Learning to love yourself.

Setting out to heal myself has been such a liberating journey for myself. It’s also been a scary one, and a hard one at times. It’s hard in the sense that to heal ourselves we also need to confront ourselves. Confront the way we have been living. And we have to learn to accept ourselves for who we are. That last part is one of the hardest things we will do.

Accept ourselves. Accept things have happened to us, and are part of our growth and learning. Hopefully we learn from our missteps and stumbles in life. It’s easy to just sit there and wish we did this or that differently. What if we tried harder? What if we were nicer, or funnier, or better looking. What if. What if. There comes a time in our lives that we must accept that what has happened to us. Happened. And perhaps it could not have happened any other way. We can learn, in time, to let go. Many of us, myself included, want to control so much of our lives. That we sometimes forget that much is out of our hands, and all we can do is just enjoy the ride.

If we can learn to accept that what has happened has happened we can even learn to start to love ourselves. One of the most important things we can ever do for ourselves but also one of the hardest things we can do. It seems so easy to “just love ourselves.” Yet it’s not so easy. We can be the harshest critics of ourselves. We can easily judge another. We can easily love another. But to look in the mirror, look right into our own eyes, and tell ourselves, “I love you. I truly do.” Is not so easy. For when we look in the mirror we have a tendency to point out all the things we find as “flaws” within ourselves. Our noses are too big, our eyes have bags. Our skin might have a blemish. Tearing ourselves down more and more. We create such a perfect image in our minds of what we think we should look like. That we stop and forget to see ourselves. To see who we truly are. To see that we are beautiful from the inside out. We have our own beauty. That makes us all unique. The world would be pretty boring if we all looked the same. We wouldn’t tell our kids that they are ugly. Not because we don’t want to hurt them but because they are beautiful to us. So why do we not hold that same level of love for ourselves?

I’ll tell you why, because we let the world tell us what we think we should look like. What we think we should wear. How we should comb our hairs. We allow others to tell us we are not good looking, or we tell ourselves we are not good looking enough, when someone breaks up with us. Or we see our stretch marks as a sign of ugliness and not embracing the beauty we are. It’s time that we step into our authentic selves and embrace the inner god/goddess within ourselves. Those we who try and tear us down can truly not do anything to us unless we allow them to do so. Unless we give them that power over us. Words, while they can be mean and hurtful, have no real power over us, unless we allow them to do so. Those who attack us, belittle us, and are just plain right mean to us, does not show us our flaws and faults. It merely shows that their attacks are a reflection of themselves and not a reflection of us. We do not have to allow them to take us down into the worlds where they live. IMO, if those people who are attacking us verbally/physically could learn to truly love themselves, they could not be attacking us. One just can not hurt another when one truly loves themselves. Most that hurt us are coming from a place of pain within themselves.

It’s time that we start to heal that pain within ourselves. For when we heal ourselves we radiate that healing out of us. When we radiate that healing out of us it radiates to others. And they can start to heal themselves. When we heal ourselves and better our lives that same healing goes out into the world and they see what we are doing and know they to can live that life.

So today when you are looking into a mirror and want to tear yourself down. Take a time to stop the negative talk. Stop that self hate for a moment. Look into your eyes. And tell yourself, I love you. I love you fully and completely. Just the way you are. You are perfect to me. That may be one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself today. Don’t get me wrong. It won’t be easy to say that. We may chuckle at it. We may even turn away from ourselves. We may even want to reject it. In time, we will start to come around. We will start to see the love for ourselves. We will start to not only be able to say it, we will star to be able to truly believe it. And that is when the magic starts to really happen for ourselves. We start to appreciate things more. We start to appreciate ourselves. We start to be more positive in our lives. That is when the miracles start to happen. When we live in a state of positivity and love.

Loving ourselves is one of the best things we can do for ourselves. For when we start to truly love ourselves we can start to truly love another. Taking our relationships and our loves to deeper levels of being. The world needs more of that. Many people out there want to tear us down. Now is a time that we work to life each other up. The world needs more of that. The world needs more people to be kind, and loving. We don’t need those kind of people in our lives. We are strong people. We have gone through so much. Going through anxiety every day showed me that I could do a lot. I can get through a lot. Days when I thought I was weak. I saw that I was stronger than I could ever imagine. At the end of it all. I was still standing. Life was trying it hardest to knock me down. But I kept getting back up. I kept living. I kept moving.

It’s time to let love in. It’s time that we turn on that light within ourselves. That we are lovable. That we deserve love. That we deserve good things in life. It’s time we become the caretakers of our own happiness. Our happiness comes from within us. It’s time we let it out. It’s time to love and be happy.