With these 11 steps to self-love, you’re going to be guided to nurturing a loving relationship with yourself.
When you think about loving yourself, what do you think of?
Maybe it’s about possessing a confidence unparalleled to any emotion you’ve ever felt. Or it’s about conducting yourself with humility rather than operating from your egoic mind. Or somewhere along the lines of being so fucking authentic to your inner wisdom that you couldn’t care less what others think of you and your decisions.
Do you know how to love yourself? It’s ok if you don’t.
Because I sure as hell didn’t when I embarked upon a journey of cultivating a loving relationship with myself. Having to teach myself how to love me was bar none the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. Much more difficult than saying sayonara to the booze. I winged it and made so many mistakes along the way. But, throughout the process of my evolution, I fashioned steps that worked and still stick. I’m here to share with you what I learned which has serendipitously become 11 steps to self-love.
11 signifies divine inspiration, illumination, enlightenment, and visionary power. Recognized as a master number in numerology, it is the wounded healer that has the ability to find the encouragement to keep trekking. As an avant garde, 11 symbolizes bridging the gap between both the conscious and subconscious minds to achieve a greater understanding of life.
11 steps to self-love
1. HAVE FAITH
If you’re reading this, chances are you didn’t have an easy peasy life. Because if you did, you wouldn’t be reading about how to propagate self-love. Which is why the very first step in this journey is to have faith.
Faith will propel you to heights you can’t even begin to imagine. If you find you’re unable to have faith in yourself, throw it to the Universe. You are here for a reason. Without faith, let alone any self-love, you won’t be able to fulfill your life’s mission. Self-love isn’t created overnight. It takes time to nurture a loving relationship with yourself. Trust in the process by having faith.
2. DATE YOURSELF
The only way to truly love every delectable ounce of yourself is to enjoy your own company. And that requires relishing in your oasis of solitude. It doesn’t mean you have to sequester yourself from civilization, but you do have to take yourself out on solo dates. Go to the art gallery you’ve been meaning to get to, an exhibit at a museum, taking classes that aren’t conducted on the internet, sit in a coffee shop and people watch, etc. Explore what it feels like to spend time alone while out in public and more importantly, learn to have fun with yourself. If you feel apprehensive about dating yourself, this is the step you need the most.
3. PRACTICE GRATITUDE
Gratitude will go such a long way in your self-love journey. If you can’t find gratitude for the simple things, you won’t be able to love you who are deep down on a core level. Be grateful for what you have, even if it doesn’t seem like much. Because when you can find the joy in the small things, you’ll find the love within yourself. Not to mention, it makes life so much more fun. Start and end each day with gratitude. Thank the Universe for what you have.
4. LEARN TO ACCEPT AND FORGIVE
We live in a world where pencils come with erasers because we all fuck up. Sometimes they’re our mistakes and sometimes it’s from the doing of others. When the latter happens, we get our hearts broken. It’s a fact of life that were going to experience pain. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles. But, how and if we recover from a broken heart is what shapes our self-love. If you’re holding onto past resentments, pain, anger, and bitterness, you won’t ever fully love yourself. Don’t get me wrong; forgiveness isn’t synonymous to reconciliation. It simply means you’re no longer allowing those who have inflicted pain on you to occupy valuable real estate in your heart and mind. Most importantly, forgive yourself for any misdeeds you may have committed in the past.
5. DEVELOP SPIRITUAL PRACTICES
Spirituality isn’t about the fluffed up version of unicorns and rainbows. It’s about going into the darkness, your shadow side, to find the light. It’s a journey of personal development for spiritual progression. Incorporating spiritual practices into your daily routines and rituals will help you to embrace who you are as a whole; not the mask you show to the world. It teaches you to be unfiltered while acting with love and compassion for yourself and others. If meditation doesn’t float your boat, try starting out with divination tools (tarot and oracle cards, pendulums, crystals, runes, or spiritually based books). I purposely left yoga off the list because doing asanas doesn’t make you spiritual. That’s a whole different topic that we’re not going to discuss right now.
6. FOLLOW YOUR HEART
Following your heart and what it desires is so pivotal for your self-love. To love yourself, you need to trust yourself enough to listen to you. If you disregard what your heart wants, you’ll never be happy. If you consistently dismiss what you want, you won’t love you. Follow the guidance of your heart. It will never guide you in the wrong direction. Trust that your heart has your best interest, because it does. That’s your soul’s longing for a better life. Even if you think the stakes are too high- in the long run, you won’t regret your decision to follow your heart.
7. PAY IT FORWARD
Giving to others is one of the best things you can do to build a loving relationship with yourself. While this is about you and your quest to self-love, taking the self-interest away for a few minutes a day will drastically alter your perceptions of yourself. Buy a friend a cup of coffee or lunch, write a thank you card to someone who has touched your life, call someone you haven’t spoken to you in a while. But don’t do this step out of obligation, do it because you want to. Allow yourself to give to others because it brings you joy.
8. LEARN WHO YOU ARE
You can’t possibly love yourself if you don’t know who you are. You would only be a loving an illusion, which isn’t real love. It’s time to learn who you are. I’m not talking about filling up a piece of paper with adjectives and semantics to describe yourself. This is about you who you are at your core. If you think that this is too strenuous, I’m going to make it super simple for you. At your heart center, you are love. That’s what every person is whether it’s felt or not. See and feel yourself as love and with time, you will love yourself. It takes practice and patience, but you’ll get there of you keep persisting.
9. EMBRACE YOUR WEAKNESSES
No one is perfect because perfection is unattainable. Which means you might as well start to enjoy the bits and pieces of yourself that you deem to be negative. What you may think to be unattractive about yourself may be the very reason that someone else admires you. In embracing your weaknesses, they simply diminish into another realm. You won’t even be fazed by it as time goes on because it will no longer be existent or prevalent to how you conduct your life. And eventually, those weaknesses may even become your strongest attributes.
10. GO WITHIN
Whatever is preventing you from loving the one person you’re going to have the longest relationship within your life is, it’s time to let that shit go. And I don’t mean your significant other. You are your longest relationship. Maybe you’re not forgiving yourself for past bad behavior, not always acting with integrity or grace, or hurting others. You’re human. Acting with virtue is something to be strived for through making mistakes. We all have skeletons in the closet. Hoarding them will not bring about self-love, only self-loathing. Which will inevitably prevent you from finding true happiness. Take a journey into the abyss of your darkness to find the rotting debris that needs to be pulled out. The sooner your grievances get aired out, the faster you’ll start to accept yourself which will bring about self-love.
11. FIND YOUR PURPOSE
You may be stumped as to why finding your life’s purpose has anything to do with self-love and well, actually a shit ton. If you’re aimlessly meandering around life, you won’t ever be fulfilled. Without a sense of fulfillment, your inner fire won’t burn with passion. Finding your purpose is one of the biggest components to your reason for existence. If you don’t have the slightest clue what your purpose is, I personally believe that we’re all here to serve others while harnessing our individual talents and skills. When you figure out what you’re here to do, there will be nothing standing between you and self-love.
Voila! Your 11 steps to self-love. Remember, it’s process. Take time to harvest a loving relationship with yourself. Maybe all of them resonate with you and maybe only a few of them will. That’s ok. Take what does and leave what doesn’t.
Have you tried any of these steps or currently working them? Let me know in the comments below!
If you know anyone this can benefit, please be sure to share it with them.
See ya soon. In the meantime, stay zenspired!
Wanna embrace yourself even more? Then check out this FREE 30 Days Of Self-Care Guide.
