One small step for human kind, one giant leap towards inner peace

I truly believe one of the number one ways to live a happy and meaningful life is to love yourself. It all starts with loving yourself. 

Let's not get self-love confused with self-awareness. Both go hand in hand. You can't love yourself truly if you aren't aware of yourself in mostly every way. Self-love is the ability to be kind to yourself, to love yourself as you are, to work on yourself, and water yourself just as you would water a flower. Self-love is about feeling at peace with yourself even in moments of chaos. It's knowing who you are and knowing that better than anyone else.

Self-awareness is about being excruciatingly aware of yourself. It's being aware of all your bad habits or negative aspects of yourself, as well as being aware of the good parts and all the little pieces that create the mosaic that is you. Being self-aware means you analyze things about yourself better than anyone else. If someone were to point something out about you, 9 times out of 10, you probably already knew that about yourself. We aren't perfect, and sometimes we don't notice things, but people who are deeply self-aware usually notice all the things that create the person they are.

Loving yourself is one of the most powerful acts you can perform. Being able to be so secure and sure of yourself creates this aura about you that not even the worst of things can abolish. You become, in a sort of way, mentally resilient.

With that said, we are not perfect. Oftentimes, people believe that loving themselves means never disliking something about themselves.

That is false.

We’re human, we naturally judge things, especially ourselves. Sometimes we don’t like our hair, our body, or maybe how we act. That’s okay. Loving yourself doesn’t mean you don’t have moments when you dislike certain things about yourself, but it means being kind to yourself even when you do. It’s about understanding that even if you dislike how your hair looks, you’re still beautiful. Even if you dislike how you acted in a scenario, you can change that or work on it and you’re still beautiful. You just made a mistake.

Think of it this way: when you truly love someone, sometimes they might do something you don’t like. That doesn’t mean you’re going to stop loving them (sometimes, sure, but in this scenario let’s say no). You just get upset with what they did, and you might forgive them and continue to love them as you did before, or even more perhaps.

It’s the same way with yourself. We all do things we don’t like or have things we don’t like about ourselves.

I struggle deeply with my body image. Not because I care what other people think, but because I truly care about what I think about myself. I try not to beat myself up, though, because I know I’m going to the gym and am working on being healthier, and that’s about all I can do. One day, I’ll probably be this weight again, so there’s no use in beating myself up about it. That’s something I’m really trying to learn because I tend to be hard on myself, but honestly, who cares if you have some extra chub on your body? If someone is judging you, it says way more about them than you.

Now, another act of self-love is reflecting or, as I mentioned earlier, self-awareness. You HAVE to be able to understand the good and bad parts of yourself. If you ignore the bad, then you’re not going to truly love yourself, and you’re probably going to end up creating this delusion that you’re perfect and you’re not. 

No one is perfect. We all have a shadow self, and sometimes it comes out more than other times. We all have some bad traits or bad thoughts. It's just about controlling them. Learning to love yourself is understanding those bad things, accepting them, and then working on them. Always be willing to work on yourself, grow, and take constructive criticism.

It is because I am (mostly) aware of every aspect of myself that when people say something negative about me, I know it’s coming from their own insecurities and not because I’m doing something wrong. You should be able to self-reflect and have no problem admitting when something you did wasn’t right. That’s the only way to grow is to understand your wrongs and make them right. If you want to love yourself truly, that is a HUGE part of it. 

You have to know yourself like the back of your hand and understand yourself better than anyone else. Once you do that, you unlock this different level of self-love. You unlock these new lenses to look through life with.

Suddenly, it seems a lot more beautiful. A lot less about pleasing people and truly just about nourishing your soul and doing what makes you happy. You shine so brightly. You don’t project or spread negativity because you’re secure in yourself. Ultimately, you make the world a better place by making yourself a better place to be.

Learn to love yourself and understand every aspect of yourself. Sit, meditate, think, reflect, take the time to do nothing but understand yourself more and be more aware. I promise you’ll notice the difference once you do. 

Love, Sarah