Self-Love – an old concept, but a vital one

 

 

 

 

Recently I’ve been receiving the message again and again in different guises about how important self-love is.  I’ve found it to be such a hackneyed phrase that it’s become easy to ignore over the years. Louise Hay who wrote ‘You can Heal Your Life’ was probably the first to push the message to the forefront, and even in the EFT set up we make the statement that ‘I love and accept myself.’

So I knew it was important, but a part of me never really took it to heart, accepted what it meant or how it feels to truly live that phrase. However certain things I’ve read and watched recently have really put together why it is so vital.

I’ve been reading a great blog by Jeannette Maw who is a coach working predominantly with the Law of Attraction. The shortcut explanation to this law is that our thoughts and feelings attract our experiences, so being deliberate and conscious of the ‘vibes’ we send out can alter the reality we encounter.

Many may have met this message in the film or book ‘The Secret’, and it certainly is an empowering one if we can take can take it on board. In the same way, our actions such as how we treat others, are reflected back to us, and for me doing the right thing where others were concerned was the part of the message that I acted on primarily.  But I think it is very often easy to overlook that we also need to do the right thing in terms of being kind and loving to ourselves.

Jeanette was asked on her blog why she thought she personally had found such success in her business when others using her same methods had not, and she said she believed the key was self-love. She explained that if we don’t send feelings of love to ourselves, we send out very mixed messages about what we believe our worth to be, and in this way we can block or impede the good that might otherwise come our way.

Our level of self-love also affects how others are likely to treat us. There is a great phrase, “There are no victims, only volunteers.” While we cannot always control others’ actions, we can have a large say in whether we agree to allow them to impact on our own sense of worth.

When we are in a place of self-love, it is much harder for anyone’s treatment to negatively impact the way we feel about ourselves. We also tend to be so much less reactive and defensive when we are flowing love to ourselves, because poor treatment simply does not resonate internally with us anymore. Therefore disputes and arguments do not come up as often, as we do not feel the need to defend our self-worth when it is challenged externally.

The other place I found this idea echoed was in the accounts of those who have been through near death experiences. Often one of the strongest messages people who had been through this brought back with them was a very strong sense of feeling loved, totally and unconditionally.  In a way then, we simply need to agree with the universe about how loved and deserving of love we are and the universe and others will follow our lead – so set a good example!

No-one’s perfect at this, but as much as possible, we want to be kind and gentle to ourselves, support ourselves, and be patient and understanding.. And what happens then is that inevitably we find we have deeper resources of love and care to share with others also.

In a way this is the shortcut to the state that EFT promotes – Emotional Freedom!  Knowing we are loved and treating ourselves and others accordingly. It’s an old message, but it’s definitely a good one.