Fed up and looking for change? Yes to the freedom and transformative power of authentic self-love.
One of the most important and yet challenging things in life is to learn how to be truly be compassionate with ourselves. The relationship that we have with ourselves has a huge impact on our lives and affects our relationships with everything and everyone. I’m not talking about loving ourselves only when we feel we are ‘loveable’, loving the ‘good’ aspects of ourselves and shoving the ‘not so good’ under the carpet, giving ourselves a hard time when we feel ‘not good enough’. I’m not talking about loving ourselves and not caring about others. I’m talking about genuine self-love and self-compassion for ourselves that naturally extends to others authentically. It is of course true that it can be very challenging at times to love ourselves especially the bits of ourselves we are less fond of but if we are picking and choosing what we love about ourselves-is that really self love? Self-love is all embracing and about loving ourselves even if we are finding it very difficult to do that. Have compassion with that part of you that is having difficulty with doing that. In order to be more compassionate with ourselves we can try to be kind to ourselves, accept that we are imperfect and embrace the freedom of living more fully in the now. We don’t need to run from our emotions but rather befriend them and take care of them by being really kind to ourselves. Self-compassion means loving and accepting oneself fully- the ‘good’ and the ‘not so good’. When we accept ourselves as we are, we open up to transformation- we can experience a lot more peace and freedom. We also begin to free ourselves from judgment: both of others and ourselves. What is there to judge and why? When we are self-critical or critical of others we increase stress hormones in the body and we are sending the body into the fight or flight response. Acceptance is hugely freeing. Accepting the things we cannot change makes space to change the things we can change. The talented psychologist Robert Holden once said that ‘illness has a very basic cause- lack of self-love’. Self-love and self-compassion are hugely empowering and hugely healing. We simply cannot underestimate the power of genuine and true self-love and compassion. Certainly its easy to love ourselves when things are going well in life but I’m talking about the type of love that can embrace even the most difficult of emotions: fear, anger, grief, distress etc. Self-compassion is not some airy-fairy concept that is a waste of time. It means being very real and true to ourselves and takes honesty, commitment, dedication and responsibility. Self-care is a huge part of self-love....
Read More