10 Self-Love Lessons to Master
Everything starts with you ❤️
Self-love is the love that sets the tone for every other relationship in your life.
If you ignore your needs and prioritise those of others, guess what? You’ll attract people who ignore your needs and prioritise theirs.
Relationships with others mirror the relationship you have with yourself.
When you value your time and look after your needs, you will attract people who value your time and respect your boundaries. And if they don’t value or respect you, you’ll remove them from your life pretty quickly, since life’s too short to experience emotional disrespect or neglect for too long and call it a happy life!
We’re all here to learn, grow and enjoy our experiences, not to be slaves to expectations, rules, conditions and a mental prison of constant doubt and overthinking.
Are you ready to conquer the mountain that is called “Learning to love yourself” and earn the title of a Self-Love Master?
1. LIMITING BELIEFS
The biggest obstacle to loving ourselves are the limiting beliefs that we carry within, passed from generation to generation, until they reached us.
“I am easy to love” is the only mantra you need to remember.
If you feel like:
there’s something wrong with you
that you’re broken
that you’re unworthy of receiving nurturing and understanding love
that others get to receive their happy ending and you can only ever have drama and heartbreak
There are definitely limiting beliefs within you that need to be re-examined and redefined, so that you can open up to both give and receive love.
The love you wish to experience from others is the love you must learn to give to yourself first.
How can you love yourself the right way when you’re constantly repeating that there’s something wrong with you, that you’re not enough, that you deserve to suffer?!
You are easy to love. We are all easy to love — we make it difficult!
2. GUILT
The second obstacle to loving yourself is what happens when you abandon tradition and do what is best for you: this creates guilt!
Consider this — the tradition we’ve been taught for generations is to ignore our own needs in the name of looking after our elders or in the name of being submissive to our partners or, you know, there’s always someone else!
What kind of tradition is that? A tradition of conditional love that only brings unnecessary suffering.
You can’t give to others from an empty cup.
I mean, you can, but at what cost?
If self-care is at the bottom of your priority list, don’t be surprised when you reach a burnout point.
The price to pay for good health is being called “selfish” by those whose needs you’re not prioritising over yours.
I’d say that’s a reasonable price to pay.
You get to live a happy, healthy, balanced life surrounded by people who actually honour and respect your boundaries & needs. It’s a win-win!
3. FEAR
Once you’ve changed your limiting beliefs and overcome guilt, there comes another barrier to self-love — fear. And fear can be very creative in its reasoning, should you choose to listen to it!
In the world, there are two main operational states that we can be in: fear and love.
When we are in a state of fear, we go through all the unpleasant emotions: shame, guilt, apathy, fear, desire or jealousy, anger, pride.
When we shift our consciousness to the state of love, we begin to embody all the pleasant emotions: courage, willingness, acceptance, love, joy, peace.
Fear isn’t just one emotion in this case. When we feel fear within us, it’s an indication that we’ve lowered the state of our being and it is up to us to raise it in order to come back to love.
The moment you recognise fear within is also the moment you’ve defeated it! It’s the moment you say, “I hear you, but I choose love”.
4. PEOPLE PLEASING
While people-pleasing is not the biggest obstacle to loving yourself, it can certainly create friction in your relationships, especially with people who benefit from your lack of self-respect.
When you learn to love yourself properly, expect for most of your relationships to fall apart.
Why?
Well, they were probably trauma-based bonds to begin with.
We tend to bond over the similar traumatic experiences we have gone through life until we heal our inner wounds and become comfortable with being in a state of unconditional self-love (or unconditional acceptance of all that we are).
Once we learn self-love, trauma bonds can’t survive anymore. Or they would require of you to keep sacrificing your self-respect and lowering your boundaries for surface-level connections that cannot offer you the support that you need and deserve.
5. SHAME
When we overcome guilt, fear and people-pleasing, there comes another fun lesson for us to learn — shame!
Often this shame is a projection from others, those we choose to leave behind.
Once we learn self-love and it’s time to put it into practice, we’ll face the shame of “leaving people behind” and that’s okay.
Shame is part of your old conditional programming that is trying to keep you stuck in loops where you didn’t get the love, support and respect that you 100% deserved, but you stayed in those relationships because you didn’t know any better. Now you do!
Let’s zoom out. How long do you think you have on Earth? How long are you willing to spend in jobs, relationships and hobbies that don’t make you happy, just so that you can “keep the peace” or “preserve the status quo” because you fear change?
Every day that you choose someone else’s happiness over yours is a day that you go against your own intuition and your own health.
When you say to yourself, “I hear you but I’d rather not listen to you right now”, you are essentially reaffirming to yourself that you’re not worthy of being listened to, respected, supported and loved.
Self-love is the courage to choose yourself and set a different tone for the rest of your life. A life that is finally based on equal give and take!
6. CODEPENDENCY
Just because you’ve overcome your people-pleasing tendencies doesn’t mean that there aren’t any relationships in your life that have unhealthy codependency patterns.
This is where the concept of “detachment” comes into play.
It’s important to understand that you can exist and even thrive without anyone in particular. You are a whole being on your own.
The world might try really hard to make you believe that you’re broken and that there’s something so fundamentally wrong with you that the only way you can fix it is with constantly purchasing things and even altering your body.
But the truth is that you are perfect just as you are and more importantly — you are worthy of love just as you are, no alterations needed.
In the pursuit of self-improvement, we tend to forget to give ourselves the love we crave to receive from others, because somewhere deep inside of us we believe that it is only when we complete the journey that we will receive the recognition and love from others for the great beings that we are.
You are a great being right now. Go and give yourself a compliment — or a hug! You deserve it.
7. DOUBT
Doubt is really the process of over-thinking. The more you overthink, the more you remain stuck in your mind and unable to truly process your emotions.
Emotions are not to be intellectualised, but to be felt, experienced and acknowledged on a different level.
When you are feeling doubt, this is your internal operational system telling you to get out of your mind and go to your heart — there are emotions that require your immediate attention!
Self-love is the ability to recognise when doubt shows up in your life and allow it to guide you to the emotions that want to tell you something.
Doubt is merely an indicator that you’ve got a bit of emotional processing to do, so that you can remain balanced. That’s all. No need to panic!
8. PRIDE & EGO
What often stops us from truly expressing our feelings and connecting with others is our own pride and Ego.
If you grew up without a safe space to be emotional and/or around emotionally immature parents and friends, you probably go through a rollercoaster of emotions when you picture sharing your needs and desires with others.
As you go through this rollercoaster, you might experience:
guilt for having desires
shame for having needs
fear at the possibility of being rejected or neglected
grief for all the times you were indeed rejected and neglected
anger for all the times you chose to NOT express what you really wanted to express because you didn’t feel safe enough to do that
pride for all the times you did survive the hardships on your own
Pride is an indicator that you are now ready to connect with others. You don’t want to do the journey on your own anymore and that’s perfectly okay, you don’t have to do it on your own.
Self-love has shown you the way to look after yourself better, so that you can attract and allow people in your life who will also look after you better.
Self-love is part of the healing journey to returning to our most authentic, joyful self. You’re nearly there!
9. JUDGEMENT
The biggest critic you’ll ever meet is yourself.
It’s not your mother or your father, and even your grandmother, although you might hear their voices in your head.
You might not be able to control what thoughts come to you, but you are the one in charge of what stays in your head.
Self-love is the ability to understand when a thought has arrived to guide us to self-sabotage and doubt ourselves, and then dismiss it: “I see you, but I’ll still proceed with my plan!”
Self-love is the declaration that you are your biggest cheerleader, your biggest supporter in the entire world!
When you cheer for someone, there’s no time to judge them.
Do the same with you — be the positive voice in your head that says “I got this, I am awesome and I am ready for amazing things!”
10. JOY
The final lesson is, of course, the hardest one to learn.
It is called “The Joy of Loving Yourself”!
When you feel joy about looking after yourself and starting the day with love for yourself, you have mastered everything you need to know about self-love.
Self-love is not a chore. It’s a pleasure!
When you learn how to love yourself, you connect with your Higher Self and begin to channel more of your authentic self into the world.
