Why we don’t really understand self-love although it’s a popular topic in the media for the past few decades. What is true love? True love means that you are treating yourself with respect and kindness. Self-love means that you are ready to fully accept yourself and are ready to grow.
Self-love is not only about the action, meaning it’s not only how we treat ourselves, it’s also about thoughts and feelings that we have about ourselves.
Why We Don’t Fully Understand Self-Love?
In our pro-body culture, we are learning to love ourselves (especially women). Self-love became a popular topic reinforced by almost every celebrity. Saying that there are things that you don’t love about yourself might even look wrong, but is it? Society will tell you – yes. We are fully trained to think that strong people accept themselves, don’t feel shame about anything.
Self-Love Vs. Self-Care
That’s the most important thing that we don’t understand about self-love. Self-love is not sabotage of self-growth, and for self-growth, we do need to be ready to accept that we don’t like certain things about ourselves but to be ready to change them. Maybe you do want to lose weight and there is nothing wrong with that. Maybe you need to be more assertive and you don’t accept that as an unchangeable part of you, but you are willing to change it.
Self-Love Vs. Self-Care
Many strongly believe that self-love and self-care are synonyms, but they are not at all. Self-care is the base that we need for our mental and overall health. Eating healthy, doing yoga, having bubble baths and drinking enough water is self-care. Self-love is how you deal with your demons telling you that you are not good enough. Are you kind to yourself? How often you have negative thoughts about yourself?
Self-love is the next step from self-care and it’s crucial for your mental health as well. Our inner world is very important for our overall happiness. How we talk to ourselves, what we say and think matters.
Self-Love Doesn’t Mean You Love Everything About Yourself
The biggest misconception could be that we often think that self-love means that we love ourselves and that we don’t want to change anything about our body or our personality. It’s more about appreciating where you are today but aspiring to become better. Yes, self-love is not about hiding yourself and things you don’t like about yourself but working on becoming a better version of yourself while showing kindness to yourself now.
Becoming unique, connecting with your inner world, and appreciating it is a major part of self-love. Accepting a need to change is also a part of self-love. You need to change if you want to commit to growth in each aspect of your inner world.
Self-Love is Not the Same Thing for Everyone
There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to self-love. It’s important to know what makes you worthy, happy and confident and that might not be the same thing as for everyone else.
To show yourself love you need to honor your soul and who you are. To be able to say “No”, you need to be in touch with yourself to know what makes you happy and what makes you feel miserable. This is not again the same for everyone. That’s why it’s important to find your own unique path that would help you act from the place of integrity and honesty to your higher self.
Self-Love is not Selfish
The last misconception that we have about self-love is that loving yourself is selfish. You should love others and show up for loved ones no matter what. You should prioritize your family before yourself. This is a tough one for most of us but the catch is that there is no need to prioritize yourself over your family or your family over yourself. Self-love brings harmony and strength to yourself and your family. It’s more about you and the people around you.
We should all do our part and play our role in being more compassionate, loving, kind and caring towards us. When we can do this for ourselves then we will be able to do the same for others.
