The Radiance of Love: Learning to Love Yourself

Love is perhaps the single most common emotion humans want to experience. We seek to give love to others, to experience the strength of that emotion and everything it brings us. That being so, can we even begin to imagine what might transpire for us if we direct our ability to feel love for others at our own selves? Self-love is perhaps the most important gift we can give ourselves. Loving ourselves is perhaps the most important work of our lifetime.

As we journey through our lives, all of us experience times when events upset us. Sometimes the upset can be great enough that we hang onto it, often for years until it just becomes part of the fabric of our being. Often, the emotion we feel at the time of the event surpasses our ability to process it and we suppress it. This can be particularly true when we are very young and lack the life experience to make rational assessments of situations.

The upshot is that most of us are unable to really approach each new situation with a blank sheet. Our responses are colored by our past experiences. If you’ve ever had the experience of arguing with someone and then later wondering why it happened, you have most likely experienced this phenomenon. You were not dealing with the person and the situation in the ’now’ and with an open heart. Most likely, something about the event triggered a subliminal memory of a similar one and you reacted as you reacted in that past event.

In addition, carrying the unresolved emotion from past events can impact our lives in all sorts of ways and we feel fear. We fear getting into a new relationship because we have been hurt before. We work at occupations that are below our abilities because we don’t think we ‘have what it takes.’ We can’t accept compliments. We let people walk over us. We put other people’s needs before our own. And so on. We begin to practise self-hatred. We don’t like something about our personalities. We don’t like the way we behave. We don’t like something about our bodies.

The solution to all this is the healing of these old emotions. The tool for that is self-love. In my opinion, one of the most beautiful songs ever written is “The Power of Love” by “Frankie Goes To Hollywood”. In this song you can hear the lines “love is the light scaring darkness away” and describes love as “a force from above cleaning my soul.” Simple thoughts and yet so powerful.

Self-love means self-acceptance. We cannot love those parts of ourselves we hate. Once we accept ourselves and look at those bits of ourselves we have been trying not to, then we can begin to heal ourselves. You will no doubt have heard the saying “what you resist, persists.” Loving ourselves means accepting the pain we feel, acknowledging the pain we feel, accepting that we experienced that. Pushing it away achieves nothing except to keep us miserable.

Once we bring our pain into our awareness, then we can pour the love that we so easily give others into ourselves. This feels good. Instead of beating ourselves up for our perceived shortcomings, we feel compassion for ourselves just as we would for a hurt or upset child. Thus, we release our pain leaving us freer to respond to life in more affirming ways. As we release our pains one by one, so we become more ourselves. As we release our pains, so we experience more joy. Being kind and loving to ourselves means that we are more able to be kind and loving to others. Thus we develop the capacity to give and receive love. Then we radiate love. Isn’t that what we all want?