Practice Self-Love

Ways in which to practice self-love (not self-care), whether it be for your Core Karmic Lesson or Symptom Karmic Lesson.

Transcript

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Hello everyone, I hope you've had a beautiful week. In today's episode, I'm going to give you five tangible ways to practice self-love. This will be great for anyone who has the symptom karmic lesson or core karmic lesson of self-love. We hear all the time that we need to practice self-love or have more self-love. These phrases mean absolutely nothing as they're coming from external egos with their own expectations, value systems, and judgments. But for those of you who feel like you want to give yourself a dose of self-love, here's how to start. The first step is to practice brutal honesty with both other egos and your own ego. If you are consistently, occasionally or intermittently lying to other egos or your own ego to placate feelings, you are doing both parties an injustice. When speaking about other egos, any form of dishonesty, even in the form of white lies, is in actuality making choices for the other. You are trying to control the outcome of the situation and how they are feeling, without belief that they can handle their own emotions. No one can get mad at you for telling them your truth, but they can get mad at you for lying to them. And if you are lying in any form to others, it makes it much more difficult to love yourself because perceived guilt comes into play. With regards to lying to your own ego, it's more so a matter of plastering on false emotions for the benefit of others or not wanting to deal with your own stuff. How do you feel about yourself? Deep down, do you hate yourself? Why? Do you feel insecure? Why? Do you have fears? Why? Take stock of how you truly feel about yourself. Be honest about it with no judgment and sit with the emotion. You can't begin to truly love yourself or even be okay with yourself if your ego is pretending that everything is fine, when deep down the ego dislikes you. An apple may be pretty when you pick it up from the store, but if you take a bite and feel like the core is rotten, all you have is an externally pretty apple. The second step is acceptance. Acceptance is a strange thing because there is a deep belief that if we accept something, there is nothing we can do about the situation, or we assume that if we accept something, it is a form of defeat. In actuality, acceptance is just understanding that what happened happened, and then we pick ourselves up and go from there. For example, if you lost your job for no good reason, you would of course feel bitter, angry, annoyed, worried, anxious, etc. However, the fact that you lost your job still remains, and this is the fact that you need to accept. You lost your job. It happened. Accept the fact. It's in the past. What you do in the future is where you have the control. Do you remain angry and stew in it? Or do you look for a new job that's even better than the one that you had? The same goes for everything within our lives. This is especially important with any form of trauma. Were you abused in any form as a child? It happened. There's nothing that you can do about it because it's in the past. Is it okay that it happened? Absolutely not. But it still happened. Where you have control is how you move forward from this point. Maybe you get therapy. Maybe you spend your free time working with other abused children. Maybe you cry your eyes out and allow yourself to feel pity for yourself and be okay with where you're at. Every choice you make is the correct one for you as long as you are brutally honest with yourself about where you're at and simply accept the fact that certain things happened and there's nothing you can do about them having happened. The third step is forgiveness of the ego. When we are angry about something, we are in actuality angry at ourselves. And it is imperative to forgive the ego if we're going to begin loving ourselves. If you were cheated on, accept the fact that it happened and then let all that anger arise. But think about where the anger stems from. Ten times out of ten, it's because we feel like we allowed ourselves to get cheated on. For example, thoughts like, I should have seen the red flags, or I should have never loved this person so much, or I trusted them and they broke my trust. Flip those sentences around and you have the crux of the matter. I shouldn't have ignored the red flags. I resent that I allowed myself to love them so much. I hate that I trusted them. That's the real reason you have all of this anger, and it's not because the other person did what they did. It's because you're pissed at yourself for making what you now believe to have been the wrong decision. If the anger is from childhood trauma, again, think about how that anger could be stemming from an anger towards self that you are projecting onto your family. For example, if you were neglected as a child and have anger as an adult towards being such, the anger is simply pointed at your family. What you're really angry about is that you had needs as a child that weren't being met, and you're angry that you had those needs in general. But need for human interaction, especially as a child, are biologically correct. So accept that and forgive yourself for consistently having needs when you were surrounded by people who could not meet them. If you're still in the camp of no, I'm mad at the other person, not myself, then this is the step that you may want to spend extra time on. Remember to dig deep, be brutally honest, and accept the things that happen to you. Forgiveness will ultimately come. Forgiveness of self gives you the control. Step four is the realization that there is no duality. As humans with a human ego, we split everything into dualistic attributes: light, dark, right, wrong, good, bad. When you can realize that duality is nothing more than perspective thrust upon you by social norms, other egos' opinions, religious ideologies, or expectations of some sort, you will understand that the concept of right and wrong are innately inaccurate. Just as true and false are not universal terms, since both are simply perceived and felt. With the recognition that duality is simply a term of ego, it is much easier to look at your and others' lives with a different lens and feel differently about them. For example, if your parent abandoned you as a child, never to return, we can outwardly and culturally say that it was wrong. But it wasn't wrong for your parent. It was in fact the right thing for them to do for themselves. If we then call that parent selfish because they should have done what was obligated of them, we continuously see the pattern of dualism. This bias comes from the basic ability to make decisions. Just the choice of A or B implies that the other is incorrect. But when you take out these polarities, you are left with one thing only. And if there's nothing to choose from, then one must accept what that singular thing is. If you stop believing someone was wrong for doing something to you, or stop being righteous regarding you having the right to do something else, you will understand that everything just is. And when everything just is, it's easier to love what remains because there's nothing to compare it to that is better or worse. The fifth step is compassion for your own ego. Once you've gotten to the point where you have been brutally honest with yourself, have accepted what has happened, have forgiven yourself, and realized that there is no such thing as right or wrong, the last step is compassion for the ego. Compassion in the sense that you allow yourself to feel whatever feelings come up about yourself and know that they are absolutely valid. All of your feelings are valid. They are not wrong to feel, they are not right to feel, they are simply valid. At this point, give yourself the space, time, and compassion to just be with yourself. Take care of yourself. Don't worry about anyone else. They can wait or find someone else to help them. You are the only thing you have, and if you aren't taken care of, you can't be of use to anyone or anything, including yourself. Compassion towards the self is the gateway drug towards self-love. It enables you to get whatever needs met that you haven't had before, except now you're the one meeting them. It enables you to feel whatever you need to feel without judgment. It allows you to express yourself to the only person who matters, you. And it allows you to see yourself clearly for everything you are and find even a seed of self-love that you can then stoke into a full-blown fire. You are the universe manifested in physical form, and therefore you are everything and all. What compassion does is tells the ego to be quiet for a moment while you bask in your own universal energy. And it is within that universal energy that true self love emerges because you finally understand that you, as the universe, manifested yourself and everything else, and this meek little human shell you're in is simply trying to contain your awesomeness. Until next week, all of my best and highest vibrations to you.