Learn to love yourself and advance in self-knowledge

Loving ourselves well is not just indulging ourselves or doing activities that we like. Learning to love yourself is a way of meeting our intrinsic goodness. It is resting deep within ourselves and trusting that we can unfold our potential and let go of causing ourselves harm.

Throughout our history, we store conditions, tendencies that limit us with greater or lesser intensity and prevent us from maintaining a state of well-being.

Behaviors learned defending hostile, harmful environments or other painful factors that are no longer necessary. In our present they close our hearts, distancing us from potentially beneficial or enriching experiences. Learning to love ourselves is to regain confidence in being able to embrace authentic happiness.

• Related article: "The 8 types of emotions (classification and description)"

How to learn to love yourself

How can we get started? Let's see some keys.

1. Get to know each other without self-deception

Walk a path of self-knowledge. Explore our mind. How we are, what are our predominant emotions and how they affect us. We can attribute qualities that we do not have and deny others by projecting onto others what causes us discomfort.

Love towards oneself needs to create an internal bond from honesty and courage. Know our defects to polish them and our qualities to enhance them. If we do not open our hearts to what is inside, we can hardly love each other.

Give us permission to shed our masks. Meet our reality without disguises or self-deception and embrace what we find.

• You may be interested: "Low selfsteem? When you become your worst enemy"

2. Accept us as we are

Sometimes we reject some of our facets out of shame or pain. We corner them without giving them a space creating suffering and bitterness. We need to accept them. No excuses or conditions.

Connect with love towards us, stop hurting ourselves and allow ourselves to be happy. Abandon passive indulgence towards our conditioning, "I am like this and I am not going to change." Open an internal space with affection and kindness where to integrate those disapproved and hidden facets. Defrost the ice cubes that we keep in dark and hidden places with love and warmth. Only from that unconditional acceptance, can we begin to love each other.

3. Understand our conditioning

From the moment we are born we are writing our history and leaving traces in our conscience. Having information about our ancestors, family system, the context in which we grew up will help us understand many unknowns. Expanding the vision of our life allows us to understand ourselves better.

Understanding, honesty and a good internal relationship they open our hearts to self-esteem and healthy love. Reviewing our bio may open unclosed resentments or hurts, but we need to do it to release them.

We may need specialized help to navigate this path, if so, it is good to seek it. Accumulating reproaches and anger will bring us bitterness. It will not allow us to let go of what hurts us. Loving yourself well is helping us to be happy, to be our best friends. Dusting off what keeps us from the intrinsic goodness of our heart and trusting it to make it shine.

4. Commit to us

We acquire work, school, judicial, contractual, matrimonial commitments,… And us? Where are we?

The most important commitment that we can keep is the commitment with us. Link ourselves on a deep level with our heart. Committing to take care of ourselves, not harm ourselves and protect ourselves, is a vow that we should renew frequently.

We can review how we want to start this commitment. Make a list of what helps us connect with our heart and what drives us away. Incorporate time into our busy lives to listen to ourselves. Learn to really love ourselves, without stinginess or deception.

5. Attend and take care of our three doors: the body, the word and the mind.

To love each other well, we have to take care of our body, watch our mind and pay attention to our word. There are three revolving doors to the outside that go straight to the heart. A conscious and vigilant attention to what enters and leaves them shows us a way to learn to love ourselves.

Tune in with our body

The body is the place we inhabit. Through sensory consciousness (taste, touch, sight, smell, hearing), we communicate with the outside. Each stimulus has a bodily resonance. A caress, a stomp, a murmur or a scream, reverberate in a very different way.

It is easy for us to live disconnected from the body. We find it difficult to identify our needs or tune in to body awareness.

To learn to love ourselves we need to tune the frequency with our body. Learn to listen to it, to respect it. Feed him properly, give him rest, movement, care. If we tune in with full attention to our senses, we will be more selective and careful about what enters our heart: noise, food garbage, hyperstimulation, lack of sleep, aggressive images, overinformation... We will better filter the healthy and close the way to elements harmful.

The look we put on our body determines how we relate to it. If there is rejection or shame, we will live disintegrated. Our head will go one way and our body the other. We will punish ourselves consciously or unconsciously and lead to illnesses, distortions of our reality or self-injurious tendencies. Connecting needs listening, respect and patience.
The body anchors us on the ground to be able to aspire to go further.

Guarding our word

The word is a very powerful weapon. Spiritual teachers tell us: “When you are alone, watch your mind. When you are with people, watch your word ”. Watching the word is also a way of loving ourselves well.

We can speak without words. In these days of confinement, if we spend time alone, becoming aware of our internal dialogues will help us to better understand how we communicate. What we tell ourselves and how we do it. This internal word can easily come out of our mouth to encourage or harm other people.

Depending on how we communicate with others, this is how we will receive a response. The relationship with others, part of a good relationship with us. If we take care of the way we communicate, we will provide a meeting space from dialogue and understanding.

Observing our mind

The mind is the boss. The way we behave, communicate, and take care of ourselves is born in our mind.

Thoughts or emotions are manifestations of our mind. They arise from it and dissolve in it, like waves in the ocean. If we train ourselves to be vigilant and attentive, we can better manage our internal world so that it does not harm us and is more friendly with us. Looping thoughts drag us down and steal energy. It is good to observe them, and realize that there are many of them that are susceptible to change. Distinguish the negatives and transform them into positives.

When feelings of discouragement appear, accept them, go to the root and turn them around. The challenge is to accept what arises without being carried away by it.

Conclution

We need to learn to love ourselves in a healthy way; be our best friends.

When self-esteem is severely damaged, it is necessary to seek therapeutic support. Releasing deep-seated conditioning is not easy, because we have a lot of resistance to letting go. They have been our companions for many years. If you decide to bet on learning to love yourself, seek help, do not doubt that it is worth it.