Cultivating Self Love
As a student of relationships in general, I have to agree with the old adage: You can’t love others if you don’t love yourself.
Thus, cultivating healthy relationships begins with improving relationship to self, in other words: self-love.
Here are some meditations on self love, exploring dimensions of it that might not be immediately obvious. Here’s to loving yourself more!
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Finding ways to do more of what you love, and less of what you don’t love, is a form of self love
Good nutrition is self love
Focusing on your health (including seeing health care providers regularly) is a form of self love
Releasing the armor around your heart that is held there as the result of old wounds, is a form of self love
Working to be a mindful parent is a form of self love, because part of good parenting is learning and understanding more about what your own parents did and why, and helps release old trauma
Modeling self love to your kids is a form of self love
Adoring your own body, and working out or doing other things that increase your attraction for your body, is a form of self love
It’s a form of self love for men like me who feel a little weird about being attracted to their own male body, to not be worried about that
Reducing your anxiety is a form of self love
Learning spiritual practices like meditation, and the gaining of spiritual wisdom, is a form of self love and is one way to reduce anxiety
Learning to grieve, and finding regular time to do so, is a form of self love
It’s a form of self love to recognize that the desire to repeat peak experiences (doing whatever it is that gets you high, over and over) is totally natural, but that doing so all the time diminishes your ability to have peak experiences, because our bodies and psyches can only experience a certain level of “peakness,” and a constant stream of peaks becomes flat ground
It’s a form of self love to focus on “deepening” your experiences, and carry the resulting new consciousness forward into everyday life
Taking time and prioritizing “dates” with yourself, acknowledging what you like and giving it to yourself, is a form of self love, and will help you experience a higher level of self-love!
It’s a form of self love to keep a journal
It’s a form of self love to ask the land that you are sitting on if it loves you, then waiting to sense what comes up in your awareness
It’s a form of self love to think about what you would add to this list
