SH Series (1): 101 ways to have True Love in Your Life (Part 1)
A page in the diary "Accept, Adapt and Appreciate: How?"
Written by nw4m Jun 19 2008 12:45 PM
Welcome, friends!
This is the new self-help series corner started for this week or month by your friendly neighbourhood guy, nw4m.
Let me go straight on without further ado.
Love Yourself (Chp 1, pg 6)
Loving yourself is of the utmost importance. If you don't know how to love yourself, you won't know how or how well to treat others, and you may have problems with what we call boundaries.
Instead of having clarity, you'll stumble through swamps of low self-esteem and thickets of self-loathing that will derail you in your efforts to "love others as yourself."
In order to love yourself, you must first understand that self-love isn't narcissism. Nor is it egotism, self-righteousness, excessive self-involvement, stubborness, conceit, or greed, all of which have given real self-love a bad name.
Rather, it is the solid internal grounding from which you can become your most authentic self.
Learning to love yourself is a process. For when you really learn to love yourself, you'll no longer have to work at it every minute.
By continually reminding yourself of how important you are, how important loving yourself is, you will eventually arrive at the place where self-compassion comes almost automatically.
From the steady practice of a gentle unconditional care of yourself, you will be able to reach out to others with exquisite generosity and a bounteous open heart.
In time you will see that self-love is also a spiritual matter.
It's not just learning to treat yourself better, it's also learning to see and feel yourself as one of the threads in the vast human shawl, as deeply, indeed, unconditionally received by a caring and beautifully ordered universe.
It is when you embrace this connection that you can truly love yourself.
This true, felt sense of yourself as a precious part of the universe is really the ultimate source from which you can love others.
Begin this beautiful, powerful journey to yourself by taking a single step of caring for yourself today.
For you, what would that step be?
Write it down on a piece of paper. Paste it up on your bathroom mirror and then take it!
Author: Daphne Rose Kingma, is a psychotherapist who has counselled couples and individuals to a deeper understanding and improvement of their relationship for more than 25 years.
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Stay tuned, more coming up! - nw4m =)