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Self Love
Self love is unconditional love that is
directed toward the various aspects of ourselves such as thoughts,
emotions, feelings, actions, physical body, and images.
Self love and destructive states. Some people resist self love because
they do not differentiate it from other states such as:
 | Vanity.
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Narcissism.
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Narcissism is an obsession with ourselves, to the
exclusion of other people. Narcissism is not self love:
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| Narcissism ignores the aspects of ourselves that are fulfilled only
through interaction with other people giving to them, and receiving from
them. If we love ourselves, we love the social aspects of ourselves, and
so we reach out to people in a manner such that they will respond with
the love that we require. We know that we must give love to get love. If
we give something other than love, we get something other than love. |
| Narcissism is ineffective in nourishing the aspects of ourselves that
are fulfilled only through self love. There is a type of nourishment
that comes only from ourselves to ourselves, but narcissism is mere
infatuation. It does not nourish us, and so we spend an inordinate
amount of time with a focus on ourselves, in a futile attempt to satisfy
ourselves with this infatuation. In contrast, if we have self love, we
do achieve the satisfaction, and we can effectively turn our attention
to other aspects of our lives including other people. |
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The benefits from self love.
|  Self love
increases our ability to love other people. This phenomenon occurs because
we are loving the designs that are common to all of us. If we love our
assertiveness, we tend to love other people when they are assertive. We do
this because the mind observes the assertiveness design, and then it plots its
response by examining our elements that are associated with that design. Those
design elements are the thoughts, images, energy tones, and physical habits
that we have generated in previous encounters with that design. This process
does not consider who is being assertive, and so the same standards are
automatically applied to ourselves and to other people. |
| Self love increases the amount of love that we receive. People are more
likely to offer love. This phenomenon is due to various reasons:
| We are more loving toward them, because we accept and love the
elements that are common to us all. Naturally, they tend to respond to our
love with their own love. |
| People intuitively perceive the elements of our designs.
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| We enhance our ability to receive love. Our self love is a
confirmation that we are lovable. We eagerly recognize and accept the love
that is offered to us. If we lack self love, we reject other people's love,
because we do not recognize it, or we feel that we are not worthy of it. |
| Self love feels good. Pleasure and happiness are our subjective
experience of the flow of spiritual life substance from one thing to another. As we love ourselves, that life substance circulates within us. |
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Self love allows us to understand and know ourselves. We are not
repressing anything from our own awareness. |
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Techniques for developing self love
| Design-work. We can generate energy tones
of contentment, satisfaction, and happiness as we view the various aspects of
ourselves.
| Affirmations. |
| Directed imagination. We can visualize ourselves being kind to ourselves. |
| Modeling. |
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| Intuition can tell us how to express our self love. It can tell us that
we are working too hard, and that we need to comfort ourselves with some
relaxation and recreation. |
| We can develop the various types of love toward ourselves. We can develop
self acceptance, patience, generosity, forgiveness, and self respect. |
| We can love ourselves with regard to our physical needs. We can get
proper medical care, and we can attend to our physical fitness. |
| We can become more aware of the occasions when love is offered to us.
Every time we recognize that someone is loving us, we confirm the idea that we
are lovable. Self love is unconditional, we can love ourselves even when other
people do not love us. |
| We eliminate shame. Shame is the belief that there is something
innately wrong and undeserving in us. If we are experiencing shame, we cannot
love ourselves, nor can we allow other people to love us. |
Next topic: Self Image
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