Hello everyone! I hope you are healthy and in a good condition this week. Lately i read something interesting in social media, yes…it’s about self love. So many celebrities nowadays are doing this campaign also. I totally agree with this topic, since i wrote a lot of blogs about accepting our selves condition or feelings. So many people wrote about the power of positive thinking, how to be positive, etc….so the positive movement is everywhere, but more or less we are starting to forget that our life won’t always surrounded with positive things. Yes…it’s not wrong that we do hope for positive things happening in our life, but somehow we have to be prepared for the negative side too and allow ourselves to experience it, especially our feelings.

At some point today, we are forced to always be okay, to keep being positive or to always show positivity in order to please others. That’s how we lose the sense to love ourselves. Loving ourselves doesn’t always mean that we are a selfish people who don’t care of others feelings. It means that we care more about our well being, our mental health, our body and mind, instead of pleasing others. A Self love is an action of appreciating our selves, our feelings by supporting ourselves physically, psychologically, and even spiritually. Self love means that we do care more about our needs and not always sacrificing our well being to please others.

Why is this important? Because we need to love ourselves first, so we can love others. Self love is a food to our soul so that we can be the best version of our selves. By loving ourselves, we become more alert and responsive to our need. It helps us to improve and maintain our well being. At the end, it helps us to make a healthy decision for our life. Self love also allows us to be vulnerable and unafraid to seek for help when we need it. By being a healthy person physically and psychologically, we can contribute more to our society and live our life to the fullest.

So how to love ourselves? There are some things that we can do to love ourselves, here are my opinions :

1. Accept our imperfections.

We live in a world who adore perfection so sometimes there is no rooms for imperfections, although perfection itself is only wishful thinking. How could we reach perfection since none of us human beings is perfect, only God is perfect. In my opinion, perfection actually is tightly related with our own standard, our parent’s standard, or our environment’s standard. When we don’t meet the standard, then the inferiority feelings will arouse. We start to think how imperfect we are and starting to hate our imperfection, especially when other keep talking about our imperfection. But one thing that we must keep in our mind that no matter how good we are, there must be people who keep talking behind our back. It’s not because of us, it’s because they do that to make themselves feel better about their imperfection, so that they won’t pity themselves. The people who like to talk about others normally don’t feel happy about their life, they don’t satisfy so they talk about other to make them feel better about their life. So don’t hate ourselves because of them. We can find our own perfection in our imperfection if we reframe our mind .

2. Take care of ourselves

We have to listen more to what our body’s need not what we want. Eating healthy food, to maintain our health, exercise not because we are ashamed of our body, but to keep being healthy or even be healthier. proper sleep to recharge our body, take a rest when we are tired, have some massage, drink more water, etc. We have to listen to our body’s need more than what we want.

3. Appreciate ourselves and say more nicely things to them

Be nice to ourselves. Appreciate ourselves even for a small achievement that we achieve in a day, such as not eating sugar for one day, not smoking in several hours, not saying something bad when we are angry, etc. Just tell our selves, “you did a great job, i’ m proud of you.” This nicely things act just like fertilizer that nourish our soul.

4. Retreat from routine

In this pandemic era it’s not easy to take holiday to another country or even city, but we can take a day off just to do something that we really like or need such as do our hobby, or just watch and sleep. For some people, even sleep is precious things to get. We need to recharge our body and mind regularly by taking a distance from our routine. If we don’t have a lot of time even for our selves, it’s good to have 10-15 minutes calming time, just close our eyes and take a deep breath.

5. Avoid toxic people

There are some people who are energy sucker. They always say something bad, complain about everything, and spread negative aura. I know this won’t be easy, especially if these kind of people are in our inner circle, so what can we do? First of all, avoid to play in the reality that they made. What they say to hurt us aren’t true. Sometimes people talk bad about us, just to make themselves feel better about their selves. It doesn’t related with our reality. Don’t drawn in when they complain about everything, just say that we understand their feeling and if possible try to exit from the conversation, if it’s not possible then try to make ourselves busy so we don’t pay attention to what they say. Don’t invest our time with them, if possible, keep interactions brief and the topics light. If we are lucky to have support system who aren’t toxic, utilize them.

6. Forgive ourselves

Everybody has made a mistake in their life. Mistake is indeed a great teacher, we can’t erase or undo the mistake but we can learn from it to be a better person. Forgive ourselves, don’t be to hard with it. We are only human and mistake is indeed a part of learning process. The greater the mistake, the more we have to learn from it. So forgive ourselves, learn from our mistake, and continue our life. The way we can get forgiveness from our mistake is only by showing that we can be a better person each day.

7. Accept your feelings

It’s easier for sure to accept positive feelings, but don’t deny the negative feelings cause it’s also real feelings. Negative feelings are not always bad, it’s a natural reaction to unpleasant stimulus. When you feel fear, you become more aware of danger, when you feel anxiety you become more alert. We need anger also, cause anger helps us to cope with stress by removing the tension in our body, so that it calms our nerves. We need sadness also since it is how our body signal to tell us that we need help from others to comfort us from our intolerable pain. It’s so okay to cry, crying doesn’t mean that we are weak. It’s just a mechanism of detoxing negative vibration. Feeling are there to be felt, to be accepted, and to be managed. So accept your feeling n condition cause life is not always about something good or positive, bad thing could happen n also negative feeling can exist.

Life won’t be so colorful if it’s only be filled with something good. Something that we think as a bad things, make us grow more. Growing doesn’t mean everything should be in a good condition, growing is a process, a tough one… that includes accepting imperfections, allowing and feeling the negative feeling, dealing and managing with all the negativities, reframe our mind, transform the negativity to healthy and productive beliefs. It won’t happen in a day and for sure it needs a lot of hard works. Don’t feel ashamed if we don’t feel okay today. It’s not easy to communicate this to others, especially if we don’t have a supportive surroundings, but we can always take a distance for a while to take care our selves until we are ready to face the world. Since we are the one who understand our selves better than others, so be nice to our selves!

Have a nice day everyone! Take care! God bless us all!