Falling in Love With You

The process of learning to love unconditionally is often a long and difficult journey. I suppose that’s why I like to teach and talk about it, as its what I need to learn the most. Along the way, we inevitable arrive at the conclusion, as the old cliche goes, that we cannot love others unless we first love ourselves. The question for me has always been how do we do just that? How do we begin to love ourselves? Do we stand in front of a mirror and start flirting and making out with ourselves like James Franco recently did in this YouTube video, or do we just repeat love affirmations to ourselves and telling our own reflection how awesome we are?

In my experience, the process of learning to love ourselves must start with first learning to fall in love with who we are. By this I mean, learning to see ourselves in our own perfection and divinity first, embracing the totality of who we are, and learning to honor ourselves first before anything and anyone else. How do you do that? How can you get to a place in your own loving where you can walk by a mirror and look at yourself and literally tell yourself “I’m so in love with you baby!”?

Here’s some suggestions on how to begin this process of learning to fall in love with yourself:

Make Peace with your Past. Give yourself permission to allow your past and all the things you did and didn’t do rest in peace. Release any judgments you still hold about things someone did or didn’t do to you, about things you must have and should have done. Stop shouldn’t on yourself! Like the Beatles say ‘Let it Be’.

Forgive Yourself. Yes, all forms forgiveness are ultimately self forgiveness because when you forgive others you’re essentially forgiving a belief, or judgment you’re holding about something or someone. Think of something you like to forgive about yourself, a habit, an addiction, something you’ve been carrying with for years and begin my simply saying “Even though I (am, did, was, thought…)_____________, I deeply love and forgive and accept myself.”

Be Present to the Love in Your Heart. Our true and only source of Love resides in the One Presence that lives in our hearts. You can think of this as God in the first person, the I Am. Spend moments in silence attuning to this inner most loving presence, listening to it, communing with it. The love we all too often seek from others in the form of approval is as close to you as your jugular vein!

Pick Projects, and Relationships that are an expression of your Love. Now that you’re beginning to tap into that inner most source of love withing yourself, from this place choose the projects and relationships that are truly in resonance or vibrational match with yourself. Simply, put your attention on how you feel about something or someone and allow this newly found emotional guiding system to lead you into taking inspired action. Do those things that give you joy, or as Joseph Campbell reminded us ‘Follow Your Bliss”!

As our inner capacity to love ourselves grows, what begins to happen naturally is the manifestation of the highest expression of ourselves. From this love rooted awareness we begin to attract towards ourselves the right people, events and circumstances that will no doubt lead us to success. So start by falling in love with yourself first. You are the only person you can truly know intimately, and the biggest and most incredible love affair you’ll have your entire life. Fall in love with yourself first, then fall in love with others!