Love Yourself

Valentine’s Day was a few days ago and I want to take this opportunity to remind you all to shower love on a very important person… YOURSELF!

You may hear people saying this often but you might not grasp just how important it is. I only truly understood this concept last year after reading a book by Louise L. Hay which I’ll tell you more about in my next post. I’m excited to share what I learnt from this book because for me it was a real eye-opener and life-changer.

So back to loving yourself. The idea is simple but effective, “Love yourself before expecting others to love you.”

Love is never outside ourselves, it’s within us, and loving ourselves works miracles in our lives.

When I talk about loving yourself I don’t mean vanity or arrogance. I’m talking about respecting yourself, caring and nurturing for yourself, being grateful for your mind and body and most of all VALUING yourself.

We should be brimming and bursting with appreciation for everything in us, about us and around us.

People express their lack of self-worth in different ways but it’s always because they feel they are not good enough in some shape or form. This has A LOT of side effects which you may not even be aware of. For e.g.: weight problems, health problems, relationship problems or money problems.

There are many mental exercises you can do that can help you understand where your insecurities or negative beliefs come from and help you to dispel them (I will share some of these with you in the next post).

This is important because loving yourself and harnessing positive thoughts will attract love and positivity into your life. Some of you may think I’m absurd but this has proven to be true for me. There was a situation I was in, where in the past I would have drowned in sorrow and disappointment, but this time I tackled it with the utmost conviction that I deserved things to work out for me and it did! This helped me renew my faith in God too, which is very important to me.

Whatever you think and believe becomes true for you. So if you always think the same negative thoughts, you will see problems repeating in your life, sometimes even the same problems over and over again. The opposite is also true: positive thoughts = positive patterns in life. However, in order to think positively, you need to be positive and you need to be happy with yourself.

When it comes to relationships, how can you expect another human being to love you when you don’t love yourself? If you don’t believe you’re beautiful, why do you expect another person to believe it? If you don’t think you’re special and worthy of love, why would anyone else think you’re special and worthy of love? If all you see are your flaws (I have bad skin, I’m overweight, I’m dark, I’m not smart, etc., so why would anyone love me?), you are probably unwittingly attracting attention to those flaws.

If you have low self-esteem or are consumed with negative thoughts, on some subconscious level you sabotage relationships or situations you are in. Trust me, you won’t realise you are doing it, even if someone points it out. Hopefully as I share some of the exercises with you, you will be able to recognize and tackle these thoughts and beliefs.

I’ll leave you with this thought adapted from Louise’s book:

“Think of yourself as being three years old. If you had a little three year old child in front of you who was scared/insecure what would you do? Would you be angry at him? Or would you reach out your arms and comfort him until he felt safe and at ease?

The adults around you when you were a child may not have known how to comfort you at that time. Now  you are the adult in your life, and if you're not comforting the child within you, then that is very sad indeed.

You have the opportunity to treat yourself the way you wish to be treated. You need comforting, not scolding, in order to express yourself at your highest potential.

Be kind to yourself, begin to love and approve of yourself.”

More on this soon!

♡, Sana xx