Self-Love: The Key To Personal Liberation

They say, the most difficult thing to do is to love one’s self. In my experience, this is true.

What does self-love mean, and why is it so difficult?

Self-love:

• Self-love is to be honest with one’s self first and foremost. Even if you choose not to be honest with others at any given moment.

• To appreciate and accept yourself as you are: to give yourself permission to be exactly what you really want to be.

• To care for yourself enough to live your life according to your own will and not to the demands and expectations of others.

• To validate and approve of yourself, your choices, your desires, your unique self-expression, no matter what the rest of the world thinks.

• To love yourself enough to trust yourself.

• To accept your ‘wayward’ emotions without judgment.

I don’t know if you agree about the difficulty of loving one’s self. I have explored and struggled with this thing called self-love for some time, and it felt like I was challenging the whole world with its agreed upon belief system which demands that we must put others first before ourselves, so that we don’t appear selfish by catering first to our needs before the needs of others. The result of this hypocritical belief is that while we may appear generous, kind and strong on the outside, we may actually be suffering, tormented and fragile inside because we are too scared to show our true feelings, to express our true desires, and live authentic lives.

If we love ourselves enough to give ourselves the permission to be who we are, it will be easier for us to permit others to be who they are. As we accept our idiosyncrasies, our mistakes, our nonstandard or non-mainstream desires, we will find ourselves more understanding and permissive of others’ mistakes and idiosyncrasies. If we love ourselves enough not to beat ourselves up to conform to some established standard of normality or morals, we would not also be as critical and judgmental of others who we think are not measuring up to such social standards.

It is true that, at the core, the way we treat ourselves (consciously and, mostly, unconsciously) is the way we treat others. It is when we are cruel and exacting of ourselves (even if we don’t know or admit it) that we also become cruel and exacting of others.

So when we fully love ourselves for who we are, we set ourselves free. We let ourselves off the hook. And simultaneously, we set others free. For it is in understanding and acknowledging our own complexities, our strengths and weaknesses, our fears and insecurities that we truly come to develop genuine understanding and sympathy for others.

Money Is Power

Honest. Admit it. Whether we like it or not, money is power.

We may be strongly resistant to the thought that our sense of self-worth could be tied to how much money we have, but having very little or no money at all does significantly affect our level of self-confidence. For so-called conscious “spiritual workers”, especially, it is particularly difficult and embarrassing to admit this to oneself, since we loathe the thought that our value and confidence level could be affected by a mere “material” thing, such as money.

However, rather than to go on continually denying (as many Light Workers do) that our feelings are not a bit affected by our financial circumstances, it serves us to understand our confused or ambivalent relationship to money, so that we may find peace with it.

The first step is to see money for what it really is.

Money is energy. Energy is power. Money is power.

Energy, money, power – they all go through cycles of surges and declines. And just like the ebb and flow of the ocean tides, our emotions are naturally affected by the same energetic movements – the ebb and flow of money in our experience.

So there is really nothing to be embarrassed about when our moods and self-confidence is dampened by the ebb in our finances. It is but natural that we don’t feel so confident and energized when money energy is on the low, as it is natural to feel perky and confident when money energy is on the flow.

However, although we can’t help but feel dispirited when we are face to face with financial ebb, we can always find a way to use the experience to our advantage.

In my next blog post, I’d like to share some of the interesting things I learned when I didn’t have money.