Self Love

As a life coach, I have found myself saying the same cliché catch phrases to clients like “You have to love yourself before you can expect anyone else to love you”, and “As above, so below”. The key to most things in seeking fulfillment in life is to cultivate a healthy self-love practice. What I have found most interesting though, is the response I get nearly every single time I bring this up to my clients:

How in the hell do I love myself?

I find this to be both fascinating, and also maddening at the same time. How can something so simple, and so necessary, be so elusive to so many of us? Shouldn’t this come naturally to us?

In my coaching practice, I share a story about the golden Buddha with every new client. This true story is a great metaphor to explain exactly why it is so difficult to love ourselves. The story itself actually begins at the end, with some monks in a small village in Thailand moving a giant statue of Buddha in 1957. As they were trying to relocate the mammoth statue that had been around for several hundred years that appeared to be made out of clay, one of the monks noticed a crack in the clay…and gold underneath. They later discovered that the entire statue was made out of pure gold. The assumption is that the villagers or monks who created the statue must’ve realized that having this statue made out of gold was inviting war from neighboring villagers for coveting the incredible golden creation. In an attempt to hide the precious gold, they covered the entire statue in clay and debris. The original people who built the statue died in a battle, and the legend of the gold Buddha was laid to rest with them, not to be discovered again until 1957.

This story is just like the story of each of us. We each come into this world, just like the golden Buddha- pure, bright and precious. From the moment we are born, clay is slung at us. If you are a female, you are born into a world that, right away, tells you…in certain ways…that you are the weaker gender. If you are a male, you are born into a world that tells you to “toughen up”, don’t show your emotions (other than “manly’ ones like anger and frustration). These are just two examples of life’s clay that makes us forget our gold.

We go on in life to encounter our parents, our neighbors, and people we would call friends…and often, through the best intentions, our interactions with other people cause more and more clay to collect on our beautiful, perfect selves. We feel bad for making mistakes, then we go on to create more experiences for ourselves validating that we are, in fact, “bad”. Unworthy. The cycle repeats, and more clay collects.

Before you know it, you’re decades into your experience here on this planet, and all you can see for yourself and who you are is clay. You can’t see your gold at all.

Then someone tells you to love yourself. Go ahead, look at your gold!

How are you supposed to see gold where you can only see clay?

This is what has been keeping me up at night. I decided to start researching, and figure out the answer to this. The first thing I realized is that it is too much of a mind fuck to try and think of this in terms of actually loving yourself. Instead, I first looked at this from the perspective of loving someone else. What does it take to love some else?

First and foremost, you have to know the person. After all, how can you actually love someone on a deep level if you don’t know them? Step one: Get to know thy self. You might already be asking “Well, how do I do that??” In many ways, you do this the same way you would if you were getting to know a new love interest, or a new friend or co-worker. Spend time with yourself, QUALITY time. This means getting away from the tv, from your phone, and getting into a space where you can really pay attention to yourself and your thoughts and feelings. When was the last time you took a walk just because and paid attention to how your body feels? When you do this, you are allowing yourself the space to make you a priority, and this is often when we get our best ideas!

Try something new, something that takes you out of your comfort zone. What excites you or intrigues you? Pursue those things, whether they make you money or not. The only way we can grow is if we challenge ourselves beyond our comfort level and what we know to be familiar.

Learn about yourself. Go to therapy. See an astrologer (wink wink), get a birth chart reading. Find and hire a life coach. Do whatever it takes to get to know and understand yourself on a deeper level. Are you an introvert or extrovert by nature? Do you need alone time to recharge your mental, emotional, physical and spiritual batteries? Or do you recharge better while being around others? Once you have the answers to some of these questions, you’ll start to have a clearer picture of who you are as a person, almost like creating your own personal instruction manual!

The paradoxical thing here is that just exploring any of these things is an act of self-love. Think about it: when someone is on a date that isn’t going well, are they likely going to be very curious about the other person? Probably not. They are more likely to make less of an effort to get to know the other person. The same goes for your relationship with yourself. When you act disinterested in yourself, your relationship with you suffers (along with your relationships with others, ‘as above, so below’). Self-love means giving a shit…about you.

There are other steps involved in the process of self-love, but so far, from what I have seen in my practice and in my personal life, these are the keys needed to start your own self-love practice. Imagine what things would be like if we put into ourselves a fraction of the effort we put into trying to ‘fix’ or ‘save’ others. More people finding their true worth, their ‘gold’, means less people trying fix their inside problems with outside resources. This means less people turning to substances, work, people or other things outside of themselves to cope with life. This means more people living a joyful life. This means less political debates and more laughter. This means less trauma and unnecessary pain and suffering the world, and more love.

Who doesn’t want that?

I challenge you to start the process of getting to know you, today. I bet you’re pretty awesome, you should meet you.