Image by Ashish Verma
In This Article:
- What is self-love, and how does it reflect your true self?
- How can self-caring behaviors improve your well-being?
- Why are self-compassion and self-forgiveness vital for emotional resilience?
- What role does surrender play in achieving self-acceptance?
- How can practicing self-trust and bravery transform your life?
Self-Love Practices: Connecting with Your True Self
by Patrick Marando.
When it comes to listening to our true self, it is useful to know how it speaks to us and what strategies we can practice to grow better attuned with what it has to say. The best label I’ve found to describe the true self’s communication is “self-love.”
But what is self-love? Self-love is a combination of internal thinking patterns and external behaviors toward ourselves, others, and the world that encompass how we think, talk, relate, and act.
Even though the natural state of our true self is a loving one, many of us have learned to be hard on ourselves and not look after ourselves in a kind or loving way. If those around us showed love in a critical, hard, or harsh way, we are more likely to treat ourselves similarly. If we were gently nurtured, with more love and encouragement, we more than likely have better ways of loving ourselves.
Following are behaviors which I feel constitute self-love and most closely represent how the true self treats us. They may seem natural to you or quite foreign.
Being Self-Caring
Being self-caring usually involves doing things for ourselves to look after ourselves or treat ourselves well. They could be things we enjoy or things that make us feel good or healthier. It could also be allowing ourselves to do nothing at all or asking for help.
Self-caring can take different forms but can fall under categories such as looking after our health, doing things for fun, choosing activities that help us relax, exercising, eating well, nourishing our body, practicing good sleep hygiene, pampering ourselves.
When deciding on how to be self-caring, it can be helpful to ask: What would I do for someone I cared about if they were in the situation I was in? Once you have your answer, see if you can turn that behavior onto yourself. You may also like to take some time to ask yourself: What activities make me feel better and help me care for myself? Once you have done this, set some small achievable goals of when you would like to do those self-caring activities. Make the decision to love yourself enough to care about you.
Self-Compassion
Self-compassion is similar to self-caring, but it is more about how we care about ourselves internally with our beliefs and attitudes toward ourselves. We can recognize that sometimes we are going to struggle and not live up to our expectations. We are going to make mistakes and not always get everything “right.”
Offering ourselves compassion is giving ourselves permission to be an imperfect human. We can learn to speak to ourselves with understanding, fairness, and kindness as if we were talking to the person we loved the most in the whole world in a moment of their deepest pain, or perhaps like talking to the 5-year-old version of yourself who is struggling to understand the world and is trying to cope the best they can.
Self-Respect
Speaking to ourselves and treating our body in a kind, nice, gentle way which builds us up rather than tears us down is considered being self-respecting. Giving self-respect can be extremely useful when you have feelings of disappointment, guilt, loneliness, rejection, abandonment, low self-worth, or any of the self-hate emotions.
A good practice for self-respect is to close your eyes and imagine you are standing in front of the person you respect most in the world. Then ask yourself: What would I ideally say or do to them to give them the most respect possible? Then decide to turn this onto yourself.
Self-Encouragement
Encouraging is the act of giving someone support, hope, or confidence to forge ahead. It logically follows that self-encouragement is the ability to do those things for ourselves. Self-encouragement is a useful self-love tool to use when you feel stuck in any emotional state.
An example of a self-encouraging question to ask yourself is: I feel [name the emotion], but how do I want to move forward despite feeling this way? Or perhaps: What is one small step I can take to move forward right now? Repeat the question once you have completed that step, and so on.
Self-Forgiveness
Forgiveness is a conscious decision to stop holding on to anger, hate, and resentment toward oneself or another person. Ultimately all forgiveness is an act of self-loving. Forgiveness is best used with the emotions of guilt, disappointment, hurt, rejection, anger, self-hate, and abandonment.
An exercise to develop your ability to forgive yourself or others is to sit quietly and put your hand on your heart. Once you have done this, imagine your heart filling with a pink light of forgiveness. As it begins to grow full, say to yourself: “I forgive myself for...” and state what that is. For example, “I forgive myself for my mistakes,” “I forgive myself for being imperfect,”
You may experience some resistance. If this is the case, change the wording to make it lighter and more in line with where you are in the process, such as “I would like to be able to forgive myself for...”
Self-Appreciation
To appreciate is to recognize the full worth of someone or something. We are taught from a young age to appreciate the others around us, but many of us have not been taught how to appreciate ourselves. In fact, sometimes when we did appreciate ourselves we were told we were being too big-headed or conceited so we were left feeling guilty or ashamed.
An exercise to grow your ability to self-appreciate is by creating a list of things you are good at, things you like about yourself, improvements you have made or barriers you have overcome. Remember this list especially when feeling the emotions of disappointment, guilt, loneliness, hurt, rejection, abandonment, and unworthiness.
It can also be useful at the end of every day to see if you can find at least three things you can appreciate about your day. Self-appreciation and appreciation can help us connect more deeply to our true self when we are feeling sad, unworthy, dissatisfied, hopeless, directionless, hurt, empty, or powerless.
Self-Acceptance
To accept means to fully embrace something exactly as it is without it requiring change. Self-acceptance means acknowledging and not rejecting yourself—all your qualities, thoughts, emotions, urges, physicality, gender, sexuality. It is to accept every little part of you, no matter how good or bad you or others view it.
Self-acceptance is useful at any time, but particularly when feeling disappointed, guilty, lonely, hurt, rejected, abandoned, unworthy, and when experiencing self-hate.
Practice self-acceptance by choosing a part of yourself you notice yourself rejecting. List as many benefits or uses you can think of for this part and then choose some lighter thoughts to describe it.
For example, disliking your selfishness could look like: it is wrong to be selfish; I’m a bad person for being so selfish; others’ needs are more important than mine. Lighter thoughts could look like: it is okay to be selfish sometimes; everyone has selfishness in them; selfishness is another word for being self-giving; it is important to give to yourself; selfishness helps me get my needs met; it can help me to not be taken advantage of.
Pay attention to how much you resist or accept the thoughts, and grow the self-acceptance and lightness of thought from there.
Self-Advocating
Advocating for oneself is about learning when it feels right and true to speak up and stand up for what is important to you. It is about you being willing to speak and act in a way that supports your truest interests. It means using your voice to speak in an aligned, helpful, and respectful way to get your message across for your truest benefit.
Ask yourself some of these questions regarding self-advocating:
If I were not scared to talk, what would I like to say?
If I truly believed I was important enough to have my needs met, what would I like to ask for?
If someone asks me for something, how would I like to hear it?
What feels like the most aligned way to advocate for myself?
Surrender and Acceptance
By practicing acceptance, you are practicing listening to your true self and bringing about the peace that comes with it. The best way to practice acceptance is to make peace with and allow whatever emotion is arising and to choose lighter thoughts about how you perceive it.
Surrender is about letting go of the need to control the current flow of life and where it may lead in the future. Are you willing to listen to your true self and surrender your need to control the flow of life and what it may bring and allow yourself to experience the peace that comes with it?
To improve your ability to surrender, it is valuable to practice accepting emotions (in particular fear) as this will give you more confidence in yourself to manage whatever emotion may arise in the situation you fear losing control of.
To discover the other emotion you could make peace with, ask yourself: “What am I scared I will feel if I let go in this situation?” Practicing surrender with self-trust will also help.
Self-Trust
In actuality, to trust another we must first trust ourselves enough to believe that what we feel about them is correct. We must first have faith in ourselves and our judgment if we are to trust another person.
Difficulties with self-trust often create anxiety within us. So as to not overly trigger anxiety and instead to grow your self-trust, it will be beneficial for you to go slowly.
Try this exercise: think of a small area in your life where you doubt yourself. From there, surrender to the idea of making a wrong decision or looking stupid. Once you have done that, decide you are going to take a chance on yourself and stick with the decision that feels most aligned to your true self in the situation. As you become more adept at trusting yourself in smaller parts of your life, move on to the bigger ones.
Courage/Bravery
To have courage is to have the ability to do something we feel scared to do. Bravery is not doing something in the absence of fear, but more a case of doing it because it is of importance to us, even though we experience fear. It takes bravery and courage to decide to love ourselves enough to live a rich, meaningful life, the one our true self wills for us.
If you experience fear, ask yourself if you are willing to be brave enough to do what is important to you even if the outcome could be emotional or physical pain. When you do this repeatedly, your bravery will increase and your fear decrease. Bravery is a useful tool when you feel the anxiety emotions.
Self-Love Is Not Always Easy
The ability to love yourself and practice these self-love skills is not always easy. This is normal and most likely means you never learned those areas of self-love. So, our goal from here is to cultivate and nurture our ability to self-love and listen to our true self.
The more you are willing to practice these behaviors, the more your connection to true self will increase. The more your self-love increases, the easier it will be to deal with any emotional pain you may be feeling.
It starts with a willingness, a desire, and a choice to build self-love within. If you do not make the conscious choice, you will still be able to access self-love, but it will likely involve more emotional pain before you reach that point of connection. It helps to do so slowly and to begin by changing your perceptions to make them lighter instead of heavier or darker.
Copyright ©2024. All Rights Reserved.
Adapted with permission.
Article Source:
Book: Waking Up to Your Self
Waking Up to Your Self: A Guide to Living Your Truth
by Patrick Marando.Drawing on more than 20 years of experience as a spiritual teacher and psychologist, Patrick Marando has written a guide to remembering who you really are -- teaching how you, too, can live from the state he calls the true self. Patrick provides a guide to remembering your truth and fully awakening to who you are. The result: a life of well-being, peace, and fulfillment. He also explains how to utilize our minds to help -- instead of limit -- us. With his clear explanations and practical exercises, Patrick has created a step-by-step guide to being human and overcoming the barriers to living your truth.
Click here for more info and/or to order this paperback book. Also available as a Kindle edition.
About the Author
Article Recap:
Self-love is the communication of your true self, encompassing internal thoughts and external behaviors that nurture well-being. Practices such as self-caring, compassion, forgiveness, and self-trust help foster emotional resilience and connection. Through self-acceptance, surrender, and bravery, individuals can embrace their emotions and navigate life with greater confidence. Cultivating self-love requires willingness, small steps, and a commitment to nurturing lighter, more positive perceptions. This journey leads to profound inner peace and self-awareness.
#SelfLove #TrueSelf #EmotionalResilience #SelfAcceptance #InnerPeace