Self-Love
Introduction
With this month of love upon us, and our company culture being so much about spreading love we wanted to reflect upon the idea of self-love. That person we see in the mirror every morning is often the last one to receive the amount of love and attention that we give out daily to others.
The difference between “I already love myself”, and realizing all the ways you might not be loving yourself enough is subtle, yet the results of loving yourself more deeply can be profound.
How often are you giving daily love to yourself, reflecting upon your positive traits and habits?
Contents
What is Self-Love?
Self-love is the practice of bringing your full adult self into the present moment with appreciation, compassion, clarity, and confidence. When we are fully resourced we typically have an endless supply of love to spread to others, yet it requires balance and practice to not deplete our own reserves.
While this blog post doesn’t cover all the ways to love yourself, we are going to highlight a few so you can see if there are some opportunities to deepen your self-love and expand your capacity to love others.
Are you conscious about the many ways you may be limiting your self-love by judging yourself as bad, wrong, or unhelpful?
Internal Self-Talk and the Inner Critic
One of the most common areas where self-love can fall short is through negative self-talk. It depletes our energy and our capacity to authentically love others. Most people are unconscious of how often their inner critical voice is active, so the first step is to raise your awareness and listen. It typically sounds like your own voice or like the voice of someone else from your past.
The inner critical voice is one that shows up to critique your choices, actions, judgements and outcomes.
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Here are a few ways your inner critic might be showing up:
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Comparing to others
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Worrying about what others think
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Needing to do things perfectly
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Making self-effacing comments
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Not accepting appreciations and compliments
Some ways to begin noticing and unwinding your inner critic:
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Raise your awareness, write down the actual self-talk and write about your body sensations when you notice that voice is active
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Remind yourself that your inner critic is simply a patterned thought-response to a mix of circumstances. You are able change them if you want.
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Give the inner critic a new job of recognizing itself plus responding with self-appreciation. Learn more about that here.
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Notice the inner critic’s gifts. For example, the ability to heal from an early parental trauma by letting go of that parent’s critical voice inside your head.
Give Yourself Time Daily to do What You Love
One easy way to deepen your self-love is to get into your body daily, to do something that feels good and friendly. Maybe you love to dance, run, lift weights or meditate on a blanket in the sun. Do whatever it is that helps you feel grounded down into your body, and centered in the moment. Create time daily to raise your awareness of your physical experience so it can assist you in increasing your joy. The peak of this sort of experience is often called a flow-state.
Get Clear About How You Like to be Loved
You may have heard about the 5 love languages by Dr. Gary Chapman, a different way of breaking down the acts of love that we most enjoy. How we like to be loved is different for each of us, and the 5 love languages is a fun way to better understand how your friends and loved ones really want to give and receive love.
The Most Common Of The 5 Love Languages:
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Words of affirmation: 23%
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Quality time: 20%.
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Acts of service: 20%
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Physical touch: 19%
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Receiving gifts: 18%
Take this quiz to learn your love languages https://www.5lovelanguages.com/quizzes/.
Don’t be shy about asking to be loved in the ways you feel most aligned with.
Benefits of Deepening Self-Love
Some of the main benefits of deepening your self-love is that you become more productive, confident, secure, and happy because you aren’t wasting energy on negative self-talk. When you have ongoing self-love practices you increase your resilience and ability to respond to life’s inevitable moments while sustaining your joyful state of being.
As you deepen your own self-love you will also find that your relationships change. You will get closer to some friends and you might even find new circles of friends you never imagined.
So remember, spreading the love as we do requires starting first with that person you see in the mirror each day—yourself. Your capacity to authentically love others is ultimately dependent upon how deeply loving you are to yourself.
For more on self-love read this article by Esther Perel
https://www.mindfood.com/article/esther-perel-debunks-the-myth-of-self-love/
