Love yourself passionately: how and why

On By Inese, visual artist, writer and life sciences bloggerIn goals and determination, happiness, life, love, personality

You are manager and boss of your life

In my previous universe and subconscious mind related articles, I reviewed how seriously universe takes you. If you are not yet a responsible manager of your own life, you have to change things around so that you decide what happens to you, not anybody or anything else.

Who or what runs your life

You have to become the one who creates the life you want to live by not allowing to be pushed around or told what not to do. Just floating with the stream also takes you nowhere or it takes you where the stream goes which might be a place where you do not want to be.

Difficult times should not stop us

This is fast-paced and complex time we live in. Pressure from social media, requirements from workplace, family necessities and the need to prove the society that you are a worthy and valuable person, obligation to compete and establish your presence can take one’s true identity swiftly away and dilute your personal goals and intentions.

Somebody told me how the life felt so immense and infinite to her in the age before the internet. There was definitely much larger personal space, there was much less need to show off or demonstrate one’s greatness. There was absolutely no need to invent your online personality just to be in line with everybody else and not to look bad.

Satisfaction with life

Loving ourselves is a huge part of a good and satisfactory life. There is also a tight association between satisfaction with life and loving yourself. We are the source of our own happiness, genuine pleasure and well-being. The only true harmony must also come from within us. It is pointless to look for it in diets or entertainment. In order to be satisfied with your life and the way things happen, you must start with loving yourself, honestly, truly and passionately.

Most people try really hard to be an excellent student, flawless employee, perfect wife and mother, as well as good child to their parents. They end up perfecting and developing their skills to exhaustion and try to do everything for their children, take care of older parents and become a superb wife or husband that always supports her spouse to achieve their life goals.

Put yourself first

The only social role which is quite frequently neglected is our own personality.

It is understandable how one wants to please everybody in order other people would say they are helpful, kind and good people to be around.

We have to put ourselves first actually. While pleasing others and taking care of everybody else’s needs, we do not live our own life. We start to depend on other peoples’ judgement and opinions. In that case, our well-being completely depends on what the others said, thought and how they viewed our actions or us.

What does it really mean to love yourself?

It first of all means to realize who you are. That means to become conscious of your own desires, goals and intentions. That means to be aware of your qualities and bad traits of character and still respect and love yourself for who you are and how you are. That also includes self-care and doing no harm to oneself.

Being selfish or loving yourself

There is a thin line between selfishness, extreme selfishness and loving oneself. We have to always focus on the golden middle. Your common sense should guide you and tell where a total selfishness starts and where you just say “no” to make your own life more pleasurable and satisfactory.

The less you love yourself, the more often you will come to conclusion that you must be fine with what you have and you are not entitled to strive for more. Quite frequently that also involves neglecting your talents, skills and abilities, because why to bother?

Our only life: here and now

In our current shape, we have only this one life. We do not know if, when and how we might live again. Therefore, we have to live consciously our own life without being a patch to others needs and goals. Gradually, we learn saying “no” to invitations, requests and demands. We guard our inner space and we do not allow anybody to deplete our energy. That means choosing between activities, deciding on entertainment and even more so on work tasks and different duties.

Problematic matters

If you clearly know that you have to do a lot in order to genuinely love yourself which is not the same as publishing exciting stories about your success or selfies where you look the best on social media sites, you should at first identify the areas which require some change.

Most people will identify only physically visible things (too obese, too thin, too old, too many wrinkles, bad hair and so on), but we have to think about the mental part of us also. The satisfaction with life is born in our brain. Our brain and our head manage everything, and dissatisfaction with life causes neuroses, depression, anxiety, nervousness, insomnia, tiredness, lethargy and mood swings which sooner or later manifest as physical damage to our physical body.

Loving yourself results in happiness

The happy people usually take good care about themselves. They normally love themselves also: with all they have physically and mentally. That does not mean only loving yourself when you are in a perfect shape, look great and life is kind to you. That means loving your wrinkles, your not-that-perfect body, loving you when you are sick and when crying, too. Your current body is all you have for this life, so love it! That also means loving yourself early in the morning and after a long workday. That means understanding why you feel the way you feel and figuring out how to change the annoying or upsetting matters.

Steps to self-care and loving yourself:

identify what you adore, love about yourself and are pleased with, don’t stop at only physical look, work, skills or relationships;

identify what areas need improvement and include all areas of life, as well as physical body, mental state and any conditions that bother you;

learn making decisions about what you need and what you absolutely do not, prioritize;

make a list of things you want to do, what you desire, what is necessary in order you (nobody else) would feel better, good and satisfied with your life;

implement and focus on purposeful actions: new hobby, new skills, attending courses, getting education, engaging in sports, spending time outdoors, doing physical exercise, changing eating habits, giving up bad habits, learning new things, creating garden, attending hairdressers or spa, massage, cosmetic or beauty treatments, changing home interior and so on.

The goal: pleasure and satisfaction with yourself and life

The goal is to experience pleasure and satisfaction with yourself (what you have achieved) and be happy with changes.

Thinking less of yourself causes numerous diseases and health problems, therefore: love yourself genuinely and honestly and from the bottom of your heart so that the soul can sing!

Next time more.

26 thoughts on “Love yourself passionately: how and why”

      1. Thank you Inese. I think, this has to do with being a very young mother many years ago. Then you put your kids in front as a good parent. Then I forgot myself for some years and now I have been working on the case for some years.

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      2. That can happen. My daughter is almost 40 and grandchildren 21 and 16. As far as I remember, I did not have time to think about such serious things. However, I somehow always wanted to look the best, to go ahead with education and do whatever I preferred. I think I have managed that: do whatever I prefer.
        WE were best friends with my daughter and she was angry that children in the yard told I was her sister. Did that happen with you also? I think having children early is great. There are many people my age in Canada who have teens. That is difficult to imagine.
        Regardless of what you did or didn’t, it is never too late to turn life around and be in a place where you want to be.
        Regrets, feeling of guilt or being sorry destroy people from inside. Any such thing should be left behind. Therefore, we focus on the moment we are in and make the best of it. It doesn’t matter what others think or assume. You know what you are doing and where you are going.
        Many say; be happy with what you have. I’m saying: always dare to ask and go for more.

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      3. I can only agree. Tomorrow might be a better day, if we work for it.
        My adult kids are now 34 and 31 years old and they both have toddlers.
        I did take my education, while they were kids and remember it was tough, but possible. If we really want, we can…

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      12. I hope to help people finding the best part of themselves. I have written and half-written quite a few of follow-up articles about the same theme: how to make live better, easier and more enjoyable. This especially relates to women because speaking from my own perspective and revealing what I have discovered is what I feel I should be doing at this point of my life. I just turned 61 a small while ago, so, time is precious and it needs to be spent purposefully and mindfully.

        Liked by 2 people

    1. Thank you! I could say it took me 60 years to arrive at knowledge what I am sharing on this blog. We didn’t have internet yet when I was young, and I think it really prevented lots of bad things from happening. Regardless of all online convenience and technically advanced machines making our life easier, there is a terrible price to pay. Most frequently, it is the ability to compare oneself to all the rest of the world.
      There is always somebody healthier, slimmer, richer and smarter and when one wants to be at the top of all the online bragging, it can cause losing one’s true identity.
      Loving ourselves is a big deal. It requires a strong spine and being able to withstand all trends and all wrong routes to happiness.
      I would love people returning to their own decisions and being what they are. I mean, giving up the false masks and pretense is going to make life easier. I really hate the sheep-like behavior when masses follow some hilarious guidelines. It hasn’t made nobody healthier or better. When I see the statistics about nervous system and brain diseases, as well as mental troubles, I want to suggest people returning to the basics: follow their gut feelings (that is almost always the subconscious mind talking), true instincts and their personal decisions. It is important we love ourselves for who we are and for what we can develop us into.

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  3. “Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.”

    When we feel pushed around by emotions, particularly other’s emotions we often make wrong decisions. Rational choices, thinking, is very important.

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    1. Thanks Joanne!
      That’s why we do not depend on other peoples’ judgment or appreciation. We have to make our opinion count first. While we have to stick to certain behavior and be decent, we still make our life, our decisions depend on us and our goals. That is what I reviewed in previous articles: how to take your life in your own hands.
      If you add self-love and self-care to that, life becomes way easier.
      In another articles I wrote how everybody’s life is their own responsibility. We should live our own life while we can. Parents, kids, friends, spouses, they all are responsible for their own happiness.
      Rational choices are definitely important. The other part is trying to access your subconscious mind which knows everything about you and other people. The feeling we’ve met somebody before or that we’ve been somewhere before is quite real because you most likely have some association with either that person or place.
      Generally speaking, we should feel and think and listen to our own body and subconscious mind. We should become observant and watch for signs, and definitely love ourselves passionately and sincerely.

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    1. Exactly! Who wants to love and like a person who has a bad opinion about themselves? I also know how people who love themselves have such very attractive aura. It’s a pleasure to be around such people. It does not even depend on whether they are physically very attractive. It comes from the inside. It is very noticeable, as well. I wrote this post because it sort of continues the personal improvement line. I personally never had issues with loving myself, I think it happened very naturally. I am seeing, however, many people who like to describe themselves as failures, unlucky, unsuccessful and who are comfortable with admitting that they do not need or deserve more.

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  5. I’m so glad you posted this, as I feel it’s such an important theme for people to understand more. There is so much stigma around “self care and self love” because it has not been taught and there are more ideas around what it is not, than what it is. People identify it with selfishness and narcissism, of which as you pointed out, is not so. I love the details you shared to help people understand the difference. I have found this constantly coming up with people I meet and their having a tough time with it. I feel it’s fundamentally a key factor that runs the show and when we create that healthy relationship with ourselves, the rest of life falls into place more harmoniously. Thank you Inese!

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    1. Thank you, Tania Marie!
      While I always loved myself a lot straight from the get go, I have noticed how people use to put themselves down describing how little they know, how they lack experience, how they cannot handle many things and how they get desperate and depressed afterwords.
      Self-respect, self-love and self-care definitely play a major role in what we get from life.
      Many people also live for others assuming that this is how it must be.
      I mentioned in the previous articles that every single person, your kid, your spouse, your parent, your friend or your neighbor, everybody, is responsible for their own life and where it takes them or rather where they have lead themselves. Therefore, living for others will cause one feeling a huge void at the end when they realize they missed their own life.
      I don’t think loving oneself can be taught. However, there are approaches one can advise to practice. We are seeing lots of positivity and probably false happiness statements online. When you meet the real person, you frequently see how tired, exhausted and disappointed they are. that life didn’t turn out what they expected to.
      Well, it all starts with us.
      There are extremely selfish people and that can cause other problems, but yet, without loving ourselves nothing good is going to happen.
      I will continue in some next articles what causes the lack of love towards ourselves and what it results in.

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  6. theburningheart

    Good advice, as always Inese.

    “We are the source of our own happiness, genuine pleasure and well-being. The only true harmony must also come from within us. It is pointless to look for it in diets or entertainment. In order to be satisfied with your life and the way things happen, you must start with loving yourself, honestly, truly and passionately.”

    In Spanish we like to say: “El que es buen juez por su casa empieza” (“A good judge starts with his own home”).

    Best regards to you Inese. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

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