3 Lessons in Self-Love: Lesson # 1

Hello beautiful Valentines!
 
Yes, I know Valentine’s Day is over but does it mean that we need to stop celebrating love? Whether there is someone in our lives currently, whom we can call our Valentine and celebrate love with or not, we want to remember that we are and will always be our Number One and most important Valentine. So let us continue celebrating the Love that we are in all its beautiful expressions!
 
As you probably have discovered for yourselves by now, all loving relationships begin with healthy, unconditional self-love and appreciation for our perfectly imperfect and ever-evolving selves. If you discovered it a long time ago, and have been practicing being more loving to yourselves – awesome! These quick lessons in self-love with simple tips could serve as good reminders for you. And if you are just discovering the importance and the power of self-love – awesome! The information below can help you do it more easily and consistently.
 
As someone who struggled with loving myself for most of my life, I can feel your pain if you are finding it as difficult as I did. It took me decades to be really able to feel unconditional love for myself - I wish I had some help! As it felt and probably was a life or death situation, I knew intuitively that I couldn’t continue judging and even hating myself and hoping for my life to get better. At times, I even felt that I was slowly dying because the life force in me was so blocked, there wasn’t enough energy to sustain me. After helping many clients for years with similar struggles, I realized just how universal this pain was. So I felt inspired to share the most profound lessons I learned in Self-Love over years. And even if one person learns what they need to learn from this message, all of it will be worth it 😊
 
A lesson in self-love #1:

Not feeling good enough or deserving of love is felt by more people than we can probably imagine. It is likely that we all experience it to some degree. Of course, our rational mind will point to many reasons why it's true for us. But the only truth is that as children we made a safer decision. When we didn't feel loved or validated, or emotionally supported by our parents, there were only two ways we could explain it as little children. Either something was wrong with our parents, in which case our survival could be at risk since at that age we were completely dependent on them. Or something was wrong with us - we were not lovable and therefore our parents didn't show us the love we expected from them.

This was, of course, a safer decision for a child because if something was wrong with her there was something she could do to change it and finally deserve her parents' love. In reality, our parents did their best, often not knowing how to show love to us because they never learned it from their parents. To change it, we want to begin to see ourselves through the eyes of the Divine, the Creator, Universe and see the beauty that has always been there. We were born deserving of love and nothing can change it.
 
Tip #1:

Find a picture of yourself as a baby or at a very young age and keep it where you can see it often. When you catch yourself criticizing yourself or not feeling good enough look at this picture and imagine saying it to this innocent baby. You will probably realize very quickly how wrong it would feel to do that. That unconditionally loveable baby is still very much inside you and is doing its imperfect best to be the best she can be.
 
If you are ready to establish some Self-Love habits, please download a free resource “7 Habits of Self-Love & How to Practice Them” with a Habit Tracker. Feel free to share it with anyone who will benefit from this information and tools.

Next week, I’ll share the second lesson with some great tips and tools to practice it. Until then, treat yourself as you would treat someone you love and care about. 

Let’s celebrate the love that you are!