Practice Self-Love!
Practice Self-Love!
Self-love is a term that gets tossed around a lot—and it’s often misunderstood. Self-love is not just about feeling good or taking time for yourself. It’s a state of appreciation for oneself that grows from actions that support your physical, psychological, and spiritual growth. Self-love allows you to accept your weaknesses along with your strengths, and to have compassion for yourself as you strive to find personal meaning and fulfillment.
It may seem hard to grasp, but self-love and self-care are important for overall well-being. You might think of your thoughts as reflections of the outside world; you’re actually creating your life with your thoughts. It can be challenging to shift from self-judgment and negativity to compassion and positivity. Fortunately, you can change your body and brain with the thoughts you think, and the words you speak. Self-love builds out of the thoughts and actions that you choose. This, in turn, will support you emotionally, psychologically, physically, and spiritually. Self-love is a dynamic experience that expands and moves with you as you change, experience life, and grow.
This year, nurture yourself and become your own valentine. Start with these strategies to get back in touch with your own heart:
Foster Mindfulness to Help You Cultivate Self-Love
Being connected to what you feel, think, and want allows you to remain mindful of who you are and act on this knowledge. Slow down and begin to notice what you’re saying to yourself and the thoughts that you’re having. Reflect on how these are impacting your mood, health, and behavior. When you become mindful of who you are, you’re more likely to act in accordance with this wisdom rather than on what you perceive others want from you.
Practice Self-Care
Nourish yourself: Commit to healthy activities such as balanced nutrition, exercise, getting adequate sleep, massages, play, and social interactions. When you show yourself love through these types of actions, you’ll continue to take better care of your basic needs. This sets the foundation for growth and living an authentic life.
Forgive Yourself
It’s important to own and take responsibility for your actions. It’s also important to learn and grow from your mistakes rather than punishing yourself. Practice self-compassion when you make a mistake. Reframe mistakes as lessons, and embrace them as chances to learn and grow.
Set Boundaries
Being able to set limits and say no to activities, interactions, and work that depletes or harms you physically, emotionally, or spiritually shows self-love and compassion. If there are people who incessantly stress you out, inflame you, or bring you down, see if you can take a break from them. Creating space can help you evaluate your relationships and commitments and decide which ones you want to invite back into your life.
Live Intentionally
When you live with purpose and meaning, you’ll make decisions that support your intentions. This makes you feel great about yourself when you accomplish your true purpose. If you set your intention to live in a healthy and meaningful way, you will take actions that support this intention.
Choose one way to start caring for yourself today. As you work on beginning to accept and love yourself more, you will exercise actions of self-love naturally.
Build your letting go muscle
We're constantly holding on to things in our past, and it can tend to weigh heavy on our souls and even give us low self-esteem. The more blocks we clear, the more we can really live big in the area of self-love. Although we may do this as a way to protect ourselves from hurting, it’s really only holding us back from moving forward to reaching optimal self-acceptance and loving who we are.
According to Dr. Hansen, author of Hard Wiring Your Happiness, taking care of yourself has a good ripple effects on others. Deliberately do a small thing that feeds you - a little rest, some exercise, some time for yourself - and then notice how this affects your relationships. Notice how healthy boundaries in relationships helps prevent you from getting used up or angry and eventually needing to withdraw.
Helping others helps you; helping yourself helps others. Similarly, harming others harms you; harming yourself harms others.
It's as if we are connected in a vast web. For better or worse, what you do to others ripples back to you; what you do to yourself ripples out to others. Recognizing this will change your life for the better. And change the lives of others for the better as well.
Which strategy resonates with you most? How do you plan on embracing self-love, so that you can offer love?
