Love Yourself!

"Love yourself!" That sounds almost like a command, doesn't it? But how does one love oneself? Easy to say, not so easy to do. Why is that? Why is it so hard to love ourselves? I'm really opening a can of worms (what a strange saying...) with these questions, aren't I?

All my life I have strived to love others unconditionally, and I consider myself a loving non-judgemental person. But for some reason I really seem to have a hard time just to love and accept myself. I am my own worst critic and my own worst enemy. I judge myself harshly at times...

When I was a child I was bullied severely. I didn't enjoy that. It felt bad. But I always thought about how much the bullies must be suffering inside. I knew that they were having a hard time and that they didn't love themselves. So, I always sent them love in my thoughts and I thought that one day when I grew up I would be able to help them heal their pain with my love...

This is what I have been absolutely passionate about all my life: healing our pain with love.

I started my own healing journey consciously in the summer of 1987 when I moved from Finland to Canada. I was twenty-one years old. It was then that I read You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay. From her I learnt about the importance of loving myself unconditionally. I would listen to her morning and evening meditations about loving and try to repeat her positive affirmations: "I love and approve of myself. I love and approve of myself..." It felt very strange to say that, and I'm not sure I ever really believed it.

Right at the same time I started reading A Course In Miracles which taught me the meaning and the power of true forgiveness. True forgiveness does not see the other as guilty of anything but looks past the appearances to the heart of the true person, one who is asking for love. Wow, this is what I knew as a child! When someone was behaving hurtfully, it was because they needed to be loved.

So, that is not the hard part for me. The challenge for me for all these years has been to extend the same loving kindness toward myself that I so easily seem to give to others. What kind of hypocrisy is that! How can you not love yourself and think you can love others? Does not all love start with self-love? "Love thy neighbour as thyself", says the Golden Rule. I always loved it even as a child and wanted to live by it, but I don't think I fully understood it back then.

Children get hurt and loose their natural ability to love and adore themselves when they do not look into the mirror of unconditional love in the faces of their parents and other caregivers. The fact is the adults in their lives do not love and approve of themselves unconditionally, so how could they possibly love their children that way?

So, what can we do now that we are all damaged ever since childhood? None of us know how to love ourselves unconditionally. Do we blame our parents, or who do we blame? Or do we stop blaming others and start re-parenting ourselves with loving kindness?

I have done quite a bit of Inner Child work but I find that it is not over and done with at a certain point. It is an on-going process. Every moment we have an opportunity to be loving and kind toward ourselves by turning negative self-talk into loving self-talk. Instead of saying: "You idiot, now look what you've done! You've made a mess of everything..." or the like, we can say: "Oups, I made a mistake but this is a good learning experience. I will do better next time. I forgive myself. I can start over." Does that not feel better...?

I am now committed to treating myself with loving kindness. And I ask you to consider doing the same. I believe we all deserve to be treated with love and respect, with gentleness and even adoration. No matter what happened to us as children, or at any point in our lives, we can still - today - start practising loving and accepting ourselves. There is nothing - absolutely nothing - that we could ever do to change our True Nature which is Love, no matter how much we have covered it up with guilt or blame. As A Course In Miracles assures us, we are innocent; we are still as God created us.

As you look into the eyes of a new-born child, ask yourself: is this not the picture of pure love? And know that you are still like that child. And so am I...