What Is Self-Love?

Today I’d like to share with you a few reflections on the concept of “self-love”, because it’s coming up daily in my coaching sessions, and I think it’s of the utmost importance that we give it some conscious thought.

Many people think that self-love means selfishness, being over-indulgent, lacking discipline, and many other negative things. For others, it means treating yourself to a massage, to a beautiful concert, to special food. It’s neither nor.

Self-love means, first of all, understanding what we are. What is a human being? It’s an eternal soul, experiencing the universe through a physical body. Each and every one of our souls is part of the all-knowing, all-permeating universal intelligence. A spark of the divine.

What’s not to love about that?

Your soul chose the perfect body, perfect family, perfect place and time to be born, in order to live its life purpose. Your soul came into this life with an exciting plan, with things to learn, to do, to experience. For your own benefit, and for the benefit of the entire universe.

What’s not to respect about that?

You came here on a very important mission. No matter what your family, school, community, church, spouse, and neighbours told you, the truth is that you matter. You are loved. You are needed. You are meant to be here. Otherwise, you simply wouldn’t exist. The universe doesn’t do anything by mistake, by chance, by default.

I know there are 7 billion of us on this little planet, and people say it’s not possible that every single life should be so important. Well, they’re wrong. Every single life IS so important. And 7 billion is a tiny elite group in the vastness of the universe.

If you’re a human being, you are an elite soul, a cutting-edge soul. You may say, come on, don’t tell me that all those horrible criminals out there are beautiful, worthy souls?! Yes, they are. Only, their minds don’t know. Because their family, school, community, church, spouse, and neighbours told them that they’re worthless. Not necessarily because they meant harm, it’s often only because they didn’t know better themselves.

The truth is, that every soul is a wonderful soul. What can be very ugly is the mind, the ego. The ego is our primeval survival mechanism, it has the function to keep us away from danger so we can stay alive. Now that’s great when it’s dealing with tigers and poisonous berries, but it’s a little less great when it wants to protect us from our own dreams, or from starvation in the middle of abundance, or from beautiful human beings who only look different or think differently from us.

The ego is limited and scared, and it just wants to feel safe. So everything new, exciting, different, great, is perceived as a threat to its peace and its very survival.

The source of all evil is fear. Only fear. And fear is the ego’s big thing, not the soul’s. The soul doesn’t know fear. The problem is that the ego is – like most very stupid people – very loud. And it babbles all the time, mostly nonsense. So the soul, whose all-knowing, all-loving, and usually soft-spoken, cannot be heard.

In order to allow your own self-love in, you only need to understand who’s who and what’s what.

There’s “you”, the conscious mind, my analytical, rational self who’s writing this post, and yours who’s reading it.

Then there’s the ego-mind, my identity, who’s afraid that you won’t like it, and yours, who’s thinking who’s this silly cow,  writing all this rubbish?

And then there’s the soul, the real me, and the REAL YOU. Our souls know and love. Deeply. That’s all they do. They’re not afraid, they’re not judgemental, they’re not stressed, angry, sad, malicious. They’re just all-knowing and all-loving because these are the energies they’re made of.

As human beings, we are magnificent. Our conscious mind has the ability to appreciate the purpose of the ego and to put it in the right perspective. It has the ability to free the subconscious mind of all the fears and limiting beliefs that we have been storing there since day one of our journey on earth. And it has the ability to invite the soul back into the body, to allow it back into the driver’s seat, once the ego-mind has been cleared, appreciated and thanked for what it is, and asked to just relax and enjoy the ride.

And when this happens, from this new place of pure consciousness, we start creating our life the way we want it. We are natural-born creators. Want to call that gods?

What’s not to love about the all-knowing, all-loving, creative, god or goddess that you are?