is actually
a beautiful and extremely powerful exercise that, if you decide to give it a go, will grant you amazing rewards on the self-love plan. So, just allow the words and ideas to pour out of you, imagine yourself receiving that letter a few months or years from now, and try to imagine
what that version of you would like to hear, what words would soothe their heart. Once you’re done, you can either send that letter to yourself or ask a person of confidence to mail it to you at some future point in time when they remember to do it. When you receive the letter, again, take some quiet and undisturbed time to go through it, to soak in all that love for yourself that you have and notice how good does it feel to receive the loving care from someone so relevant and indispensable such as yourself.
3) A DATE WITH YOUR INNER CHILD
No matter how old we are, each one of us still has inside our Inner Child. And that Inner Child needs love and compassion in order for us to feel complete from within. If that’s not so, we feel disconnected, alone even when in the company and often - numb. There are many ways to
reestablish a connection with our Inner Children, which is also what some therapists call our ‘unconscious’ part. You can take a piece of paper and write with your dominant hand: ‘Hey little (your name), what you want me to know at this moment?’ Then take the pencil with your
non-dominant hand and write or draw a reply. Do not overthink it, as messages from your Inner Child will come automatically and intuitively. Our Inner Child may be afraid to speak up as after years and years of neglecting and not being listened to and attended to, but do not give
up. Take time, love, and patience to let it out and reconnect with it. Ask it what it wants more of, what does it want to do in your spare time. Is it going on a bike ride? Soaking your hands in the dirt and playing? Singing? Dancing? Once you know what is it that it needs, make sure to
provide that for it and notice your mood changing. Our connection to our Inner Children is the single most important connection we have as it is really our connection with our deepest desires and wishes, so please make sure to tend to that little Inner You and let it guide you to
the greater amounts of self-love along the way.
Last but not least, add some rose to your daily rituals, being it in the form of the Rose Quartz Crystal or as a rose tea. Rose has a powerful frequency known to enhance self-love and love in general - so rose it up!