SELF LOVE: THE KEY TO ENLIGHTENMENT
Love is a powerful word! Love is a feeling, an emotion unique to each one of us, the driving force of the cosmos. Love is power, love is protection, love is divine, love is me.
And before I can share my love with all, I must learn to love myself, take care of myself, provide myself with all beautiful creations. But how do I start exploring self-love when I have been conditioned to constantly judge myself. Appreciating oneself doesn’t necessarily mean Narcism, if appreciation comes from the fullness of love, narcissism is showing itself from a deep sense of lack of self-love and constantly comparing ourselves with others.
In this article, I try to convince you to adopt some approaches which help you to understand and feel the meaning of loving yourself completely and wholly.
1. AFFIRMATION
If only we could measure the power of words, we would realize how powerful they are. Words are energetic beings that make your day or kill it, I remember someone telling me you have a beautiful smile and the whole week I couldn’t stop smiling. Words have the power to uplift you. Repeating positive words like a mantra is the affirmation. There is a saying “fake it, till you make it”, affirmations train your mind how to become more accepting of the beauty that lies within you.
“They wore their strange beauty like war paint.”
― Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
For example, you can repeat this affirmation every morning “ I love myself, all that I am, is Love. I am beautiful, kind, compassionate. I am all abundance”. And you will start to notice a change in how you feel a lot more accepting of who you are and further generating a chain of positivity in your daily life. It is surprising how playing affirmation can make us healthy, wealthy, and melodiously joyful.
When we come on Earth we sign an agreement to forget who we are and therefore forget our true brilliance. Well, the purpose of coming and forgetting our sufficiency, is part of another expedition. An expedition to be kind to ourselves.
2. YOU ARE YOUR PRIORITY
When flying through an airplane we see the plane’s air hostess going through safety measures announcement repeating “in case of emergency when the oxygen mask above your seat falls due to air oxygen shortage, then please first put the mask on your mouth first and then take the initiative to save your favorite child or co-passenger”.
In real life, we face similar situations. We live in a cage of commitments, responsibilities, sooner or later they will consume us.
“Love your rage, not your cage.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
Dear folks, now breakthrough this prison, prioritize yourself as the sole commitment.
3. FILL UP YOUR EMPTY CUP
Human needs can outnumber humans. It is impossible for us to completely satisfy each other’s wants or “Till death do us apart”. Though I am not very sure that even if we die for each other will we be able to fully satisfy each other. Relationships break down not because we fall out of love, but because we are unable to fulfill each other’s requirements. When we come together we offer each other what all we have, including love. And when we are empty from inside, devoid of self-love, we find it challenging to offer and receive love.
“Smile is the beginning of Love”
-Mother Teresa
Therefore it is essential to fill up your empty cup with love and then let your overflowing cup of love fill those around you.
4. ASK YOURSELF QUESTIONS
Human society runs on judgment. Why a human is only measurable when she is better than her fellow beings. The sufficiency of one person becomes the inefficiency of the other. Not everyone has all talents but each one has got some talent. But when we start measuring everything with a unilateral approach gives a shortsighted blur vision and puts a limit on the creativity of the human race. Sitting on your office chair, looking at the clock, we tell ourselves ‘OK! Only a few hours or minutes left. Well 360 seconds, 365days went by. Are we too old to try new things or too young to pursue the risky endeavor?
“All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi
The answer demands a self-introspection of what is that you want from life. Is there more to it? Few dangerous questions can throw you off balance, enough to leave you miserable for days. Great! Keep doing it. Ask and you shall seek.
“Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi
5. APPRECIATE YOURSELF
We living and working in a world designed around reward or penalty. Our schools, games, factories, even pleasure play with this concept. The choice is between right or wrong, like or dislike, love or hate, a shuffling between two poles. But the universe is more than two poles, so are you, even psychology has moved from Bipolarism to multiple personality disorder.
“You say freak, I say unique.”
― Christian Baloga
Taking a guess, I assume maybe it is coming from ego, ego works to keep us safe and sound.
“Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Night in Lisbon
A limited perspective can never generate curiosity or even risk, for both are meant to challenge the idea of limits. It’s funny how when we are unable to understand people, emotions surrounding us we either shut them or label them weird, strange, or non-suitable. Forgetting the concept of uniqueness is forever present within us, within the universe.
“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
― Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers
I use to envy girls who would receive dozens of love letters, the only things which I ever got in dozens were bananas and eggs. Being the hopeful yet the hopeless woman I am, I waited and waited. Weeks turned into months and months into years but no sign of a love letter near. One day I came across this quote by Agha Shahid Ali “The world is full of paper write to me” and magically grabbed a pen-paper, composing my first love letter to me. I felt a strange sensation like when your crush says Hi to you for the first time and inside, your little heart is playing the firecracker show.
“Everything I do is a love letter addressed to you.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage
“A real love letter is made of insight, understanding, and compassion. Otherwise, it’s not a love letter. A true love letter can produce a transformation in the other person, and therefore in
the world. But before it produces a transformation in the other person, it has to produce a transformation within us. Some letters may take the whole of our lifetime to write.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh
Love teaches us to value our own kind. When you find yourself beautiful, the world around will become intoxicated with your beauty. So remember to write a love letter to yourself. Writing can produce healing, helps you to observe your feelings of pain, sorrow, loneliness, happiness, joy. Gives an insight to you inside you. It is required to know where we stand, to know where we want to go. Appreciating yourself irrespective of what anybody thinks about you. Soon you will begin experiencing a shift in your surrounding as a result of your thinking.
6. PRACTICE GRATITUDE
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi
With appreciation will come gratitude. Great + Attitude = Gratitude
Being thankful, to the cosmos for things you are grateful, is sending a message of “I Appreciate”. When we appreciate, the universe gives us more and more. The universe is a reflection of our thoughts, emotions. It runs on our feelings, manifesting, creating the reality around us. Thus, observing those feelings and keeping a check on them is an essential element for universal energy to create. Feelings are in a flow state, like the Brooke taking curves, rising through, falling a great fall. What they demand is not control but a command. Indulging in self-love can certainly teach you, how love commands and expand our existence.
And yes, Self-Love is the enlightenment, that you are seeking, and it is seeking you too.
