6 Practical Reasons to Embrace Self Love – Part II
In Part I of this series, I discussed the importance of self-love for living well and finding true love. Self-love allows you to learn about yourself and live your truth, live the life you want right now without waiting for anyone else to fulfill your needs, and to recognize true love in the form of a romantic partner when it comes along.
In this post, I’ll focus on the non-romantic, and even more important benefits of self-love, including taking responsibility for who we are and how we feel. There are very basic and practical reasons to love yourself. Here they are:
4. Integrating the self: For cognitive and spiritual wellness, it’s important to spend time with yourself and figure out how to integrate the different aspects of yourself. For instance, nurturing your inner child and adult self, your left and right brain, and your self-talk and self-confidence through affirmations and meditation. I do my best to allocate time for playful activities, art, analytical work, creative cooking, brain balance exercises, meditation, and mindfulness activities to honor the many different aspects of my mind and being. This takes time, and is an investment that pays off in my career, productivity, and happiness. In fact, I accomplish much more work now in less time – more so than ever before in my life – next week, read about how I wrote a book in one day – the outline and summary took two hours, and the book, five hours. How do you integrate your whole being?
5. Embracing physical wellness: Through exercise and diet, you can practice treating your body right. This way, you will be in optimal shape, free of lifestyle diseases, and able to enjoy your life to the fullest each day. The way I think about it is this: I love myself enough not to put dead animals and their trauma, antibiotics, hormones, and toxins into my body, or to support their killing in the first place, which threatens our very life support system. I love myself enough to spare my brain and cut the negative effects of gluten. I love myself enough to walk, dance, and lift weights. I call a friend of mine the organic police, because he ensures all his foods, cleaning supplies, and other products are organic. How do you practice self-love in terms of what you put into your body, and how (much) you exercise? Of course, diet and exercise have benefits for your mind too.
6. Setting better boundaries: By knowing what you’re worth, having self-respect, and being confident in who you truly are, which self-love helps you achieve, you can quickly and effectively discern who is treating you right and who is not. For example, if you have a healthy sense of who you are and love yourself unconditionally, you will have compassion for yourself. This compassion will set the bar and you will not allow others to treat you unfairly. You will have set an example for how to respect yourself, and you will maintain strong boundaries to ensure only those who meet that example are in your personal and professional circles. I have learned this lesson painfully by doing hundreds of hours of work for free, and not being appreciated for my skills and generosity. Now, I attract clients who understand my worth and remind me about it when I forget because I’m prioritizing them. Old habits die hard, but practice means continuous improvement!
Self-love is a lifetime of learning, so it’s important to get back up and keep going when you fall off the wagon. I specialize in habit change, and constantly experiment on myself. Sometimes, a buddy can be so helpful. Recently, I was inspired by a friend to get back into a proper weights regimen; injury and travel had been excuses for not resuming it sooner. Like any habit change, self-love can take time, but it will reward you richly with a strong sense of self, wellness in mind and body, and the potential to attract true love.
Let me know if you agree or disagree with my assessments about self-love, have questions. If you’d like to talk further about any of these reasons or something else that’s on your mind, drop me a contact request. And, stay tuned for our latest book, entitled, The Path to Romantic Success: What You Won’t Learn in School or at Home about Finding True Love, launching next week!
As part of a practice of self-love, it’s important to eat a healthy diet to nourish mind and body, like this feisty vegan and gluten-free noodle dish with tomato-coconut sauce I made the other day.