How To Love Yourself

I have journeyed over the last month on seeking yogis and sages on the topic on how to love myself. These are my discoveries. Personally, I find this to be an awesome teaching. Below, I will share with you the techniques I used to increase my capacity to love myself.

"In the capacity to love ourselves we increase the capacity to love others and creation"

"There is no other teaching in the universe, other than love"

Forgiving Yourself

You are born into this world stumbling around with no idea what to do. You just took whatever that was avaliable to you, put that together, and called it a solution. You didn't know any better. Forgive yourself for your past mistakes and blunders.

Due to how fragile our brains are in the first 20 years of our lives, even minor trauma during this time becomes deeply embedded in our subconscious. Though you may think it doesn't affect you, it often controls you like a puppet.

This is the process I use to forgive myself:

1. Play meditative music (chantress seba is good)
2. Clear out my mind and enter a meditative state
3. With an empty mind, bring up the "event"
4. As a 3rd person spectator, I remember every single little detail of the "event"
5. I replay the "event" in my mind, as many times as possible to recall all details
6. I watch and feel as a 3rd person on what has happened
7. I come out of it and take a 15 minute break
8. I re-enter but this time I experience the "event" again as my younger self in 1st person
9. I reinvoke all the emotions I felt during that time
10. Now, I combine the two people together
11. Either, I receive advice from my older self (the person you are now) or I give advice to my younger self. It depends on what perspective you want to take.

If you do this properly, you should have tears rolling down your eyes. And you should feel a great sense of relief after you have done this excercise. It almost feel like you're not being held back anymore, and a great burden has been lifted from your shoulders.

What's just happening here is that you're just accepting your younger self for his mistakes. So in turn, you no longer carry around this self inflicted baggage when you choose to forgive yourself.

Forgiving Others

Realize that there is no such thing as evil in the world. To forgive others you need to put down your sense of self-rightousness. To see things from a neutral perspective and really take on the perspective of the person who hurt you.

True forgiveness comes when we realize there was and is nothing to forgive, as we should not have condemned the other in the first place. "He recognized her mistake, but did not call upon to hate her for it."

These are the reasons why people hurt you from their POV:

1. They did it out of ignorance, they didn't know any better and given their limited understanding of life, they did good in the best way they knew how.
2. They did it out of weakness and out of fear
3. They did so out of selfishness
4. They did it out of a desperate desire to get love
5. They did it out of the lack of awareness and self development

Realize that you yourself have hurt others out of these 5 reasons as well! So this realization can help you put down your sense of self-rightousness. Now that you understand these core fundamentals of human behaviour, let's delve how to practically forgive others:

1. Play meditative music (chantress seba is good)
2. Clear out my mind and enter a meditative state
3. With an empty mind, bring up the "person"
4. Really see them for who they are (using the 5 key reasons I listed above)
5. Deeply accept them for their actions
6. Say "I forgive you" to them in your visualization and love them despite it all.

Short Story About Forgiveness

"The only regret you will have in your life is that you dont love more. Yourself, others, nature."

Hurt by the past, armor worn so thick friend nor foe can pass. Dare not leave myself vulnerable again! He exclaimed. To prevent hurt he draws his sword and attacks first, driving away people whom love him the most.

With a self image marred, the picture of a tough exterior walks believing he is not well liked and accepted. His dealings are made by overcoming, combating and protecting when nature shows him cooperation and acceptance. Fustration, aggression and loneliness is the price he pays.

"Little men are never wrong and always right. He walks fighting his old emotional battles within his mind. Self pity and resentment builds in his heart, unable to control his reaction to any situation. Turning his rein over other people, he demands others to dictate how he should feel or act. Just like the slave he is."

He lay down his sword and takes off his armor. Realizing that a real hero is one who wears forgiveness and vulnerability for the world to see.

Beneath the armor is a person who is a soft and vulnerable, the person that wants to depend on others.

He awakens, and understands what a wise person once told him. The only regret you will have in your life is that you dont love more. Yourself, others, nature.

Visualize your future. Attune your mind to the present and feel the love around you. For you will enter the belly of the whale without a sword or armor and come out unscathed.

~ "Nothing can damage me, but only myself"

Engaging In Creation

There is no better way to love yourself other than to put your love into creating something into the material world. Have you ever wondered how come art soothes the mind from depression?

You are an artist. You get to design your own life and create whatever you want into your life. Notice that when you engage in creation, it brings you great beauty and joy.

Take a piece of paper and write down what you want to create into your life, then do it. Create the things you've written down on that piece of paper. It can be done if you put enough love into it.

Acceptance

A core part about loving yourself is to deeply accept yourself. Accept all the cards you have been dealt with. We cannot come out of victimhood if we do not first accept our situation.

Your major challenges here are blame, demonization, judgement, condemnation, denial, dogmatism and resentment. All of these characteristic are just smokescreen to not allow you to look inwards and accept yourself.

Taking 100% responsibiltiy is closely related with self love. For we cannot love something that we do not give attention to, as outlined in my how to love others post.

Do this excercise. Take a rubber band and put it around your wrist. Everytime you judge, blame etc, you snap this rubber band. Then remind yourself to accept others or yourself, and find the root cause of why these judgement, blame etc. entered your mind in the first place.

Letting Go Of Attachments

Remember the 5 key aspects of why hurt happens? Let's reverse engineer why letting go of attachments is important.

1. Letting go of your attachments reduces your bias, which increases your awareness. Therefore, you are less ignorant
2. Letting go of attachments cause you to be less needy, therefore you are less weak and fearful of life
3. Letting go of attachments allow you to absolve materialistic desires, therefore you are less selfish.
4. Letting go of your attachments to others allows you to love them out of your own love, instead of the egoic need to persue and "get something" from them.

Meditation is the most accessable way to let go of your attachments. I recommend kriya yoga and chanting meditations where you chant a mantra while meditating. The chant has a "beat" to it and you can learn the ropes by chanting along with the singer. Remember to read the chant before beginning, so you know what they are saying. (Here is one chant that I like.)

Mindfullness

If you can let go of things quickly, almost nothing can disturb you. This helps by giving attention and care to your current emotions. Without awareness you cannot "let go" of it, therefore, allowing the emotion to control you instead.

1. Put that distubing thought in your mind
2. Label the emotion you're feeling
3. Relax your body
4. Feel the emotion
5. Imagine your disturbing thoughts/emotions leaving with your next breath.

You can apply this to anytime you're feeling down and negative. It helps to maintain a positive mood throughout the day.

Loving Others

A true sign that you love yourself is when you can love others. It is not possibe to love others without loving yourself first. This is because the capacity to love others is the "spillover" from our own cups of love.

If we are deficient of love, then we cannot love others. Counterintuitively, when we love others through our excess love, it creates a positive feedback loop where we can bask and enjoy our own love by giving it to others.

By loving yourself you are able to love others. By loving others, you love yourself even more. Do you see that?

When you have the capacity to start loving yourself using my methods outlined here, start practicing my guide on how to love others.

Conclusions

As I discover more, I will come back to this article and amend any new techniques and discoveries I make. Self-love is the highest teaching in the entire universe and I am very greateful that you took the time to read what I have to say today.

Please do check out my other posts and practice everything holistically. You can see "coaching" to see if I have room to onboard new students. Send me an email if you have topic suggestion.

Cheers,
FriendlyWrenChilling.