How to love yourself more

A quick exercise

I suffered from “low self-esteem” for most of my life. People kept telling me that I simply needed to love myself more, but I had no idea how to do that.

I thought I was mostly alone, but as it turns out, we ALL suffer to some degree from a lack of self-love or self-acceptance. For most of us, we never fully accept ourselves and are often on a treadmill of self-improvement. And worse yet, our whole society reinforces this self-loathing by reminding us day-in and day-out (through things like advertising) that we are all in need of serious improvement.

So how do you love yourself more?

First of all it’s critical to know that we CAN love ourselves more. Indeed it’s our natural state. But it’s less about actively loving ourselves and more about removing the conditioning that taught us we are flawed. We have to edit the programming.

We were not born to be self-loathing

None of us was born with a lack of self-esteem. Indeed we had no thoughts and did not know what was “good” and what was “bad, until we were taught these definitions. For most of us, as children, we quickly learned that we were not perfect. We learned that we were not fast enough, smart enough or good enough. And, if you were raised Catholic like me, you learned that you were “born a sinner” with a black mark on your soul.

How do you de-program yourself to be more self-loving?

Here is one easy exercise that helps: Simply list a few things that you are ashamed of. Then take each one and totally embrace it. Do not just accept it, but try to totally “love it.”

Here are some examples from my life:

·       My books are not selling in the millions.

o   Say: I love that my books are not selling as I had hoped. I trust that I learned what I needed to in writing them and that when the timing is right, the audience will appear.

·       I quit the practice of law and gave up status and money.

o   Say: I love that I no longer practice law. I trust that I have more important and meaningful work to do, no matter how much it pays.

·       I have only a few good friends.

o   Say: I love that I have only a handful of friends. Its okay that I am not invited to many parties. I trust that I have the perfect number and quality of connections.

·       I am divorced.

o   Say: I love that I am single. I trust that my relationship with my husband had run its course and that I am in a better place. And so are my daughters.

When you accept everything that happened to you and get rid of the idea that you did something wrong or something did not go “right,” you get rid of resistance!

Letting go in this way can actually free you at a deep level because you can now explore what is underneath the regret or embarrassment. For example, you can find out why you still harbour these thoughts and find the root cause. If you bury them, deny them or resist them, they never fully disappear. And thus you suffer low self-love.

When you are truly OKAY with what WHATEVER happened, your self-love returns! As well, you will be able to let go of all the effort you might be making to mask the embarrassment. As you accept yourself more, you no longer have to wear the mask of “everything is fine” because you will find that you actually ARE OKAY with it! This is not just positive thinking; it’s positive being, It’s powerful, so try it!