How to practice self love and other skills

Even though self-love is a concept that has been explored by the media and made famous by being used in mainstream speech it is not thoroughly explored as a practice besides being a notion. There are many ideas that relate and go hand-in-hand with self-love some of them being happiness, success, fulfillment, and many more but these notions stay in the abstract realm intangible and unreachable to the average person who doesn’t sit around and wonder philosophically on how to achieve self-love. People realize that they still don’t really understand how they can implement these ideas in their lives. So, the question of self-love still hangs unanswered. What this article attempts to do is highlight a few examples of how self-love should be practiced in daily life by using the force of thoughts and self-acceptance to practical ritual and acceptance.

Though Monitoring

For the more sensitive bunch of us, we tend to be highly alert to emotions and these emotions can manifest themselves in the form of thoughts. These thoughts can shape into emotions and vice versa, they come with a strong force, mass, and leverage that influence the receptor. Thoughts can be amazing in that they assert themselves loudly in a person’s life. They do that in an unconscious method; going deeply into our perception and encoding the next new thought processes and turning themselves into active perceptions and also behaviors. This is what internalization means; when thoughts can become programmed into our system of thoughts and change our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us. To be able to control your system of thoughts clearly impacts your ability to control your emotions and what change they can bring along. For example, If I am currently processing negative thoughts, I am internalizing them into negative emotions. I can easily change these negative emotions into positive emotions if I change my thought process. It can be a difficult method if you’re experiencing anxiety along with any other conditions which make it harder for you to control the severity of the negative emotions. However, don’t lose hope, because it is a learned process. This process in my opinion, of regulating your thought patterns the way you see fit, changing them from negative to positive, is what I see as self-love being practiced.

Ritual

How hard can it be to practice thought monitoring? Not hard if you implement a system. Imagine that you’re having a hard time controlling your negative emotions and they’re taking away your ability to truly perceive yourself and the world around you. You have sort of created a thought matrix around you that dislocates your vision from the positive to the negative. You look at the mirror and without a single heard thought a negative emotion arises. Your mind is now starting to flood with negativity and even your memories work against you making you remember past negative experiences. Now imagine that you are actively combatting this by using a system of thought monitoring. You look at yourself in the mirror and suddenly a negative thought brings up bad emotions but then instead of letting it control your body by stressing you, making you feel awful, you truly look at it and experience it. You see it for what it truly is, a thought. A construction, maybe, of your own, maybe not, maybe it comes from your environment or the media or someone else’s opinion of you. It’s not yours; you disown it. You take the agency back from the thought and you change it to whatever thought you see fit. Why not make it positive? It might seem like this is what a narcissist would do and some would say that there is a fine line between narcissism and self-love. However, true self-love comes from knowing yourself truly and this is where the next part comes in.

Acceptance

Acceptance is another facet of self-love. When you realize you’re surrounded by intrusive negative thoughts, it might be that your thoughts are not trying to bully you, although they definitely can, it can be a wake-up call to something you haven’t been attending to like self-image, self-esteem, and certainly self-love. What you begin to see is that there’s a barrier grown between you and yourself mad by these negative thoughts and the only way to loosen up the grip or bring down the walls between you and yourself is to swallow your pride and tell yourself straightforwardly what you have been feeding yourself your whole life. You see on second glance, that problems have arisen in your life caused by no one other than yourself, your lack of attention to what kind of ‘content’ you have been digesting is whats causing the negativity and so acceptance of your condition and yourself is what can bring you clarity and structure back into your life. Once these ego-protecting walls have fallen down, you will start to practice real self-love that builds you up strongly instead of hanging on to the fragile walls of dismissal and rejection of problems you need to deal with. Self-love is about knowing when to set the boundaries, when to be as frank as possible with yourself, and when to acknowledge that some of it is your fault. Acceptance, that way, can be your key to entering a healthy, loving, relationship with yourself.

As we can see, coming to terms with yourself about what you project onto reality is actually your own perception that might actually be flawed. Knowing when to break the thought matrix and exert enough energy to self-love through self-acceptance, changing the negative to the positive by taking the power into your hands, and finally detoxing from the fringes you’ve come to have grown accustomed to is the next step to actual self-loving.

It might be hard at first, but as I have mentioned, setting a ritualized system that keeps the harmful thoughts at bay will keep you learning how to better control your thoughts and emotions and stop projecting them onto the world. The chaos within unleashes itself into reality and it perpetuates back the same negativity. Express more love and you will learn to love back and the first person you should learn to love is yourself.