Read part one: PHYSICAL SELF LOVE

Part two:

SELF LOVE

In our last blog, we discussed physical self love which includes eating whole foods, getting enough rest and relaxation, self care, taking care of our finances and creating a peaceful home in which to inhabit and give oneself space to breathe. In part two we are taking a look at mental, emotional and spiritual Self Love.

MENTAL, EMOTIONAL AND SPIRITUAL SELF LOVE

It is way more difficult to quantify what spiritual self love is because we cannot see, hear, taste, smell or touch it. We can only experience it and it is through our healthy mental and emotional states that we can access our spiritual awareness and experience this spiritual love. Our innate being already loves itself but so often in our fast paced lives where we have little time to self reflect, we have lost touch with our own inner being.

Our mind and emotions are deeply connected to one another. So, just how do we love ourselves at the emotional and mental levels?

Meditation

Meditation is not only about sitting still and doing nothing while we quiet the mind. That is just one type of meditation and is a wonderful and useful practise. Sitting meditation can certainly bring us into a greater awareness of our deeper selves. It can help us to become calm and peaceful so that we react less and are able to move into the world from a more thoughtful space. Meditation is about awareness. But what are we becoming aware of? We are becoming aware of our own consciousness and connecting our consciousness to the universal stream of consciousness. We become connected to ourselves emotionally and mentally. Not only are we able to gauge where we are at emotionally but we are actually able to direct our feelings and emotions. Successfully loving ourselves comes down to total awareness of our thoughts and feelings. When we become aware of our thoughts and feelings, we are able to direct them into the direction that brings us most inner peace.

Inner peace is when we are living our lives deliberately. Living deliberately takes alignment with our inner being. Our inner being always holds our highest potential and brings with it inspiration to act in a self loving way. If we are at the mercy of our negative emotions, we are still creating our reality, but we are doing it unconsciously and our outer reality, our physical manifestations mirror our negative emotions.

Mental awareness

One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves as human beings is to become aware of our thoughts. As soon as awareness arises in us, we begin to make the connection between our thoughts and our emotions. Our thoughts literally tell us what we are feeling and it is through our thoughts that we can change what we are feeling.

As human beings, we have already had the full spectrum of feelings. We know sadness, happiness, love, jealousy, loneliness, depression, fear, anger, shame, distrust and joy. And we know the subtle feelings in-between that we cannot name and and do not understand intellectually. We know when we are feeling something that we do not want to feel and because we know the full spectrum of feelings, we can call into feeling, any emotion that we want to feel. If we are depressed, then perhaps joy is not the first emotion we can call, perhaps a more appropriate feeling than depressed might be anger. Anger may bring relief as we realise that anger has a place in our emotional life. Anger draws boundaries when we feel abused, unloved or uncared for and even when we are lacking self love. We may blame others, but really we can no longer blame others for our own feelings. Once we have these boundaries in place we can begin simple self loving practices until we settle into a more peaceful place. We can practice physical self love. Then perhaps we can reach for a more positive feeling, one of trust where we not only begin to trust others again, but we begin truly trusting ourselves. We say no to emotions, activities and thoughts that do not serve us and we begin to love ourselves by choosing thoughts and feelings that we really want in our lives.

Manifestation

By the time manifestations appear in our lives, we have already been practicing the feelings and emotions that correspond to the reality that we have been experiencing for some time. We have developed beliefs around our habitual thoughts and feelings. We are likely unconscious that what we believe is how the world appears to us. We might have an unconscious or even conscious belief for example that “nobody loves me”, and then time and time again we prove to ourselves through our manifestations that we are unloveable. We may have a belief that making money is easy and the proof will be that we will always make money easily.

Radical Self Love

Radical self love means to pay attention to our thoughts, feelings and our natural ability to align with our inner being. It means that we are able to direct our lives into the lives of our dreams. Human beings are amazing, we can be, do and have anything we want. When we realise that the only thing that is stopping us from being and doing and having anything we want is our own beliefs, then we can begin to unravel our beliefs. Beliefs hold us back. They keep us stuck in a paradigm that does not necessarily work for us and as human beings we are able to to continuously introspect and question our beliefs. Truly loving ourselves brings us into alignment with our deepest truths and when we are aligned, we can experience true spiritual self love.