Love Yourself More: Why and How

Self-love is a deeply powerful and healing force, yet it is too often overlooked as an indulgence or ego trip. But in fact, self love is just the opposite — it's necessary to healing the ego, transcending the self, and experiencing the deeper aspects of life.

Love is here now. Do you have the willfulness and willingness to receive it? I made this video series to make it a little easier for all of us. Part 1 covers some practical reasons to love yourself right now:

Maybe you're already "sold" on the importance of self-love. The question is just, "how?" In the next video, I share 3 easy practices for self-love: two meditations, an encouragement to love yourself enough to grow beyond your comfort zone.

You might struggle with self-love due to a deep feeling of unworthiness. This is a common experience, especially in our shame-based culture. The other videos on the Self Liberators YouTube channel provide tools to heal painful memories and difficult emotions.

One essential emotion that I haven't covered yet is shame. In my experience, shame can’t really be “healed” in the child or teenager (or our adult lives) the same way most issues can because it didn’t come from INSIDE us, it was dumped on us by others, or used to manipulate. So in a sense, it must be given back because it wasn't ours to begin with.

My preferred meditation for working with shame is one where I imagine giving the shame back to the people who dumped it on me - visualizing myself handing them back a bag of worms and dirt and shit and fire and whatever else I can imagine. Whoever dumped it on you probably had it dumped on them by someone else who had it dumped on them, stretching back for generations. It’s a very powerful choice to break the cycle. If you want to go a level deeper, you can have compassion for the person who dumped it on you, and recognize that they're coming from a place of constriction and pain.

Note that shame is different than remorse, which comes genuinely from within. Once remorse is genuinely there, suddenly that part of oneself becomes a lot easier to love.

Also see the previous post, "How much love can you let yourself receive?"