The relationship we have with ourselves determines the quality of every other relationship in our lives.
If you think something is missing in your life, it is probably you.
–Robert Holden
Self-love is the process of knowing yourself, connecting with your inner self, overcoming the self-limiting beliefs, letting go of everything that doesn’t serve you, and falling in love with your- self. Being in love with yourself for who you are!
It is important to love ourselves because the relationship we have with ourselves determines the quality of every other relationship in our life. Only when we are in a loving relationship with ourselves can we reflect that love in other areas of our life. I have learnt this the super hard way and that’s what I share in my book Come Alive.
All of us look for love and happiness in the wrong places like status, pleasure, addiction, and more. No one looks for it in the right place. And I did too, as these are the beliefs created while growing up, in school and university. All we were taught is that our materialistic achievements are considered as success in this world. What about our internal happiness and spiritual growth, why are there no metrics on those?
I have lived with the feeling that something was missing since I was a little girl. Being born in a privileged home there was never anything missing however the feeling didn’t stop until I finally met me, fell in love with myself, and came alive. The awareness came with a series of incidents and reflections. And as soon as I started to focus on me, my transformation started. My journey of achieving a fulfilling life is based on five phase process that I share below
1. Knowing yourself
Why is it important to know ourselves?
Can you imagine living with someone you don’t know? Imagine being with a companion you don’t know and have no inclination to do so. How would that feel? Walking life with a stranger with no idea what’s inside his/her mind, heart, and soul. We build relationships with people by starting to know them and spending time with them; the more time we spend with them, the stronger our relationships get and we also build friendships for life. So this brings us to the question, how strong is our relationship with ourself? What are we doing to spend time with ourselves and know ourselves? There are many ways to know ourselves and I use the few below to know myself and stay connected to my self 1. Silence and meditation2. Journaling 3. Reading and learning 4. Exercise
2. Identifying who I am
Beliefs create feelings. Beliefs are created based on our experiences or the experiences and comments of family members either in our growing years or even earlier. And since the subconscious mind is absorbing and open till age seven, they straight go to the subconscious mind. And as we know the subconscious mind is about 95 percent of our brain. In this step, we will go deeper to understand how beliefs are created and how can we identify the programmes related to those beliefs. We will address ques- tions like, what do I feel most of the time? Why do I feel the way I feel? What are the negative feelings in me? What makes me feel sad?
3. Dissolving the beliefs
To overcome and change beliefs is the major part of the process. Once feelings and beliefs (our programming) have been identified, we need to start working on them from the inside. We need guidance, coaching, healing, discipline and routine (meditation, reading, journaling, gratitude, affirmations, and exercise) to start overcoming them. It is an inside job and needs your commitment.
4. Letting go
Once the above three processes are clear and followed, there will be a lot of things that you will need to let go of. Through tools we can start letting go of all the things that don’t serve us, which will include things, people, activities, and thoughts. Your utmost responsibility is to serve yourself, and hence everything else can be allowed to let go.
5. Being in love
Once you have let go, you will feel peace. And here I will express how it feels to be in love with yourself through accepting, appreciating, and nurturing ourselves. When we start living and serving from within with intention and con- sciously, we start to grow into becoming our best version and falling in love with ourselves for who we are. Our unlimited power emerges, the universe supports us, and we feel it!
The five-phase process will serve you to start your transformation.
