Self Love

What does it mean to love ourselves? You’ve heard me say that all love flows from self love and we will never find someone to love us more than we love ourselves, but what does it mean to love ourselves and how do we know that we’re not loving ourselves? If it is so important why is it so complicated? It depends on how we define love, how we define ourselves, and the measure we use to gauge whether we have love in our lives because although loving ourselves has nothing to do with these things, it is through them that we decide whether we are worthy of love and can or should love ourselves or not.

Do we ever ask ourselves what love means to us? Our conversations about love are really conversations about relationships, where we have someone to love who loves us in return, or doesn’t. And we tend to confuse love, the noun, with love, the verb. Instead of a state of being, love becomes an action that can be given and taken away at will. And this is where we feel we aren’t in control of love because rather than ‘being’ love, we focus on ‘having’ love. And so often when we talk about love we bring another person into the discussion. We have love when we are in a relationship with someone who has said they love us. And if we don’t, then we think we are without love.

But our greatest challenge in loving ourselves is the ‘self’ that we love. While we see ourselves as a physical being and may even include our spiritual aspect, there are many different aspects to who we are. We have wounded and whole aspects, potential and realized aspects, we have past and present aspects. The ones we don’t love are the ones we are ashamed of, that are painful or represent bad memories. The ones we can love are the ones we are happy about. Our ability to love ourselves then depends on whether the number of ‘good’ aspects outnumbers the ‘bad’ and yet when we truly love ourselves, we love the one aspects of ourselves that matter,  all of them.

Loving ourselves does not involve emotions, memory or relationships. It is a state of being that involves seeing ourselves as whole and complete, perfect in everything we do in each moment and moving from judgment to acceptance. We are love, from love and in love at all times. Love is the energy that makes our heart beat, so we can never be without love. It is the spark of divine light that gives us life and that is with and within us at every moment. It is impossible for us to not love ourselves, but it is possible for us to be in judgment and criticism of who we are, ashamed of or shamed by our actions, limited by our beliefs and thoughts. When we can set those aside we know that we are worthy of love and it is by reflecting the light of God that is within each of us, back to ourselves, that makes us worthy of love, lovable and loved.