Love: My Journey to Loving Myself

As you know, we have entered February, and all the talk this month will be about love. In fact, I was shopping, and all I saw was red hearts and advertisements for a certain holiday. Before you assume you know where I am going with this, I want to caution you that this is not a romantic piece. This is about the very difficult journey that I had to embark upon in order to learn to love myself. My desire is that as you read it, you will be challenged to shed the layers, heal the broken places within your soul, and dare to do the deeper inner work that you have been avoiding. In essence, if you never learn to love yourself, you will never be able to properly love the people in your life.

1. You have to end cycles of self-hatred. Most people will never admit to hating themselves. However, they exhibit self-hatred through self-neglect, self-inflicted wounds, and self-abandonment. As someone who has personally walked through this, I am easily able to identify it in others. This self-hatred shows up in their disposition, deflection of any positive words or compliments, and their eagerness to dim their own light. Self-hatred is destructive, and it wants to devastate your life. Where does self-hatred come from? It is deeply rooted in self-limiting beliefs, perceptions, and psychological constructions that are incongruent with the truth of who you are. More importantly, self-hatred is the offspring of low self-worth. Self-hatred is never ostentatious or blatant. Self-hatred is subtle and suppressed. In fact, self-hatred can even disguise itself under acts of service and false humility. What I know for sure is that if you do not deal with self-hatred, it will be the basis of every soul battle.

2. You must identify the root of self-hatred in your life. If you have followed my work for any length of time, then you know that what you do not get to the root of, you will inevitably repeat. While we are all on different paths, the reality is that self-hatred always has a root. Normally, self-hatred comes from a moment in our lives where we lost ourselves, gave our personal power away, and started to shrink to fit the expectations of other people. I cannot identify when that moment was in your life. However, I want you to spend some time sitting with that question. What you cannot pinpoint will reduce you to powerlessness. If you never identify this moment in your life, then you can never begin the journey to learning to love yourself again. We have a generation that talks about self-love. However, self-awareness is the genesis of self-love. You have to identify where you lost yourself so that you can find yourself and learn to love yourself again. Self-abandonment is the courageous decision we must make if we want to heighten our self-awareness. Most people lack self-awareness, and that is why they spend a lifetime in soul agony. Self-awareness is a superpower and one of the forces that drive healing and transformation.

3. Self-care is irrelevant until you address self-hatred. As many of you know, much of the conversation today is around self-care. While I believe that self-care is vitally important, I also know that it is impossible to care for a self that you have learned to hate. Honestly, you are not going to care for a self that you do not love. Like many of you reading this, I went through a season in my life where I did not like myself very much.  I did not like who I was, and I did not like where my life was headed. Most of all, I did not like who I was becoming. I knew how to put ona good front and how to wear a painted smile. However, inwardly my spirit was dying, and my soul was defeating me. I knew that something needed to change in my life; however, I did not know what to change or how to change it. I had an epiphany that changed the course of my life forever. It became clear to me that I was trying to care for, nurture, and love a self that I had learned to hate. It is impossible to care for a self that you have been taught to hate. Most people do not know themselves at all. We do not know ourselves because we have spent our lives learning about everyone else. We know their likes, dislikes, wants, and needs. However, we do not know who we are or what we want. There is nothing wrong with being there for the people in your life. However, you cannot give so much to everyone else that you lose yourself in the process. In order to care for yourself, you must give yourself grace, learn self-compassion, set clear boundaries, and make your peace a priority.

4. Learning to love yourself is a journey. When I look around the world today, I see so many experts and gurus that claim to know everything about love. However, when I look at the quality of the relationships in the world today, I see a major discrepancy. Most people go from relationship to relationship, and they still feel empty. It is heartbreaking because they are still not learning the lesson. The love and fulfillment you seek will not come from another relationship or another achievement or even the accourtrements of success. The love and fulfillment you seek will require spiritual evolution and soul exploration. In other words, learning to love others begins with learning to love yourself. As long as you do not learn to love yourself, you will bring pain, divisiveness, and dysfunction to the relationships in your life. We think the answer to our lack of fulfillment is more relationships. However, the answer to our lack of fulfillment is radical honesty with ourselves. You have been looking for love and validation in all the wrong places. From decades of doing the deep inner work, I can tell you that the journey to learning to love yourself is challenging. However, I would not trade anything for the lessons, wisdom, and growth that it has produced in my life. In doing my work, I came to the conclusion that freedom begins with establishing your life on a firm foundation. Furthermore, this journey of learning to love myself taught me that I cannot express love until I first embody it. Learning to love yourself sets the standard for every other relationship in your life. In a culture that celebrates love, you discover that very few people have the capacity to love.