By Cason Lehman

We hear the term “self -love” being used more and more these days.  There is a major trend happening around the globe to look inward, especially in the last year with the worldwide lockdowns and everyone having more and more time away from others.

To me, now more than ever, is the perfect time to sharpen the skills of self-appreciation in the comforts of our own home. So, with the spotlight directly on “self-love,” what the heck does it mean and how can we practice it properly?

To fully understand self-love, we must begin with consistency. 

Whether we are trying to simply love ourselves more, trying to lose 20 pounds, optimize our sleep, enjoy our spouse to greater lengths, grow in our faith, we must be consistent in our action(s) to reach that specific goal. Consistency is key in change, creation, or anything we want to materialize in our life.

In order to generate love for our self, we must have a consistent practice of self- love and here is how to do it.

Quite simply, self-love is turning our limiting beliefs and emotions into elevated states of love, joy and bliss.  It is estimated that 70% of our life is spent living in stress.  And stress is living in lower, fear-based emotions such as: worry, doubt, guilt, jealously, comparison, anxiousness, regret, rushing/racing to get things done, etc. Can you connect with the difference between the two?

Now, let’s jump a layer deeper into what we are personally thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking on a moment to moment basis….especially when we are alone. This takes a lot of self-awareness of our subconscious, habitual programs.

So how do we do this?

Sit down and settle your body down.  Relax and take some deep breaths.  Think about what things you do during the day that you no longer want to do.  If you’re rocking and rolling in that regard perhaps you want to improve in a certain part of  your life. 

Here are some examples to help to get your wheels turning;

• What areas did you speed through too quickly with your spouse, partner, kids, co-worker today? What could you have done differently to be more “present” in that scenario?

• What situation did you show more emotion than you should have? What about less?

• Was there a situation that made you feel insecure?

• Was there a situation that made you feel proud or empowered today?

• What health opportunities did you take advantage of today? Which did you miss?

That is a lot to consider of course, but write down that one thing that really charges you up that you want to change, stop doing or start doing.  Write down whatever comes to your mind and charges you up emotionally. Write it down!

Good job!

Now in order to change this thing, we are going to have to face the discomfort of the emotions that arise from us either doing this thing that we do not want to do or avoiding the thing that we know we should be doing/start doing.  This is the tough part, but push through! You got this!

Ok, so now write down the emotion that comes up for you when you bring up that thing you want to change in your life.  Examples of emotions that might arise would be: fear, doubt, worry, guilt, unworthiness, unsafe, etc.

Write down the emotion that stands in the way of you making that choice to change.  Feel the charge of it.

Great work!

Now you know exactly or at least more specifically what it is you want to change.  Directly connected to this is the emotion that stands in your way.  You know the thought and the emotion.  This is self-love!  You are doing the work to understand yourself  better.

When we do this properly and sit with the thing we are avoiding to change and then we become aware of the real emotions that this thing brings up we begin to integrate those old emotions.  This is again self – love because we are doing the hard work to change our self. 

As we do this and admit and integrate who we have been to ourselves and to God, we now have a release of available energy to use for creation.  There is now available energy for us to use with our own free will.

So now that we have available energy this means we must have a clear vision of what we desire in order to use this availability of energy to create a new future. You see, now that we are not giving our energy and attention to the aforementioned lower emotion, we can now start giving our energy to a future that we desire to create.

To do this properly we have to start getting clear on what we want.  If we want to change something in our life, we must know what it is exactly that we want. Another way to say it is we need to have a goal or a vision that is very clear.

Some examples might be : losing weight, quitting sugar, eating more vegetables, being nice to people, saying no when we want to say no, slowing our self down and meditating, feeling stronger, having more energy.

Now we have a purpose that inspires us and drives us to practice self-love even more.  This drives us to feel love for ourselves for doing the work to change.  It’s a never ending cycle.

We now have awareness of what we were doing and why we doing it.  We have sat with the awkwardness of avoidance of the thing we want to quit, change or start.  We have let the lower emotions that have kept us stuck go and we know what we want. 

Now we can consistently practice doing the work of loving our self. This is as simple as being aware of what we do not want and creating and putting energy on what we do want.