Tuesday, July 28, 2009

HOW DO YOU LOVE YOURSELF?

As someone who has been through a LOT of negative things, I have been on a seemingly never ending quest to find healing and wholeness. One message that I have heard before but that the universe has been screaming of late is to love yourself, to respect yourself and other will respect you. This seems to especially apply in everyone's manuals about how to find that special someone. Love, yourself, have morals, standards, etc. Play by the rules and everything will go okay. You will attract what you are so be good to yourself and you will attract that.

My question then: Is simply this? What is the process of loving on oneself? How do you love yourself? is there a golden rule book or play book that says, do x, y and z and you will love yourself? Where are the step-by-step directions or the accounts of their inner journeys?

It is not that I don't agree, it is that I am genuinely asking for the people like me who have been hurt and abused so much at times that it is hard to even conceptualise it. For with every effort you do make you have to contend first off with yourself...with the voices saying in your head who do you think you are, the fear of what the other person will think of you, if and when you set boundaries, the fear of being alone.Then you have to contend with others as well..


It is something that is easy to say but long and arduous to do. If you have grown up in a great childhood and a decent adolescence then great, you have a foundation. What about those of us who haven't had it so great? What is a frame of reference to begin?And when do you know that you have arrived?

If all those people who advocate loving yourself or better yet if someone who has had a less than perfect start has completed the journey, can you give the rest of us a holler and some steps to follow instead of just saying to love yourself and looking down on us poor mortals who are struggling? Some tips anyone? And please...... no cliches......

1 comment:

Max Reddick said...

Again, I likes. Very honest, very heartfelt. This is what I have learned over the course of my life.

Everyone has been abused in someway over the course of their lifetime, and everyone has been hurt over the course of their lifetime. But what really counts is how you deal with that abuse, how you deal with that hurt.

And listen to those voices in your head. No one knows you like you do, and no one knows what you feel in your heart like you do. So follow your head, and follow your heart, and shut out those outside voices who only have their interests in mind.