When many people talk about being a loving person, it’s usually about how loving, kind, compassionate, and caring they are to other people. The focus is on the outgoing current of love or the outpouring of love energy from you to others.
While loving and nurturing others is one of the most rewarding and fulfilling experiences there is, it is that much more rewarding and fulfilling when you’re extending that love, kindness, compassion, and care from a place of fullness.
How do you come from that quality of fullness? Through the practice of self-love.
What Self-Love Can Look Like in Daily Life
Self-love is about the kind of thoughts and emotions you have about yourself. When you've embodied a loving attitude toward yourself, you've internalized a positive relationship to yourself. You consistently direct loving thoughts and positive emotions toward yourself. You've be-friended yourself.
Self-love is not being selfish. Liking who you are is not being selfish. A more beneficial belief to cultivate about self-love is that it is healthy and promotes well-being. Having happiness in who you are is a positive thing to accomplish in life.
Developing and internalizing a loving attitude toward yourself is being accountable for your physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual well-being. It’s taking responsibility for your relational energy and how you use it in daily life. Love, kindness, compassion, respect, nurturance, and care are relational energies. They are energies you experience in relationship.
The level of satisfaction and happiness you feel in any relationship, including your relationship to yourself, depends on how much positive energy is present in that relational exchange.
Managing your relationship with yourself happens through self-care practices and habits. When you’re tending to your needs, taking time to self-reflect and engage in regular self-care activities, giving yourself time to listen to your responses, respecting yourself, making time to learn about yourself as a dynamic human being, pursuing your dreams and goals, practicing having compassion for yourself in daily life, cherishing yourself, having healthy boundaries that nurture and protect your energy, and generally extending warm, positive regard toward yourself, you’re filling up on positive energy.
You’re tending to the relationship you have with yourself.
You’re making space for yourself and engaging in some self-directed nurturing. This quality of active self-loving can make it easier to be more consistently loving to others and more open to receiving love from others. The more you take care of yourself by building and maintaining a positive relationship with yourself, the more you have to give to others.
What Helps You Develop and Internalize Self-Love
Part of effectively loving yourself requires self-awareness and self-knowledge. In order to love who you are and be attentive and responsive to your needs, wants, and preferences, to advocate for yourself and speak up for your needs and wants, you have to know who you are, what you value, what you prefer in just about every situation.
Self-knowledge is a lifelong practice of self-discovery. It's through this regular habit of looking within and knowing who you are at whatever stage of life you're on that helps you to keep your energetic integrity. It’s also what helps you know what replenishes your energy reserves. When you know what you love, what you enjoy, what delights you about yourself, others, and the world, you know what you can move toward for internal positive energy renewal.
A habit of self-love helps you stay mentally and emotionally fit. The positive energy that comes from all that positive focus you’re giving to yourself regularly actually has a cumulative effect over time. Positive emotions, when experienced regularly build or add to your energy reserves.
Actively practicing self-care by including it in your daily routines generally helps you move into a holistic sense of well-being. An active self-care practice can boost your mood, help you discover something new and delightful about yourself, help you recover and reverse the effects of stress, and so much more.
How Self-Love is the Basis for Healthy Self-Esteem and Self-Confidence
The more you direct loving, compassionate, kind, and caring attention toward yourself, the more you transform your self-talk.
Believing in yourself, seeing yourself as capable, being at ease in your skin, knowing that you belong in the world, that you give good loving, knowing that you will always deserve to be treated with respect are all psychological and emotional standards that become your norm when you’ve internalized a loving attitude toward yourself. It is a loving attitude toward yourself that stokes your inner radiance and allows you to shine.
Self-love helps you realize that you matter, you count, your voice counts, that you essentially deserve to feel love and loveable no matter what.
How Self-Love Can Help You Achieve Inner Balance
Self-love requires you to be introspective to some degree. Looking within yourself, checking in on how you feel and what you think allows you to self-reflect and look inward. That periodic return of your attention to your inner life is part of what helps you replenish your energy reserves.
By regularly paying attention to yourself, you become better equipped to identify and understand your physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs. From that self-attention and self-understanding, you can make plans and take action to meet your needs in various ways.
Self-love basically helps you invest in yourself and your overall well-being by helping you to direct some of your nurturing, loving, compassionate, and caring tendencies toward yourself. Developing the ability to nurture yourself and others helps you develop and maintain both internal and relational balance.
How Self-Love Can Help You Create and Maintain Healthy Boundaries
Self-love can help you raise your standards for what is acceptable energy and behavior from yourself and others. When you’ve developed the habit of treating yourself with nurturance, gentleness, respect, love, compassion, and care, you’ve raised your standard for what kind of energy and behaviors you’re willing to be available to from yourself and others. This can make it much easier to assert yourself and assert your boundaries.
Through self-love you can define who you want to be in the world and what you want to contribute to others in a relationship. When you raise your standards to the level of self-love you raise your standards for what you are willing to give to others as well as what you’re willing to be available to and receive from others. This is what helps you establish flexible but firm boundaries.
When you think about being a loving person, try thinking about it in the following terms:
Loving to self, loving to others
Kind to self, kind to others
Respectful to self, respectful to others
Compassionate to self, compassionate toward others
Caring toward self, caring toward others
Appreciative of self, appreciative of others
When you include yourself in that map of being loving, you balance the act of loving-ness in a way that helps you create and maintain healthy boundaries.
Self-Love Questionnaire to Help You Develop and Improve Your Level of Self-Love
To get a feel for the level of self-love you experience, try journaling on the following questions:
Do I feel comfortable admiring some of my strengths or positive qualities?
Is it easy for me to think about what makes me unique, loveable, and admirable?
Do I respect myself?
Can I think of a small number of personality traits that I am proud of?
Do I feel comfortable talking about what I like about myself?
Is it fairly easy for me to know how I feel in most situations?
Is it fairly easy for me to express myself in my life?
Am I supportive of myself?
Do I celebrate my accomplishments regularly?
Do I give myself positive acknowledgment and encouragement for my progress?
Do I consistently see myself in a positive light while I recognize I am a work in progress?
Do I give myself positive reassurance when I need it?
Am I gentle with myself?
Do I remind myself to look after myself?
Do I empower myself?
Am I easily receptive to positive compliments from others?
Do I focus on how I'm growing?
When I look in the mirror, do I feel love for who I am?
What energizing activities do I enjoy doing?
What are some of the things in my life that help me to replenish my energy?
By engaging your self-awareness around how you show up for yourself in daily life, you can build, improve, and fine-tune your attitude toward yourself. You can internalize and integrate a more loving attitude toward yourself and receive the many relational, psychological, emotional, and spiritual benefits of embodying self-love.
Kidest OM is a manifestation author and teacher with indispensable books and online courses designed to help you attract and manifest what you want. Her books include "Anything You Want" and "Nothing in the Way: Clearing the Paths to Success & Fulfilment" which are available globally in eBook, print, and audiobook on her website and through online book retailers.