Before you begin this process, first ask yourself if there’s anything you don’t love about yourself. Is it some mental character flaw that seems to keep popping up in your relationships? Perhaps it’s some part of your body that you just can’t accept, let alone LOVE!
If there are things (and there’ll probably be at least one thing), let yourself acknowledge whatever it is about yourself that you haven’t found a way to love yet and then put this part of you aside for a few moments.
Over the years, for many of us, we are told and experience a variety of loves expressions and, if we’re able and fortunate enough, we also are interested in sharing what we feel or know as love with others – often times forgetting about or simply taking for granted the sharing of love with ourselves, for just ourselves.
Loving yourself can look like the self care examples we see or hear about, and are often helpful (if we implement them) in assisting us to pay some attention to ourselves and our needs. More often, it seems, the prescribed self care acts that we think will be the panacea to what ails us is more like a buffet of tasty looking items that can tempt us and we can load up on for a special occasion only to not visit again for months.
This is the difference between self care and loving yourself.
Loving yourself is a daily gift that can look any way you want (and usually doesn’t entail tangible accessories) and this is where you can begin.
What does it mean to you to love yourself? Write it down here – there’ll always be space in these pages for your reflections. Once you’ve thought on this a bit and noted (yes, write this stuff down!) what loving yourself means, look at what you’ve written and see if you’ve included any action items or verbal cues around this process. If there are some, or even just one then let that be your focus for today. If there are none then take a few more minutes to consider what you’ve written to determine if there’s a way to tease out an action item you can use today. If not, then be with what you’ve written, accepting that you do know what it means to love yourself…in any way that’s good for you.
TimeSpaceOne 