Celebrate Life with Self-love

Life teaches us so many lessons every day. It is through these learnings, we eventually grow and even change our whole perspective towards life. Some of these lessons come again and again, but we just keep on rejecting them because of ignorance. Some of these come easy way, others, hard way. Some lessons just keep on popping up, and we don’t even realize that it is something that we are looking for since long.

Talking about me, one of my biggest lessons came an unexpected way.  One fine day, when I was browsing the internet, a couple of words started to come to my focus.  Initially, I ignored, but then I stopped and paid attention. The words were “Self-Love”. It made me a little curious.  I was wondering if I knew what that meant.

In my opinion, love was something that we get from others. By Others, I mean people related to us, like society, friends etc. and being loved by them means getting accepted and appreciated. But as I studied more about self-love, I began to realize that we do so many things to get the appreciation and love of others. we try to look good, do things to please people and try to change our self to better fit in society and our family. All this we do in the name of becoming better person and to be liked by everyone. As a result, we lose our real self.

Now the question was how to understand self-love.  I read some books and articles to fully understand the concept. Below paragraph gives a brief description of it.

Self-love

Thinking about self-love, we may think of things like giving some extra time to oneself, indulging in self-pampering like manicure, doing a bubble bath, losing some kilos to look good, feeling good by achieving something big. We generally mix self-liking with self-love. Self-liking is simply done by doing all these activities, however self-love is different. It is something that needs to be done both internally and externally.  It is to love oneself even in a time when we are not looking good, being a loser, being mean to someone. It should not be conditioned liking of oneself, instead, it is pure love towards oneself without a judgment. Appreciating and accepting real you. Always drenching oneself in pure unconditional love.  Self-love is the foundation for your emotional and physical growth. If we develop self-love, we accept our weaknesses as well as nurture more of our strengths. We can live life happily with our own efforts.

After understanding it, the next challenge was, how to implement it in our life. I knew, it will need patience and little more learning and that it is not going to happen overnight. It is a process to discover who you really are, then truly accepting and appreciating your real self and unconditionally be in love with yourself. It is difficult but with the help of little shift in mindset you can start to be first fine with yourself.  It is a continuous process and begins with being aware of it.

In the next blog I will discuss first sign of lack of self-love.

–Seema