The Self-Love Journey Circle: 7 Steps To Loving Yourself When You Are Not In Love With Yourself
1. Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is the first key step to unlocking self-love, for without self-awareness we may be in delusion as to how much we love ourselves or how much we don’t love ourselves. Self-awareness is the mechanism of consciousness to notice itself. It is the means by which we get in touch with reality as it is. It is the means by which we get in touch with ourselves as we are in whatever mental, emotional, spiritual state we are in in the present moment.
Our self-awareness has the ability to notice that we are not as in love with ourselves in this moment as we perhaps could be or would like to be. We use it by guiding our conscious awareness to bring attention to the fact that I am not yet full of love for the self - the self being who we really are. We may ask ourselves “Why don’t I love myself right now? What is blocking me from loving me?” The answer may not come, but in the asking, we have taken the first step on the journey to discovering the answer and in discovering how much we don’t love ourselves right now so that we may learn to love ourselves more fully.
2. Self-Allowance
The second key step to unlock self-love is the key of self-allowance. Once we have become aware that we are not loving ourselves in this moment and perhaps we are in some form of self-shame, self-hate or self-anger we accept that these aggressions towards self are part of self as it is right now and we allow them as part of our experience of self. Denying, repressing or rejecting these negative emotions toward self only serves to self-perpetuate them as we can very quickly become ashamed of our shame toward self or more deeply in anger at our anger toward self and then we are on a downward spiral of self-destruction and despair of self. Let us just accept that, “Hey, we are not loving ourselves right now and that is completely ok with me. I accept my self-hate. I accept my self-loathing. I accept my anger and despair at self for I am not in love with myself right now, but that is precisely why I am going on this journey of self-love.”
Self-allowance also accepts that this journey toward self-love is going to be a messy and incoherent journey with the potential for mistakes, wrong turns, confusion and more opportunities for self-hate, self-loathing and self-anger, all of which are a part of the journey of allowing the self to fully love itself. There are no such thing as “mistakes” or “wrong turns” in the journey toward self-love. All is love, and all is learning, growing and experiencing life as it is for life's sake on life’s terms. This means that the negative emotions and experiences are just as much part of life as the positive emotions and experiences. Accepting this, is truly allowing life to flow through us without blockage or distortion.
3. Self-Acceptance
After allowing the self to be as it is, we move onto the third key step of self-love, which is that of self-acceptance. With self-acceptance we must accept the counterintuitive and paradoxical notion that in order to love ourselves we must first recognise and accept that we do not love ourselves, safe in the knowing that the act of acceptance is so potent that it has the power to transform our self-hate into love in an instant. Now, I’m not talking about the all encompassing, mushy, lovey-dovey love that we all know as love, but I’m talking about an aspect of love that is vital to its nature. Acceptance like all these seven aspects of love that I am discussing here is love. It is the gateway to love in its entirety. To know love in its entirety is to know its true nature as everything and everyone, the good and the bad, the positive and the negative, the light and the dark, the yin and the yang, for all is love and love is all. The only reason we do not know love in this way is because we have not accepted it in this way due to our cultural conditioning and beliefs and we have not accepted ourselves in this way due to our self-hate, self-denial and self-shame.
So, self-acceptance then is, first coming into awareness of that which we do not love, then into allowance of that which we do not love to exist within us and then finally into acceptance of that which we do not love as a part of us. It is not yet truly loving that part, but it is accepting that part as part of us, thus retrieving it from its abandoned state in the unconscious. For that is where it was before we accepted it. It was abandoned within our unconscious mind; crying, angry and pissed off that it was forgotten for so damn long; desperate for us to remember it as part of us so that it may know love again and so it may join us on our journey toward self-love and be one with us in the light of our newfound awareness and greater love for self.
4. Self-Analysis
The fourth key step of self-love is self-analysis, which is the close examination of self with our self-awareness to see where our self-hate or anger toward self stems from. The psycho-somatic tool we use here is contemplation and contemplation is a dance between our mind and our unconscious mind - the part of us that holds the memories of all our past experiences. When we enter into contemplation with loving curiosity and a sincere desire to know where this pain has come from it is like we walked into a library with a specific book in mind, but without a clue where it is. The unconscious mind is the librarian here to help us know ourselves at deeper and deeper levels, while our conscious mind is the student; the one earnestly seeking to know themselves and why we are the way we are so that we may love ourselves even more than we currently do now.
Contemplation is a tool or functionality of the mind and it is used to pick apart information we have accessed from our library (our mind) so we may cross reference it with our memory of experience of self thus far. For example if we become agitated at ourselves whilst doing something we may notice this by first becoming aware of a symptom of our agitation - maybe we're nervously tapping our fingers or maybe you are nervously rubbing a part of our body. Once aware of the symptom, then we can acknowledge it for what it is - “I see that I am agitated right now”, then we can come first into allowance of the agitation - “my agitation is allowed to be here” and then we come into acceptance of the agitation - “I accept this agitation as part of me right now” and then we come to where we are, self-analysis of the agitation and why it may be arising within us in the first place.
We may start by saying “when have I experienced this agitation before?” and this may bring to mind many such occasions when we have become agitated at ourselves. Next we may ask ourselves “when did I first feel this agitation? Where did this agitation come from?” and then we let go and trust the unconscious mind as the highly intelligent and autonomous system it is to go and retrieve that information for us. It may come through as a slight sense, a distant knowing, an intuition, a vision, a reminder in the form of a memory, smell, taste or sound. The mind has many methods of delivering us information and we must be open to all of them if we are to work with it on its own terms and if we are to understand how our mind likes to work, because every mind has its preferred methods of delivering information. One thing to keep in mind is that the first thing that comes to mind is the answer we are here to work with. That is how efficient our intuition is when we don’t let our analytical mind get in the way of our intuition with its second guessing and self-doubting. Once we have this answer, no matter how vague or nonsensical it may seem, we must trust that this is it. Self-doubt gets us nowhere on the journey to self-love and only serves to perpetuate our misery and shame.
5. Self-Acknowledgement
Now that we have the source of our pain in the form of a vague or clear memory of some kind we must imagine our child self in this situation and how they are feeling. Quite often it is an inner child who has experienced some degree of pain, shame, grief, rejection or isolation. For whatever reason our inner child is experiencing a lack of love, usually from the parents, guardians, peers or supervisors but most notably our self for we were never taught how to truly love ourselves. As a child we took our painful experiences to mean something terrible about ourselves, like we are “unworthy of love” or that we “don’t belong” or that we are “not good enough” to receive love. This causes our child selves to experience a great deal of self-hate, shame and emotional distress because of it and leads to the child to reject that aspect of itself, relegating it to the darkness of the unconscious mind. This self-hate self-perpetuates and compounds overtime and goes on to create the emotional pain body, which is the part of us that is triggered into pain in our day to day lives.
Self-acknowledgement, the fifth key step toward self-love is when we acknowledge that this pain body in all of its dysfunction, in all of its anxiety, depression, self-hate and self-loathing is us. It is us, and it is just as much us as all of our parts that we deem perfect, admirable and amazing. To acknowledge that all is us, the good and the bad, the light and the dark, the positive and the negative is to acknowledge the entirety of the self as it is without trying to change it one iota. This is deep acceptance of our true nature as human beings. This is the level of acceptance that brings about inner peace and inner wellbeing. The level of acceptance that brings an end to inner conflict and self-perpetuating cycles of doom and gloom. To acknowledge self as it is in its perfect imperfection is to truly accept oneself as perfect. For nature is perfect, and we are part of nature, we just forgot ourselves on our journey to separate ourselves from nature. Self-love is the journey back home to ourselves as one with nature.
6. Self-Adoration
Self-adoration is the part we know as love. It is the part that comes after we have recognised, understood and fully accepted why part of us was not in self-love at the beginning of this journey. It is where we get to speak to our heart our mind or that inner child - whatever part that is in pain, and shower it with love and adoration for who they are in this moment of perfect imperfection and let them know that they are loved; that they are more than loved, that they are love itself and we are here to help them remember that fact. If this part of us is in pain right now, then all of us is in pain right now and it is our duty as the sole carer, provider and holder of our self to look after ourself by giving this part of us what it needs. All our child parts ever need is love of some kind or another, so we must speak to it and ask it, “hey are you ok? Are you alright? Can I do anything for you? Can I love you right now? Because I see that you are in dire need of love right now and I love you so so so much and I just want to be here for you and do anything for you that you need, because you are so deserving of love.”
Now, this is a completely intuitive process and everyone will love and adore themselves differently in accordance to what feels most natural for them. If you are someone who needs cute, mushy words of love and admiration then do that. If you are someone who needs to show themselves that they are not weak, perhaps the best way to self-adore yourself is to take yourself outside and go for a mighty run so you can come into your power. If perhaps, you are someone who needs to show themselves they are not ashamed of their feelings of shame, the way you might adore yourself might be to share your feelings with another person you trust. Whatever way works for you is perfect. There is no right way. There is only your way.
7. Self-Admiration
The last step on this seven step journey toward self-love is the acceptance of the fact that you have gone on this journey toward loving yourself and you have arrived at a place of self-love through the giving of your love to the part of you that really needed that love. This is no mean feat. This is an epic act of duty, care and nurturing that you sorely needed. This was not just for your child self that was likely in great pain and distress at some point in your upbringing. This is for you right now. This is for the person who has been unconsciously hating themselves to some degree or another all their life. If you are someone who has taken the time out of your busy life to go on this journey toward self-love and have come out the other side of it in greater levels of self-love and self-acceptance then you deserve some praise. You deserve self-admiration, the final step on the journey to self-love, which leads to greater self-awareness of self as a being of love. This is what it really means to care for yourself in the moment. This is true self-care, for self-care is self-love. Self-care is the act of self-love, whilst self-love is the act of caring for self. Both are one in the same.
Self-admiration has a very specific and important role on this seven step journey, in that it is the step that encourages to keep going and to open up the possibility to our future selves to willingingly enter in this journey of self-love again and again until there is no self-hate or shame in us any more. We have to tell ourselves in the present moment that we are perfect and that we are doing a great job in loving ourselves the best we can right now. We may not have arrived at the level of self-love we would like to be at, but we are on the path now and we are awesome for starting this journey. This is self-admiration and it is in essence, the child self who was unloved, now full of love, loving our older selves back and saying that you are fucking great, keep going and we will achieve everything we could ever want or hope for in this life, because self-love is the key to life itself. It is the key to loving life as it is in its perfect imperfection. It is the key to loving ourselves in our perfection imperfection, and when we can do that there is no more imperfection. All is perfect. All is life.
