The Path to Self Love
The Path to Self-Love
The path to self love is right in front of you. Whether or not you choose to take that first step is up to you.
After a particularly rough day of attempting to balance, say, attending college, spending time with family, keeping a tidy home, and working full time, you may feel overstressed, overworked, and generally unsatisfied with your life. If this sounds like you, try to remember: Once you stop having fun with something and start to doubt yourself, you ultimately won’t be good at it anymore. You shouldn’t take anything too seriously in life. You need to take some time to relax.
Now, every fiber of your being might rebel against that statement. You might be retorting this very moment with a muttered remark that sounds like this: “If people don’t take anything seriously, who will be the world’s doctors, scientists, architects, and engineers? Who will do the things that make our society run smoothly?” Or this: “Who has time to relax when there is so much to do? If I don’t work full time, who will feed my family? If I don’t keep a tidy house, who else will keep up with the chores for me? If I don’t go to school, how will I make a better future for my children? If I don’t take some time to spend with my family, how will they know that I love them and that they matter to me?”
That’s a perfectly reasonable response, given the culture of today’s world, but consider this: What would your life look like if you took that first step on the path of self-love?
Choose the path to self-love
Feeling far too busy living up to others’ expectations to even figure out your own is dangerously damaging to your psyche. It might cause you to lose sight of your values, goals, aspirations, and passions in life. Feeling and thinking that you are to run down to make time to do the things that would actually make you feel better in the long run: i.e. eating breakfast, working out, or getting enough sleep is sure to kick start a nasty cycle of chaos when it comes to your emotional, physical, and mental health.
Such a cycle will leave you less efficient, more stressed out, generally unhealthy, and overall not a lot of fun to be around! It might even make those that you are responsible for caring for, such as your children, aging parents, and/or spouse, worry unnecessarily and that’s simply no good.
If you don’t make any time to walk the path to self-love, you’ll never be in proper condition to care for others, no matter how much you want to! Self-love should be an essential part of your everyday life.
Do more of what you love- be it reading a book alone in a hammock, getting intimate with a lover, going for hikes with your grandkids, indulging in a ‘guilty-pleasure’, such as eating a gluttonous amount of ice cream and watching bad reality TV, from time to time, writing poetry, or playing a couple more levels of Candy Crush. It won’t necessarily make your life easier. In fact, penciling time into your busy schedule just to pamper yourself and sticking to it might be quite difficult for you. However, it will make your life more fulfilling.
Not being so serious all of the time will keep you from getting so burnt out on the things that you kind of need to be serious about, like work, bills, house shopping, leaving the house early to get to your kid’s soccer game on time, or choosing the right investments for your 401K.
Try making a little more time for you- start loving yourself- and you’ll be amazed at the way that you (and your loved ones!) benefit!
