Self love is unconditional love that is directed toward the various aspects of ourselves such as thoughts, emotions, feelings, actions, physical body, and images.
Self love and destructive states. Some people resist self love because they do not differentiate it from other states such as:
-Vanity.
--Vanity is the belief that we deserve love on the basis of our fulfillment of ideals. We believe that we should be loved because we are exceptionally intelligent or beautiful. Vanity is not self love.
--Vanity is based on conditions such as our fulfillment of an ideal. In contrast, love is unconditional.
--Ideals are unattainable by humans. In order to believe that we have attained an ideal upon which we base our vanity, we must repress our awareness of the occasions when we do not attain the ideal. We would deny or hate the pimple on our otherwise beautiful face. When we are in denial or hatred toward any aspect of ourselves, we are not loving ourselves.
Narcissism.
--Narcissism is an obsession with ourselves, to the exclusion of other people. Narcissism is not self love:
--Narcissism ignores the aspects of ourselves that are fulfilled only through interaction with other people giving to them, and receiving from them. If we love ourselves, we love the social aspects of ourselves, and so we reach out to people in a manner such that they will respond with the love that we require. We know that we must give love to get love. If we give something other than love, we get something other than love.
--Narcissism is ineffective in nourishing the aspects of ourselves that are fulfilled only through self love. There is a type of nourishment that comes only from ourselves to ourselves, but narcissism is mere infatuation. It does not nourish us, and so we spend an inordinate amount of time with a focus on ourselves, in a futile attempt to satisfy ourselves with this infatuation. In contrast, if we have self love, we do achieve the satisfaction, and we can effectively turn our attention to other aspects of our lives including other people.
The benefits from self love.
Self love increases our ability to love other people. This phenomenon occurs because we are loving the designs that are common to all of us. If we love our assertiveness, we tend to love other people when they are assertive. We do this because the mind observes the assertiveness design, and then it plots its response by examining our elements that are associated with that design. Those design elements are the thoughts, images, energy tones, and physical habits that we have generated in previous encounters with that design. This process does not consider who is being assertive, and so the same standards are automatically applied to ourselves and to other people. Self love increases the amount of love that we receive. People are more likely to offer love. This phenomenon is due to various reasons:
--We are more loving toward them, because we accept and love the elements that are common to us all. Naturally, they tend to respond to our love with their own love.
--People intuitively perceive the elements of our designs.
--We enhance our ability to receive love. Our self love is a confirmation that we are lovable. We eagerly recognize and accept the love that is offered to us. If we lack self love, we reject other people's love, because we do not recognize it, or we feel that we are not worthy of it.
--Self love feels good. Pleasure and happiness are our subjective experience of the flow of spiritual life substance from one thing to another. As we love ourselves, that life substance circulates within us.
--Self love allows us to understand and know ourselves. We are not repressing anything from our own awareness.
Techniques for developing self love
Design-work. We can generate energy tones of contentment, satisfaction, and happiness as we view the various aspects of ourselves.
--Affirmations.
--Directed imagination. We can visualize ourselves being kind to ourselves.
--Modeling. Intuition can tell us how to express our self love. It can tell us that we are working too hard, and that we need to comfort ourselves with some relaxation and recreation. We can develop the various types of love toward ourselves. We can develop self acceptance, patience, generosity, forgiveness, and self respect. We can love ourselves with regard to our physical needs. We can get proper medical care, and we can attend to our physical fitness. We can become more aware of the occasions when love is offered to us. Every time we recognize that someone is loving us, we confirm the idea that we are lovable. Self love is unconditional, we can love ourselves even when other people do not love us. We eliminate shame. Shame is the belief that there is something innately wrong and undeserving in us. If we are experiencing shame, we cannot love ourselves, nor can we allow other people to love us.
