Learn to Love Yourself by Louise Hay

Hey everyone! It's September 1st here in the Philippines and it signals that Christmas is just around the corner. Well, it's three more months before December but in here, the '-ber' months fly by fast!

I'd like to share what's been on my mind lately. It's about loving ourselves. We always hear our friends in a relationship tell us "Love yourself first then you will find someone who will love you the way you deserve to be loved." While it has become a cliché, it makes sense for how can you know what love from others you'd deserve if you don't even love yourself?

So the next question to ask would be...

How do I love myself?

I was happy when my mentor shared an audio clip to me two months ago. It was a clip from Louise Hay's "Learn to Love Yourself" retreat and it was quite long. After listening to the first 17 minutes, I was hooked. It was like she knew the bad things we say to ourselves when we're not our biggest fans. I got inspired that I decided to share her nuggets of wisdom in a blog post.

I've been putting into habit learning things and applying them right away as I noticed that it will give me my desired results faster. When I learned about this I got my journal, penned it down and internalized the ideas. I'm looking to find out if loving myself will affect my performance as a human being for the better. I used negative feelings as a motivator for me before, what would happen if I changed that? Maybe you'd want to try it out for yourself too? It'd be nice to know how these would work on you too.



We all stretched our limits when we were in college. But as chemical engineering students, I dare say that not only were our limits tested but also our very core as human beings (dramatic, but true). My friend Hive account@glecerioberto have shared that our college experience as chemical engineering students was difficult. I've gotten to know of the part of myself that was pretty harsh when it came to, well, myself. Whenever I got low grades I would say to myself, "You are not doing enough. You should not sleep. You should stay up. Why are you wasting so much time?" Needless to say, it backfired. I burned myself out. I didn't get anything done. My fire died.

Louise Hay recommends to choose thoughts that are nurturing to you. If I knew back then what I knew now, I'd say "This problem is new to you, that's why you need to be patient as you try to learn it. You are doing your best. Just a little push, and maybe you'll go farther. Is there something about this task that you don't know about? Is this task something that you wanna do?" Like I would a good friend.



"If you don't do this, you'd fail for sure. When you fail, you'd be an embarrassment." Sound familiar?

I came across this idea of using negative feelings as a call to action. Fear is a negative feeling. When you scare yourself, you may have gotten an urge to act and it may have given you a sense of control. But when you use fear as a motivator all the time, won't that make you a fearful person? As far as my experience tells me, fearful people are not a joy to be around. Louise Hay shares that you can use things you love as switch to fear. Try to think of your favorite things whenever you find yourself scared. Just like the song...

"I whistle a happy tune and every single time,
the happiness in the tune, convinces me that I am not afraid."

She then adds, "love yourself enough to stop scaring yourself."

In the beginning, she says that you'll see not much has been happening. You'll get negative thoughts out of nowhere, like weeds that grow in your garden. She likens weeds to the old negative thoughts, best to pluck them out. She reminds us that it's okay to make mistakes. Everything feels different the first time you do them.

I love what she said about self-hatred. To her, it is hating all your thoughts about yourself. You don't want to be hating on yourself for having thoughts, right? We can't tell ourselves to stop thinking, we just do it. What we can do is to gently change our thoughts of hatred to loving. Life may have taught us to work hard to earn love, but she said that's not true. We are lovable because we exist. Build yourself up, don't beat it up. Building yourself up shows that you love yourself. Another kindness that you can give yourself is relaxation. Another pretty good way is meditation.

Praise builds yourself up. She also differentiated blame from responsibility. Blame isn't going to build you up, responsibility will. Blame is saying that it's your fault while responsibility is saying that you can do something that will change things for the better.

Sometimes we shut ourselves from the world because we think we might cause inconvenience. We can never be more wrong. Our friends, especially those who love us, have our best interest at heart. People who have our best interest at heart would want to help us. I remembered feeling really bad one time because I wasn't exercising anymore and I opened up to one of my closest friends, I felt better after having told her what's going on with me. She said that she was glad to be of help. Don't be afraid to ask for help.

It's your house. Watch what you put in your body, be it food, thoughts, words or activities. Find an exercise that you enjoy. Louise Hay also mentioned that part of loving ourselves is feeling our feelings. Allow yourself to feel what you're feeling, even the negative feelings but remember to do more of what gives you good energy.

Your negatives served a need before. You probably were insecure and the only way you'd get past those feelings is to find bad things about other people. This negative habit served a need that you had before, but loving yourself entails that you change these negatives gradually by acknowledging that you have them, mindfully transitioning them from negative traits into positive ones that will build you up.

Ultimately, loving ourselves takes work. There are times when it's easy, times when it's hard. But whatever the circumstances, it will be worth it. How can others know how to love you if you don't even know how to love yourself?

I have been finding it hard to write lately. I don't know why but I can say that scaring myself doesn't work anymore. I'm not doing that to myself anymore. I also think that whatever I do to myself I ultimately do to others, I don't want to be hurting anyone deliberately.

I want to come from a place of love, a place of doing everything that I want to do to make a positive impact. I don't ever want to do things out of fear anymore. I want to do things because I love doing them.

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