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6 Steps to Loving Yourself

6 Steps to Loving Yourself

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Love yourself, you’re a unique, special, wonderful creation of God!

A student recently asked me, how can ‘I’ love ‘myself’? Wouldn’t there have to be two of me to make that happen? This is so true. However, for most people this is an understanding that comes much later, because they’re too caught up in hating or criticizing themselves. So if you think there is no one to love, move on to another post. If you hate yourself and want to change that, this is for you.

Now, 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.

1. Sunshine

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 – happy thoughts, spirituality, love, and this comes with surrounding yourself with the right kind of people and if that’s not possible, the right kinds of books and tv programs (dramatic soap operas, reality shows like Big boss, news channels do NOT fall into this category, they’re disease).

2. Manure

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.

One simple question helps to keep the focus on yourself instead of on everyone else – ‘what is the lesson life is trying to teach me, through this incident?’

3. Water

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.

4. Trimming and Pruning

When you start to grow, you’ll realize 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 (lovingly) 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.

5. Take responsibility for yourself

When we don’t love ourselves, we lack the motivation in doing things for ourselves. We then expect that those we spend our time on, should spend time on us, but this is rarely the case, because usually those who don’t care about themselves don’t get cared for by anyone else. Be your own best friend first, invest in yourself.

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.

… physically, mentally, emotionally
This means taking care of your diet and exercise for physical health, taking care to watch your thoughts and not take them seriously, for mental health, and surrendering to your feelings and let them come and go, for emotional health.

6. What do YOU want?

Most often, people hate themselves because they’ve been surrounded by critical, judgmental people for too long, and believed them. They then end up filtering their actions and words based on those judgments. In the beginning, it helps to remind oneself that those are just judgments, and ask one question ‘what do I want?’

Closing Remarks

Loving oneself does not give you the license to hurt others. It might be tempting in the beginning to just damn those who have suppressed you, and do whatever you like. But this is the opposite state of where you’ve been and will also bring you pain. Relax into a state where you are really aware of what your needs are, and ensure that those needs are met in a pleasant, comfortable way. It is possible.

Finding the Right Partner

Finding the Right Partner

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We live in a society where it is taboo to be alone. As they age, many singles feel like they’re nearing their expiry date, causing them additional stress over and above their work tensions, and making them feel older as well.

‘I desperately feel the need to have someone to care for me – someone who’ll be bothered whether I’m hungry or healthy’, one friend told me, adding that he wasn’t able to find the girl of his dreams – either he liked them, or they liked him, but it just didn’t seem to happen together. Those who are undergoing the process of ‘looking’ or ‘hunting’ for boys or girls for arranged marriages, are even more agonized. While a girl whined that she’s just not able to find a man who is willing to take a working and independent woman, and one who wouldn’t ask about the dowry before he enquired about her name, another guy friend complained that girls only seemed concerned about his salary, family property and whether he had scope of working abroad.

What we all need to do here is stop and ask ourselves – Does this really have to be this difficult? And to anyone acquainted with the universal laws of attraction (not talking about male-female attraction here), the answer is clear – NO.

No, it doesn’t have to be this difficult. No, they don’t have to suffer this much. No, not everyone in the world is concerned only about money, and no, you don’t have to settle for that last person just because you’re fed up and have lost hope. No.

It can be easy, yes, you can find that one person you’ve been waiting for all your life. Yes, you can have a happy married life, and yes, you can find joy, freedom and growth in a bright and happy relationship after marriage. But is that what you’re really asking for? Let us begin at the beginning.

We’re going to start with looking inside ourselves. There is just one real requirement to finding a partner – a desire to find one. And before you jump in your seats screaming ‘ofcourse I want a partner!!’, wait. Do you really want one? I mean really, really want one? Are you really, truly willing to let your defences down and allow a person to see the deepest, darkest sides of you? Are you really willing to place all your trust and faith in another person? Are you really willing to share every aspect of your life with another person? Yes? Probably not. There is a fear – and that is the fear that prevents that special someone from stepping into your life and sweeping you off your feet. You can’t be swept off your feet if you’re afraid of letting go of the ground. Let go.

Secondly, all our focus is on what we want from that other person, and not on what we can offer to them. We all want someone to care for us, someone to bother about us, someone to worry about us, someone to wait for us until we get home. But are we ready to give yet? Have we ever focussed our attention on being able to give of ourselves? Are we waiting just as desperately to care about someone? To bother, worry, and wait for that special someone? Are we looking forward to loving someone else with all our hearts for all our lives?

Despite the desperate want for that special someone, we’re afraid at the same time that we will lose our freedom. Marriage is looked upon so frequently as a permanent bondage, that it is hard to think of it otherwise. The desire to find a partner, and the fear of being bound do not go together. Fear sabotages any bright plans for the future. That marriage is not bondage, is a topic that requires an entire essay to emphasize the point. Only if a person is not willing to work at marriage, does it change a person for the worse and binds him/ her. If you want to be a person who doesn’t want to give his/ her all to the marriage and doesn’t want to work at it, you’ll be stuck with an unhappy, miserable relationship for the rest of your life, the type your children will look at and say ‘I don’t want to marry because people get miserable after marriage’.

For those who look forward to marriage and are willing to give it their all, it is a completely different experience. If you’re a person who wants to find that life -partner to love, care for and grow with and are willing to change yourself for the better to help the relationship, you’ll find the perfect man/ woman and live the kind of relationship that people will look at and want to emulate. Don’t resist change, embrace it – because these changes make you a better, stronger and happier person – isn’t that the kind of person you want to be?

A happy married life actually adds much more fun to one’s life! One never has to depend on friends to go on a trip, one tends to be more careful about expenses and hence has more money at one’s disposal, salaries are often double to boot, and you have someone who’s always there to help you become a better person – all you need to do is ask! Marriage is the easiest way to bring out the best in you.You can choose whether you want to be stuck and bound after marriage, losing your freedom, or whether you want to enjoy more than you ever have, and celebrate twice the freedom and love you’ve ever experienced in your life. Its your choice, and you have to make it both consciously and subconsciously.

So all you really need to do is take a good look inside your mind, figure out what is bothering you, what you are afraid of, and eliminate it. Thats all – and your life partner will breeze into your life so fast that you won’t even know what hit you. Trust me, I’m not exaggerating. Follow it correctly and you’ll find someone within a couple of months. It really is that fast.

The steps are simple to list, a little difficult to apply, but certainly doable, and bring great results.

1) Identify the emotion / fear that is preventing you from allowing yourself to totally submit yourself to another person.

2) Eliminate the fear/ blockage, talk to someone wise at this point if you have to. Or just talk to a happily married couple and get their views on the topic.

3) Start dreaming about the life you’ll have together. No matter what you do, think about that person. Think about how you’ll cook for each other, how you’ll make your birthdays special, how you’ll go on long drives together, etc. Whatever you do, think, how would this moment be once I find my partner? Dream about him/ her as you fall asleep.

4) Prepare for that person to step into your life. Start saving up for the life you’re going to have together. Look at romantic greeting cards. Stop to look at that wedding dress hanging in the store window. Read articles on how to be a good husband/ wife. Learn cooking. Take the plunge. Believe.

And lastly, LET GO. Several studies have shown that those who are incapable of being happy before finding a partner, are incapable of being happy after finding one. Provided you find the perfect one, it will bring you at most 2 years of a ‘high’. Identify the desire to chase this belief that you have everything except ‘this one last thing’, and drop it. Be happy now. Romance life, dance with every moment and if you’re lucky, you’ll find someone else doing the same dance too.

Love and Emotions

Love and Emotions

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Is it love or is it just an emotional addiction?

True love is something  we all covet, but when we stop to think about it, what is true love after all, and how do we recognise it? Does such a thing even exist? Then are all other ‘loves’ false? Yes and no. I believe that there is no difference, but I use the ‘true love’ term anyway, because people seem to call everything else love too.

People seem to mistake what I call ’emotional addictions’ to be love most of the time. An emotional addiction is something that is a very convenient arrangement atleast initially. Something like smoking. All of us have gaps and holes in our emotional personalities, and anyone who fills them is a favourite of ours, because they make us feel nice. But just like any addiction, these relationships slowly start strangulating the person, preventing his growth and making him miserable. It comes to a “can’t live with, can’t live without” situation, because staying with the person is misery, but without that person, one feels completely lost and starved. Just like withdrawal symptoms, actually.

Most relationships are varying degrees of emotional addictions. Where the need is more, the addiction, the bond, is stronger. And in case of separation, the pain is that much unbearable. When you see people wanting to commit suicide after being dumped, you know its a serious case of addiction – the absence of the lover leaves an emotional gap the person cannot handle.

Someone recently told me, “whats wrong if someone fills your emotional needs; if we have needs, obviously it is good if someone fills them”. No. This is why I say life must be a journey of constant self-development, a journey where you are constantly persevering to eliminate your own emotional needs. As long as you have these gaps, you’re susceptible. To steer clear of emotional addictions, you HAVE to work at filling your own gaps.

So now you’re wondering, how do I identify addictions and what is true love anyway? Think of a person you love very much. Now imagine them dead. How will you feel, will you survive? What are your biggest fears – that of being left alone? Or how you will manage the bills or the kids, or who will take care of you?? Those are your gaps. Those fears will tell you where your gaps are being filled.

The mother-child relationship is often hailed as the ideal love relationship because it is not based on need. I’m talking generally, ofcourse, I’ve seen a lot of mothers fail at it. However, generally the mother loves the child no matter what it does. It is not a need-based relationship – you can live away from your mother and you still feel her presence in your heart.

Coming to love, it is non-binding. It is something that helps you grow. When you are in love, you find yourself becoming the best person you ever were. All the best parts of you start blooming and the negatives start getting erased. Two people in love help each other grow, and help each other eliminate their own emotional needs. They’d be making their partners more independent in the process. The most important part of love is loving oneself. Love makes you see the beauty in yourself and realise that you’re special. And this love spills over and benefits everyone around you.

If you find yourself telling your lover ‘I can’t live without you’, think again, you have addiction written all over the relationship. But if you say ‘I can live without you, but I want to spend the rest of my life with you’, you probably have something going.

Coping with Emotional Turbulence

Coping with Emotional Turbulence

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When it gets dark and cloudy
And nature whips up a storm
It leaves everything wrecked
Abused, destroyed and torn

It is the eye of the storm
That’s the safest place to be
But it moves, before we know
No one is spared its fury

There is no escape
From things we are destined to bear
They comes and wreck up our lives,
But success lies in our capaciy to repair
The root cause of all our problems – whether mental, emotional or physical, lies in only one place – our mind. When something goes wrong, we tend to toss it in our minds, looking at the problem from all sides, analysing how it will devastate our lives, how things could get even worse, and so on. If one could just decide to stop thinking of it all, there would probably be no problems at all, but no, things just never seem to work that way.

The statement ‘take life as it comes’ has a much deeper meaning and is much tougher to apply in real life. We have to learn to accept our problems. More often than not, it is not the problem we are afraid of, but that it might last that way forever, or might make things worse. Just like if you try to run away from a dog, it will run after you, the more you try to get rid of a problem, it will make life more miserable for you.

This does not mean that we should not work towards solving problems – it just means that when we are trying to solve problems, we must remove from our mind, the fear the the problem might not get solved. It will.

This too shall pass
Once we realise that problems are here only to go, it will change our attitude to problems. To understand this concept, think of the most trying time you went through, and see how things sorted out themselves. That phase went away, this will too. Think of the good times, they went away too. Change is the only constant in life!

Having to Decide
Depression and fear are at their peak, when time is running out and one has to make a crucial decision fast. In situations such as these, we tend to get worried that we might make the wrong choice and end up suffering for the rest of our lives. Wrong. There is no such thing as a wrong decision – both the paths will teach you important lessons, and help you grow, which is the ultimate purpose of your life on earth.

The most helpful in a case like this, is to find someone who you know will help you put things in perspective, weigh the pros and cons and decide. And once the decision is made, never look back. Regret is only an excuse for your current failure.

Accept it
When you are depressed or afraid, do not worry over it. It is normal, and happens to everyone at some point in time. Accept your state, accept your misery, and accept that you are not being your normal, happy self. Give yourself that allowance, after all, you’re only human! It is ok to be depressed, and that does not make you any less lovable. Tell yourself that this is only a passing phase, and soon you’ll be happy again, and this will be nothing but a forgotten chapter of life.