Your greatest responsibility is to love yourself and know you are enough.
Unknown
There are four main categories of love:
- Eros: Romantic Love
- Philia: Friendship Love
- Storge: Family Love
- Agape: Unconditional Love
But none of this is possible without: Philautia: Self love
So, let’s talk about self-love.
It’s extremely difficult to have self-love when you get let the media in through your front door.
There are so many “reality” shows attempting to depict what your world “should” look like; but as with social media, “realistic” quickly becomes contorted and twisted up.
We begin to believe what we see on the screen or in magazines to be undoctored (untouched, unscripted, unfluffed).
How can you feel good about yourself as a mom if all you have are two kids, but the woman you see on the screen has four, runs her own business, and started a non-profit?
How can you feel good about who you are if the media shows you what it means to be masculine and have it all together, if all you feel are real and raw feelings of anger, resentment, and suppressed pain?
We look for love in all the wrong places: we ask our partners to tell us how valuable we are, we ask our bosses to validate our worth, we ask strangers to affirm how attractive we are…
But it’s an illusion that you’ll be chasing for a really long time if you’re searching for love.
Why? Because love isn’t something you can run out of, if it’s what you’re made of.
You’re not just a part of the Universe, you are the Universe. You’re a drop of the ocean, but removing you from the ocean doesn’t make you any less of what you are – the ocean.
So back to what I was saying: you can’t have love for your kids, love for your partner, or love for your friends, if you have no love for yourself.
So work on self-love:
- Put it into your schedule now: to sit in silence. It’s only when you can learn to silence your headspace that you can hear your heart space. Once you hear it, heed it!
- Take a look in the mirror, stark-ass naked. Review every part of you: the wrinkles, the fat rolls, the moles – all of it. As you review each part that is “bad,” consider all the ways in which others have told you you were bad. So many different life experiences will begin to crop up – because your Unconscious stores every life experience in your body. The important part? Remind the inner-child how courageous (s)he was to go through those experiences. Learn from each experience, grow from each memory, and make every part of you – well, a part of you.
- Go out in nature. Nature is the only place you’ll truly see what AGAPE/Unconditional Love means. When you begin to see how connected everything is to everything else (and you become part of that interconnected web), you’ll begin to understand what kind of God, Creator, or Source needed to have existed to create such beauty; and how an Infinite Intelligence and Source exists now to keep it all spinning.
I challenge you to schedule all three things this week; and come back to tell me how much changes below.
Live with Intention. Inspire with Love.