Building on Self-Love, a little is not enough.

Are you interested in learning new perspectives tools and skills to build your self-love?

We were dropped into this life, dropped into a situation or set of circumstances that shaped us and more or less defined how we act or behave in the world. Depending on our particular situation and the people we were surrounded with, we each learned a way of being, and more importantly, we each decided how to be in the world to get our needs met. 

In a way, it is that simple. Each generation passes on its love or lack of love to the next generation. If we are not loved and supported we tend to pass this on to the next generation, how could it be otherwise? We can only pass on to others who we really are on the inside.

As young children, we copy those around us, and as we are treated becomes the way we treat ourselves. Simply put if you were surrounded by love and kindness you learned to love and be kind to yourself. If you were surrounded by people who did not fully love and support you then you learned to not fully love and support yourself. You learned to adapt to the situation, make the most of it, and find a way to get your needs met.  One of the more common ways is to become a people pleaser, to focus on meeting the needs of others so that they will then notice us and give us the attention we need. Another is to pretend that we do not have needs and become independent and self-sufficient and locked in our own little world.

Thankfully it has become almost fashionable to talk about self-love but it can remain on that level, ie a concept in our heads that once we technically understand we think we have mastered it.

We understand that self-love is not selfish and that it is good to take care of our own needs. We feel hopeful in this new understanding of life, hopeful that things will get easier and that we will feel more of this wonderful nurturing love.

But as Colm O Connor says in his wonderful book “ The Courage to be happy”,  with any new information or a new way of looking at things, a subsequent uplifting feeling may last a few days or a few weeks unless we take real action, otherwise we will revert to our default mode, which for many of us is feeling out in the cold, or unable to access truly feeling warm and loving in our hearts.

We are guilty of wanting a quick fix, wanting something that will alleviate our deeper feelings about ourselves and our lives, we can start a new habit and feel lightness and ease but when something happens to knock us off our center, we easily forget our new habit or worse again tell ourselves that there is no point trying as things are so difficult.

But that is not the reason why we need more skills and guidance,  the main reason is that a very big part of our lives has been unloved and uncared for, for a very long time. We may not even be fully aware of it or we may be naturally afraid to look there. This is the truth of the matter and it takes more than just being kind to ourselves to address this.

Kindness is a great starting place but we need to build up a whole new way of being with ourselves and being in this world. The key word here is building – building a new relationship with yourself and with the world, it takes patience and most of all willingness to move to a happier place in your life.

There is much to be optimistic about and to look forward to in our journey towards deeper self-love, are you open to loving yourself more?