I remembered when I first read a post about how to love yourself I felt appalled. Why? Because I was in a passionate (or so I thought), crazy and “complicated” relationship at the time and the last advice I needed to hear was how to love yourself by being by yourself and taking care of yourself. I honestly didn’t even know what that meant exactly.

The thought of leaving my relationship made me feel like I was going to die and I didn’t want to believe in this crazy thinking of learning how to love yourself. I could learn how to love myself while being in my relationship, it couldn’t be that hard.

Well I was wrong. The relationship I was in was highly toxic and by that I mean bad, bad for me, bad for the other person and bad for this world. The reason for it being so toxic was because I didn’t love and respect myself enough to understand that this guy wasn’t good for me and I needed to get out.

Deep down I knew I “should” get out and I “should” learn how to live on my own and take responsibility for my life but I didn’t have the courage to do it yet, I wasn’t ready. At least that’s what I convinced myself to believe. Eventually after 3 years of suffering and some good times as well as it often goes in this thing we call life the guy finally found the courage to leave.

Now I was alone and the hardest, scariest time of my life was about to begin and I couldn’t even have imagined how difficult it was about to become. But that story another time.

I will give you techniques which I built and figured out on my own when I was finally ready to face myself and my life as it was looking at the time with all the misery that came with it. It wasn’t easy but I was ready to do it. I was ready to get involved into this weird indefinable subject of loving yourself.

All I can say is that if someone would have given me these steps it might have been easier for me to know what the hell to do to start “loving yourself”. So now I want to share my wisdom that I have gained from years of pain and suffering to set myself free emotionally, physically, spiritually and mentally from the shackles I had put on myself. These steps really made me see myself, life and the world in a different manner and I finally got some understanding of the complicated subject of self-love. You can try it out to see if it works for you.

1. Sit as if to meditate and then actually meditate by breathing in and out for some time. Why? To relax your tensed nerves and to silence your chattering mind. Don’t worry if it doesn’t work at first, it’s not supposed to, and this will take time. Start with 1 min if you can’t do more than that else you can also do 10 min. This step really helped me to feel centered, calm and peaceful.
2. Be grateful. In this step I used to thank god for the things I usually took for granted like my eyesight, health, food on my table, clean water, living in a country where I’m safe, having a family or people who love you. These things might not apply to everyone obviously but I believe that no matter what situation you are in there is ALWAYS something to be thankful for. If nothing else, be thankful for being alive, as long as you live, your life can change. I found that saying “I’m grateful for …” out loud had a bigger impact on me.
3. Forgive yourself and others.This step was really hard. It involves saying (again out loud) “I forgive myself for… “. If you find it too hard to say it out loud you can also try writing it down or just thinking it. Even though this was one of the hardest things for me to do, after weeks of doing this every single day I really felt so much better about myself. It was a very powerful exercise.
   Then say “I forgive (a person or people) for…” This will most likely feel even harder than forgiving yourself. I want to make one thing clear; whoever has harmed you was NOT right to do whatever they did. And they should absolutely be held accountable for their actions. What I’m saying is that you forgive them and let go of your negative feelings and thoughts. I believe this will set YOU free from suffering and pain. You don’t have to become friends with them or that person at all. Only let go of the feelings you associate with them that are bad. This can also take many days, weeks or months to accomplish. But sticking to it, EVERYDAY, made me notice a huge difference in my life. If you want to become truly happy and do good things for other people and for yourself, it’s extremely hard to do that while holding grudges. That’s what I believe and what I’ve experienced in my own life.
4. And now we actually come to the interesting part, say out loud “I love myself exactly the way I am” or you can just say “I love myself”. Now when I first did this I could literally hear a voice inside telling me “no you don’t” so if anything like this happens to you don’t worry it’s normal. Just keep saying “I love myself” over and over again out loud to yourself. Don’t ignore your inner voice just say “thank you for your input but I choose to love myself now”.
   Now I said I love myself in a loving tone of voice and I found that to be very helpful. It was way more impactful than repeating the words in a monotone way.
5. Visualize what you want. Now you might say like I used to say “I don’t know what I want”. So I then asked myself what I didn’t want because almost EVERYBODY knows that. And there you have it; the opposite of what you don’t want is probably what you do want! So now you visualize yourself BEING the person you want to be, LIVING the life you want to live, make up every detail of everything you wish to have and be in the image of your mind, don’t leave anything out. How do you want your relationships, health, finances to be like? How will you look and be like when you feel empowered and strong? Doing this every single day will significantly increase your chance of achieving your goals. For more on how visualization works you can read the article, Sports Visualizations, by Keith Randolph posted on Llewellyn.

All this must sound so weird and I can tell you it feels even weirder to do it but I’m telling you guys, this stuff really worked for me and I really hope it can for you as well. In order for it to work it’s important to do all the steps and also doing it every single day. Especially the days you don’t feel like it. I did this stuff for almost 6 months every single day with some days skipped but I was overall very strict in completing these exercises every day. I still go back to these same exercises whenever I feel I need to.

Let me tell you what happened to me after using these techniques for 6 months. Only after 1 month I felt liberated and peaceful on a level I can’t even begin to explain.

I felt free, more open to love and loving others and I felt as if a huge weight was lifted off of me.

I felt in control and much more positive, when I faced setbacks I knew how to deal with them in a way which made me feel empowered instead of a victim.

I met my dream man who I never thought I could get before, he very quickly became my husband and is now my best friend and even though our relationship isn’t perfect (which relationship is?) we are happy together.

Today I can finally do what I love the most, write and with it hopefully motivate and inspire people to change their lives. But most importantly I have learned how to love and respect myself and to stand up for myself whenever someone treats me bad.

If you want you can also try it out, and let me know in the comments how it turned out for you.

Thank you for reading! I really hope you found this post helpful. If you like this post, please share it with your friends and family. And make sure you subscribe to our newsletters to get updates on new content.

Choose to be happy,

Selma

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