What does self-love really look like?

Have you ever asked, “do I really love myself?”

Like, love love. Love like you love your closest family. Love like you would an innocent child or your favourite pet. 

Do you talk to yourself like you would these beloved beings in your life?

Or perhaps you snap at the people closest to you. Perhaps you blame them, scold them, criticise them. Or do you keep people at bay, believing that you can only ever truly rely on yourself?

Loving yourself and loving others work off each other. When you know what it means to be loved, you can love more fully. When you know how fulfilling it feels to have your love received, you’re more willing to receive love from others. 

Love feeds love. It becomes a way of life. It becomes the flavour of every interaction you have. And when love is everything, fear has nowhere to survive. Hate becomes an outdated concept. 

But genuine self-love can be one of the hardest things to cultivate, because so much about the world and our upbringing teaches us to block love. 

Many of us were taught that love has conditions. 

“I love you BUT you upset me when you’re naughty”. 

“I love you BUT your school grades disappoint me”. 

And then we’re taught that love has no place in politics, economics, education or careers. 

Developing self-love might start with that advice we all hear: eat healthily, exercise, take those baths, rest when you need to, treat yourself….

But these things don’t get to the crux of the block you’re facing. No matter how wonderfully bubbly your candle-lit bath, if you feel shame, pain or disappointment in yourself, your experience of life won’t shift much. 

So what’s the real work? Practicing compassion. 

Compassion is one of the main tenets of Buddhist philosophy and psychology. And beyond just a cerebral concept, Buddhism gifts us with practical means of developing this loving-kindness within ourselves. 

It takes meditating on compassion. It’s like rehearsing it. Flexing our compassion muscle, getting the repetitions in until it fires without effort. 

There are all sorts of ways to awaken this compassion, using whatever inspiration your mind can recognise. 

In the work that I do, spending time with our inner child is key. This allows us to remember that we are just as precious as the child we once were — because that child is still a part of who we are. It’s often much easier to find the love we have for our child self, so we can start there.

With this practice of holding ourselves with compassion, we can start to use it as a balm to soothe the pain we feel. The pain of unworthiness, or not enough-ness. The pain of believing we should be a different way, should be able to do better. 

Then we start to recognise that nothing we do takes away from our innate goodness. No ‘evidence’ of our wrongness makes us any less precious. No amount of mistakes takes away from our potential to grow and evolve. 

This is self-love. 

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