Self love is loving your body, soul, face and everything inside out even at the toughest of times. Self love for me starts with me and ends in people around me.
Do you know there are various stages of self-Love?
It has 4 stages and starts from me and involves me in every stage. Love for myself, then love for my family, love for my community finally love for the planet.
4 Stages of Self-Love
Love for Myself
Love for myself is what makes me want to keep my face & body clean, hygienic, well and good looking. Love for my health makes me focus on fitness or daily Sadhana. 6 daily steps to my sadhana are –
a. daily yoga
b. daily meditation
c. daily journaling my thoughts
d. daily planning my day in morning
e. daily thanking one object/person in my life
f. daily minimum once interaction with nature.
Most of us are experts in showing love to ourselves in many ways. Bathing, dressing up, posting lovely pictures of ourselves on social media and admiring ourselves in the mirror. The next stage of self-love which people often tend to forget or think is not important is the daily sadhana or 6 steps as described above.
Love for My Family
Next is Love for my family makes me want to cook for them, take care of them, keep them united, keep them healthy and teach them what I know.
Love for My Community
Next stage is Love for my community makes me want to write, teach and help them because I want to see them free from pain and suffering.
Love for My Planet
Love for my planet wants to keep my surrounding clean and not unnecessarily waste its resources.
In each of these stages I’m still a huge part of it. I’m an important member of my family, an active member in my community and still living and utilizing resources on this planet
So self-love starts with me and ends with things around me.
How to distinguish selfishness from self love?
When someone does good to you, for ex- someone says beautiful comments on your picture on social media, you will like them. If for some reason someone says bad remarks on your picture, our first instinct is to show our anger & frustration to them.
If the object or person in front of you is good, we shall feel friendly towards to it. But if the object or person is one that is miserable, we must be merciful towards that person or object, not letting hatred come in. If someone is good, we must be glad, if someone is evil, we must choose to be indifferent. If we learn to develop these attitudes of our mind towards different kinds of objects or people we see daily, then this will keep our mind peaceful.
Most of the difficulties in our daily lives occur from being unable to hold our minds in this way. For instance, if someone does evil to us, instantly we want to show the evilness in us, and every reaction of evil comes out in us and hence we are not able to hold the chittha or our mind in peace. These reactions come out in waves towards the object/person, and we lose our power. We fail to realize then that every reaction of evil or hatred is so much loss to our mind, and every evil thought, or deed or hatred if it is controlled will be in our favor. It is not that we lose by restraining ourselves, but we gain infinitely more when we learn to hold our hatred against anyone or anything.
Each time we suppress hatred or feelings of anger, it is so much more good energy stored up in our favor and that energy will be converted into higher powers. Such higher powers protect us from illnesses in future by boosting our entire immune system..
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