Both self-care and pleasure begin with self-love. As we love ourselves more and more, it creates the conditions for pleasure, for our continued well-being, and for us to really care for ourselves. However, it\’s not necessarily a linear process wherein one thing creates the other. It\’s more of a cycle: This love creates the conditions for self-care, and self-care opens the door to even more love for ourselves. Love creates an environment for pleasure and the conditions for us to experience pleasure. And then, this pleasure again creates a sense of well-being and welcomes in even more love.
There are various aspects to understanding how to bring in a new skill or develop a new area of our lives, but people often get confused about their personal development because they feel like they are getting conflicting information. This is often because they\’re trying to see it as a linear process when it\’s actually a multidimensional process. We adjust one part, then another, and then another, and that eventually snaps the whole new way of being into place.
Our self-love is an essential ingredient in developing our self-care and pleasure.
So, what does it mean to love ourselves? I get this question a lot.
There are many behaviors that show that we love ourselves. Primarily, self-love occurs when we treat ourselves with respect, care, and kindness. But it is more than ways of acting toward yourself. It\’s also actually cultivating a flow of love through all dimensions of who you are. Learning to love yourself is partly about cultivating the feeling or sensation or energy of love in all aspects of who you are. You allow this flowing love to run through you and into all aspects of your life.
Exercise for loving yourself:
1. Think of something or someone whom you really love, and focus your attention on feeling that a strongly as possible.
2. Expand that feeling through your attention.
3. Take this feeling and apply it to yourself.
Once you have a read on what love feels like, then you can start to access different parts of your experience. For example, while you’re eating, is this self-love present? While you’re with this person, is this self-love present? While you’re taking a walk—and so on. You can see whether this love is present in all aspects of your life and environment. You can look at each one of these aspects by comparing what is present to this strong love. Where you find love to be lacking, you can ask yourself “what would allow that feeling to come in more? What kind of changes in my behavior or in the kind of people I\’m around?”
Sometimes you will know and sometimes you can just experiment. If you have trouble coming up with new ideas, then there are plenty of ideas available online. Otherwise, just try something out. For example, perhaps try to be a bit more intentional while you’re walking and then pay attention to whether or not that shifts things. Or, if you try speaking your truth a little bit more in your relationships, does that help? After each experiment, assess whether it strengthened the love that you were feeling or not.
As you experiment with creating a life full of self-love, you to be able to better refine what it is that you\’re doing so that you can have more of this self-love in your life. Loving yourself raises your energy, and that allows you to make better and better choices for yourself. It allows you to draw in more pleasure. It allows you the ability to better care for yourself.
For more about self care take a look at my article >>> \”On Self Care\”
