I came across a question on orkut the other day, where this guy asked a simple question - How can we love ourselves? And as I replied to him, I realised that my answer started looking more like an essay. Since it was a general question, I felt it would probably be helpful to others asking the same question. So, I reproduce my response here with a few minor changes.
Loving yourself is easier said than done, just like most things worth doing. Let us understand it with a comparison. Imagine you have a plant. You love the plant. What does your loving the plant involve?
If you truly love the plant, you will ensure it gets proper sunshine, manure and water at all times, trim and prune it every once in a while and you'll probably also spend time talking to the plant and showering it with your love, to ensure that it grows and radiates with health and happiness.
Loving yourself is pretty much the same in concept. If you truly want to love yourself, you need to ensure that you get proper sunshine - i.e. exposure to the bright side of life - positive thoughts, spirituality, love, and this comes with surrounding yourself with the right kind of people and if thats not possible, the right kinds of books and tv programs (news channels do NOT fall into this category, they're the best means of injecting hate and anger into the mind).
You need to ensure you have good manure and that you are properly grounded and do not let your ego take flight. Use the stinky, smelly stuff that life throws at you to propel you to the top, learn new lessons and grow into a better person! Take care of your 'roots', i.e., remain humble and have your feet firmly planted on the ground.
The watering - fuel for growth, as well as cleansing. One needs to monitor one's thoughts and eliminate anything that is counter-productive to growth. Grab any opportunity to grow and make full use of it. Whenever you find a fault within yourself, yes, accept your faults, but don't stop there - start changing yourself and work on becoming a better person so that you don't have that fault anymore.
When you start to grow, you'll realise that you need the trimming and pruning every once in a while. Growth and change are not permanent and often, we need to unlearn our lessons and move in a new direction. When a plant grows in a direction we do not want it to grow, we cut off a part of the branch and allow it to grow in a new direction. When we realise that a part of our personality is resisting or hindering our growth in the direction we desire, then we need to clip that attitude and let go of past lessons. For example, a child with nasty class-mates might have learned that the best way to defend itself is to fight and bully its peers. However, once an adult, it will need to let go of that attitude to be able to succeed at its workplace.
Loving oneself involves total dedication towards becoming a better person. This means that we would start working towards eliminating any fault that we have. This does not mean we hate our faults. If a part of the plant develops the disease, we do not hate it, or hate the plant. We simply cut the diseased part off, and medicate the plant to ensure health.
We try to bring the plant to the perfect state of health again. In the same way when we discover a fault or make a mistake, we don't start hating ourselves, but start working towards it immediately.
Loving yourself means ensuring total health - physically, mentally, emotionally.
This means taking care of your diet and exercise for physical health,
Taking care to have only positive thoughts and eliminate negative thoughts for mental health
And keeping the ego in check and feelings under control, for emotional health.
Some points to note here: Loving oneself also includes protecting oneself from negativity. If a person says something bad for example, a person who loves himself will not allow himself to get angry - because that anger harms no one else but himself. Such a person will care about his family, because hurting his family or friends will eventually lead to hurting himself. At the same time, this person will not sacrifice his own happiness for that of his family, because he knows that ultimately, it is about his own happiness and he has to live with himself all his life, not his family.
Finally, after everything else above, loving oneself also involves pampering oneself, like maybe getting some spa treatments or maybe traveling, or whatever you define total relaxation as.
Dedicate special time for yourself. If you really love yourself, you'll spend time and effort to make sure you look and feel good. Most people dress and look good for others. You'll look good because you like yourself, not because you care what others think.
Loving yourself involves putting yourself at the top of your priority list. One person I know recently quit his job (yes, in the recession) and actually took up a slightly lesser paying job with lesser scope for growth, because he didn't want a crazily busy job which left him no time for his family. He was willing to settle with lesser money than his peers, and a lesser position of power, but he and his wife decided that they would have enough for their daughter's education, and their health and family was the most important to them. He valued his sanity - and realised that if earning money left him with no time to enjoy it, then he'd be damaging himself.
Very few people can think like that, Most prioritise money and power over themselves, over their health (physical, mental, emotional). By the time they're free enough to enjoy it, they're usually in hospitals, spending all that hard-earned money on doctors trying to puncture and drug their overused and worn-out body. This apart from the fact that their family doesn't care for them because when they needed them, they were away earning money and now have no emotional bonds with anyone. They're left sick (physical disease), depressed (mental) and alone (emotional). Did they ever love themselves? No.
Loving yourself is the best thing you can do not only for yourself, but for the people around you too. When you truly love yourself, and the love will flow out of you and spill onto other people in your lives. Loving yourself truly results in loving others automatically. Plus, the world treats you the way you treat yourself. When you start loving yourself, the world starts loving you. And life becomes a pleasant, love-filled journey where you look forward to each day.
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