If you want to soar in life, you must first love yourself
If you want to soar in life, you must first love yourself.
“You have to love yourself because no amount of love from others is sufficient to fill the yearning that your soul requires from you” – Dodinsky
So many of you have put the cart before the horse when it comes to love. You spend all of your time “earning” the love of others by being who they want you to be. By doing everything in your power to make their life perfect. You put others ahead of yourself and at the end of the day, nothing turns out the way you wanted it to. You are left feeling like a failure, just “not good enough”.
There is a show on PBS called “Home Fires”. It takes place in England during WWII. It’s about a women’s group that contributes to the village and the war effort. In the first season there is one woman whose husband abuses her. Like all abusers he makes every time he loses his temper to be her fault. The real issue at hand for the story line is that he is a newspaper writer who can’t get enough work, so of course he takes it out on someone he is supposed to love.
A few of her best friends figure out what is happening, but at the point in history there really isn’t anything they can do about it. She is too ashamed to admit what is happening. The times that she struggles to fight back, he leaves her self-worth in even more tatters. At the end of the first season, one of her friends was successful in getting him a war correspondent job without him being aware of her having a hand in it.
He leaves the village to go to the front, and now his wife has the opportunity to start loving herself and building up her self-esteem. The hope being that she doesn’t fall back into the same situation when he returns. One of the underlying contributors of why women stay in abusive situations is that they don’t love themselves enough to gather up what remains of their self-worth and self-trust, to leave and not look back.
“Love yourself enough to take the actions required for your happiness. Love yourself enough to cut yourself loose from the ties of the drama filled past. Love yourself enough to move on” – Dr. Steve Maraboli
You may not be in such an extreme situation with your self-love, but you only have to listen to the comments you make to yourself, to know that it is something you can still do more work on.
When you live your life in such a way that reflects, you’re coming in last, you buy into a lie. A lie that loving yourself first will take away from loving others. A lie that says the only way to be worthy of self-love, is to prove that others love you first. How could you attract the love of others, if you don’t even love yourself?
Trying to in essence purchase the love of others by the self sacrifice of yourself, is like trying to fit the square peg in the round hole. You can push it, twist it, and pound the peg until it shatters, but it will never fit. It won’t fill that yearning from your soul, that begs you to put “love us” first.
5 Things to Quit – right now.
- Trying to please everyone
- Fearing Change
- Living in the past
- Putting yourself down
- Overthinking
You have the power to choose where you are going. You have the power to stop trying to get attention from those who hurt you most. You have the power to stop hating your body, your personality, and the pieces of you that don’t fit in the square hole.
You can start with loving yourself, saying “I love my thighs just as they are”, “I love my imperfect smile”, “I love that I snort when I laugh”, “I love me”. You can get the truth of the situation into your bones – nobody will ever love you more than you love yourself.
It is critically important to your health and happiness – both physical and mental – that you treat yourself right.
What if for the rest of this year you devoted yourself to loving you more? Your choices will change your life.
Make peace with your mirror and watch your reflection change. The loss of judgment in your eyes. The removing of the wrinkles of anxiety across the forehead, that you aren’t good enough. The curve of the smile of self-confidence, that says you are amazing, and you are rocking that outfit. The glow of inner peace and love that fills your space with light. And – LOL – Best hair day EVER!
How Does One Become A Butterfly?
A caterpillar must endure a season of isolation before it turns into a butterfly. Embrace the time you have alone, it will only make you stronger.
– Steven Aitchison
Life is a journey of learning and discovery. As young children we take in everything we can learn. We are authentically ourselves. Somewhere along the line of growing up, we learn to hide who we really are. To keep ourselves safe. To avoid ridicule. To be the perfect person, so that we will be loved. We have many reasons why we start hiding. But there comes a time in our life, when we realize that in order to be truly happy, we have to transform back into who we really are. We need to become the person we were created to be.
Butterflies can’t see their wings. They can’t see how truly beautiful they are, but everyone else can. People are like that as well.
– Unknown
Transformation gives you the chance to rewrite the story of who you are and who you are capable of being. There are many things in our life that we give negative meanings to. But what if you gave pain the definition that it shows you that which is not for you? This would be a positive thing to know – what doesn’t belong to me or my life. Envy is another word that has a bad rap. What if envy simply shows you things which you may wish to empower in your life? That would be a great thing to know – things I want in my life and can empower myself to obtain.
To be nobody but yourself is a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight – and never stop fighting.
– E.E. Cummings
The being that is forming in the cocoon is no longer a caterpillar. For the caterpillar the past is truly a place of reference. It can no longer live there, because that body is gone. Within the cocoon the caterpillars body literally melted into goo, and then formed a totally new body. As the butterfly’s body grows into its new shape, it becomes cramped as the wings want to expand out. It isn’t a place of residence for the butterfly, so it has to break loose and spread it’s wings and find a new home. Even though everyone who knew you as a caterpillar is expecting you to still be a caterpillar, you can’t go back. You have to fight to go forward, staying true to who you now are.
I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.
– Mary Oliver
The butterfly had to break out of the old place of residence and begin a brand new journey, where everything is experienced for the first time. It must break open its heart to begin this journey, because it has to trust its intuition for flying, for finding food, for making a new home. Literally everything for the butterfly is a brand new experience. You have to have the courage to follow your own heart and intuition.
You will know you made the right decision when you pick the hardest and most painful choice but your heart is at peace.
– Unknown
Transformation is a scary business. Because I am a perfectionist, I hate doing something new for the first time. I am doing the best I can with my posts, knowing that I will have spelling errors or grammar mistakes in my writing. I can proofread this a dozen times and the minute I publish I find something I missed. When I sponsor the post, I can’t make any changes, so anything I missed becomes a permanent part of the post. I am living with being imperfect in order to just get the post out there.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
– Steve Jobs
When we listen to our intuition, we are right where we are meant to be. We can impact the people that we share the world with. It may be a tiny corner of the world. Or we could be like a comet and affect the entire world as we fly through the night sky. It isn’t up to us to say how much of an impact we will make. It is up to us to live life as fully as we can. To follow the dreams that have been written in our hearts. To break out of the comfort zone and spread our wings and fly. It doesn’t even matter if we know where we are or where we are going. It only matters that we fly. That we soak up the sun. The we soar with the breezes. And if we can do that, then whatever we leave behind will be sufficient.
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Self Love
Winnie Harlow is a true LemonadeMaker. When she was little she was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. Her skin pigmentation started changing in patches.
Instead of listening to the bullies who teased her, she says she gets to be both black and white skinned.
She doesn’t hide who she is. She loves her skin just as it is. She is a fashion model. How fantastic is that?
Happiness
This is so true. And we bring it to our life by giving and helping others.
Nothing puts a happy smile on your face, than we you see the light shining from someone else’s face because you showed them how much you cared.
Happiness
“The true interior, spiritual life is not for people looking for ways to be happy; it’s for those who have started to realize that they’ve never known the real nature of happiness.” – Guy Finley
It is kind of funny how we look outside of ourselves for so many things. We think that happiness comes from the love of our soul partner; from the dream job; from the acquiring of money and things. If we only can find or obtain this one thing, then we will be happy.
We look outside of ourselves when we are feeling any emotion that doesn’t feel good. If we are angry we blame someone or something else for that feeling. If we are worried we look around to try and find something that is causing the worry. All stress comes from holding on to these negative emotions, thinking that somehow we can change something outside of ourselves and then we will be happy.
But the truth is that all emotions originate inside of us. They originate from some story that we are telling ourselves is true. They come from a perception, projection, or interpretation to what we see through the filter of our mind. Your internal fears are telling you that something is missing, when in fact real happiness is just behind the illusions that your mind is projecting.
Watch a baby to see how effortless happiness is. There is a video on you tube of a baby that has a piece of paper and the baby just laughs and laughs as the dad rips the paper. (it is called Baby Laughing Hysterically at ripping paper (Original). Look it up for a moment of happiness for yourself). Happiness is a natural part of life, not the result of anything that we do. It is like the air that we breathe, always there and part of life waiting to be experienced. It can’t be possessed, or chased after. It just is.
Babies are such good examples of letting the emotions flow through you. They might get mad and cry, and then two minutes later they are giving you kisses or laughing at you. They don’t get attached to their emotions; they don’t let them rule their experience of life, and that is why they are such good examples of experiencing happiness.
Babies also love to make you laugh. They love to spread their happiness to everyone they meet. I’ve never met someone who when a baby smiled at them or laughed didn’t smile themselves. They are so contagious with their happiness, they love to share it. We need to follow their example, and enjoy life every moment!
Happiness and Suffering
“Any happiness we feel over the pain that someone else goes through — regardless of who or why — insures we remain a blind prisoner of the fact that hidden within our present idea of happiness also lies the source of our suffering.” Guy Finley
I thought that this was very interesting. I have always thought that the smile hidden deep inside when we see “karma” come into someone’s life was me being small. That I was “happy” because they were reaping the harvest of their bad seeds. I thought it made me feel good because it meant that my keeping all of the rules paid off.
Yet this is showing that some if not all of this smallness inside of me is related to the thought that somehow I developed the belief that you can’t have good without the bad. That the flip side of happiness is suffering, and that experiencing happiness itself guarantees that I will also have suffering.
Maybe this is why some people are afraid of being happy – because they believe that it will be taken away and that suffering will take its place? This is probably the source of the sayings such as, “it is better to love, and lose than to never have loved at all” – and similar thoughts come from. That if we are experiencing anything positive and good, that the negative will follow to take it away.
So instead of being a blind prisoner we can examine our thoughts the next time that this happens to us, to see what is underneath the surface. If this is keeping you a prisoner you can work this belief loose and free yourself from it. Knowledge is power and holds the key to our freedom, if we take the time to examine the layers beneath the surface.
Happiness
“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.” – Guillaume Appollinaire