Index: Feature Article: Love Your Self First and Most
*LOVE YOURSELF FIRST AND MOST!*
Dated 2/14/99..
This article contains excerpts from a book I am working on. Excerpts are found in ““. You might want to have paper handy and get ready to make some lists..... Usually Valentines Day is a time we reflect on and share our loving feelings for others.... but this Valentines Day, I challenge you to LOVE YOURSELF!
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"To Love Oneself is the Beginning of A Lifelong Love Affair" Oscar Wilde
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“What is that beautiful mystery of the ages we call love? However hard we try to understand it, we can only join in the history of mankind's search for its meaning. The more we ponder, the more we come to realize that we shouldn't even expect to completely comprehend something so big, beautiful and powerful that it is the basis of our religions, makes and holds families together, motivates every good and kind act and inspires our poets, writers, artists and musicians to live for the opportunity to express even the slightest vision of its grandeur. We experience it as warm, tender, caring feelings expressed with appropriate actions. We believe it exists in many forms and in various degrees. We know that without it life has little meaning yet, to wholly and truly identify it escapes us. Still, we must try, for if we are to love ourselves, we must know what it entails.”
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Have you ever made a list of what love is??? Maybe Valentines day would be a good time. Now ask yourself and make two lists: What do I love about me? What have I done to show love to myself lately?
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"This Above All, To Thine Own Self Be True" William Shakespeare
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“Most of us have mixed feelings about ourselves, after all we are complex beings made up of many different experiences, attributes and behaviors. It is possible to love some things and even hate others, especially if we have made harmful mistakes or are victims of abuse. This comes from and perpetuates general distrust and lack of complete respect for ourselves and is usually passed on to how we relate to others as well. Whatever things we don't love about ourselves, to overcome them will in every case involve forgiveness, either of ourselves or others or both. To begin the healing process we must identify what we don't love and trace it back to why it exists in order to find whom we need to forgive.”
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Explore what you don't love about yourself and whom it is you blame for the condition with another list.
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"The Weak Can Never Forgive, Forgiveness is the Attribute of the Strong" Mahatma Gandhi
“When you have identified what you don't love about yourself, the next step is one of the most powerful and liberating accomplishments that you can achieve, a paramount act of self love - FORGIVENESS.
The pressure and pain of not forgiving is one of the heaviest burdens we can bear. It weighs us down with such baggage as hate, revenge and condemnation. It controls our emotions and our minds and prevents us from being or growing into the best person we could be.
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There are three kinds of forgiveness to consider. Forgiveness for the things we don't love about ourselves, forgiveness of others who's influence on us has caused us not to love something about ourselves and forgiveness of others who have wronged us in other ways. Forgiveness is not always easy and there's more to it than just saying the words. Besides will and commitment, there are some steps we must go through in order for our forgiveness to be complete.
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To forgive ourselves, we must:
1. Identify that an action was actually wrongful or “bad.”
2. Feel and express regrets and sorrow to ourselves and any others we have caused harm to by the behavior. Ask for their forgiveness if possible and compensate them in any way we can. We should compensate ourselves as well, for example, replacing unhealthy habits with healthy ones.
3. Turn away from repeating the action (A MUST) and vow never to do it again.
4. Let it go to become a part of the past with no place in the present or future.
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To forgive others: (Don't wait for them to ask for or deserve it)
1. Identify the wrongdoing.
2. Realize that the burden of non forgiveness rides on our shoulders, not the offenders and in fact keeps the pain of the perceived injustice in our lives.
3. Accept that life has a far fairer way of dealing out true justice than we could ever even imagine.
4. Allow agony to become victory by focusing on all that we have to gain from forgiving, such as: Self-esteem and respect, peace of mind, control of our emotions and not having to waste time or energy on revengeful, hateful or condemning thoughts or deeds.
5. Letting it go into the past with no place in our present or future.
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For some people the act of forgiving themselves is more difficult than that of forgiving others and for some it is the opposite. In my own life, I have found that forgiveness was sometimes owed to both myself and others. Even when I considered someone else to be the prime offender, I realized I often had a part to play in the wrongdoing, even if it was simply that I made a bad choice of companions to start with.
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I suggest that you begin with forgiving yourself because as you analyze the reasons for your faults you will better be able to accept that no one is perfect and that whatever your wrong or uninformed motivation may have been, others are just as capable of being misled in similar ways that resulted in their harmful actions to you. In this case it pays to “Understand yourself in order to better understand others.”
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"People Are Never Perfect, But Love Can Be" Tom Roberts
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So go ahead and forgive yourself (and others) to give yourself some very special gifts this Valentines Day:
INNER PEACE ...... SELF LOVE ..... & ...... TRUE HAPPINESS! YOU DESERVE IT!!!
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*PARTING THOUGHTS*
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DON'T FORGET TO LOVE YOURSELF FIRST AND MOST .. and give yourself a big hug from ME, just for being so special!
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