"I celebrate myself and sing myself." – Walt Whitman
It's called self-love, self-confidence, self-acceptance, self-respect, self-esteem, self-worth, feeling good about yourself – it's all the same thing and it feels fantastic. The opposite – doubting yourself, disliking yourself, feeling ashamed, believing you're not good enough – that all feels pretty awful.
As a coach, I find that one of the major issues my clients struggle with is self-love. Oh, they may contact me for other reasons. They may want to lose weight or to have more money or to enjoy more fulfilling relationships, but the underlying issue often turns out to be lack of self-love. When you love yourself, it's easy to improve relationships because you're capable of giving love and you can allow others to love you. When you love yourself, you quit using food to stuff down the pain of low self-esteem and it becomes easy to manage your weight. When you love yourself, your vibration is high and you naturally attract money and everything else you desire.
You were born loving yourself and knowing your value. Due to pressure from parents, teachers and peers, you may have tried to become who THEY wanted you to be so they would love you and you ended up not loving yourself. This is generally followed by the absurd conclusion that you're not good enough, which results in spending your entire life trying to prove your worth and trying to get others to love you. Meanwhile YOU – the perfect extension of Source Energy YOU – have been hiding your magnificence and feeling worthless. Aaah!
There is simply no replacement for self-love. If you do not love yourself, you will be continuously disappointed in life. You will not even see opportunities right in front of you. Your relationships will be strained. Even if someone else really does love you, you will not be able to feel it. You can only allow someone else to love you to the extent that you love yourself. And it is equally true that you can only love and accept another person to the greater that you love and accept yourself.
Everyone and everything in your environment is a reflection of your self-love or lack of it. The good news is that, because everything comes from you, you do not have to try to "FIX" the outside world. Everything changes when you "FIX" your inside world and the best place to start is by choosing to love yourself more. When you choose self-love, your health improves, you have more energy and vitality, your relationships become more joyful, you enjoy greater prosperity, and fabulous opportunities show up for you everywhere you look. When you love yourself, you allow the Universe to surprise and delight you.
So how can you choose to love and accept yourself more? Start by treating yourself like the very special person you are. Start by doing nice things for yourself, such as:
- Have someone clean your house.
- Take the dream vacation you've been planning.
- Give yourself a pure pleasure day – often!
- Buy yourself a special gift – just because you're YOU!
- Make a list of your positive qualities and read your list daily.
- Whenever someone gives you a compliment, believe it! Keep a list of these compliments as evidence of how great you are and refer to it when you need a reminder.
- Look in the bathroom mirror each morning and say to yourself: "I LOVE YOU. You are absolutely and eternally wonderful and worthy of all good things." In fact, if you affirm this with feeling every time you look in a mirror, your life will improve immeasurably!
- Finally, make a declaration: "I herebyby release my limiting belief of not being good enough and replace it with the joy of unconventional self-love."
It's amazing how quickly you can attract what you want when you love yourself, treat yourself well, and know you're good enough. With the Magic of Self-Love, you can allow in what you want because you know you deserve it. As you bask in the Magic of Self-Love, you will find that you truly Can Be and Do and Have Whatever You Desire!
