Everyone wants to be loved and we often think that means we need to seek it from other people. But when you seek love from external sources you are allowing it to be taken away from you, which can leave you feeling empty and broken on the inside. Speaking of inside, why don’t we look inside of ourselves for love?
Learning to love and approve of yourself is one of the hardest things to do. It requires you to take the time out to put yourself first, focusing on your wants and needs over those of others.
Loving yourself provides you with self-confidence, self-worth, and in general, you feel more positive.
Here are Simple Ideas You Can Start Practicing The Art Of Self-love Straight Away.
How can I accept the fact that I am not pretty?
The way I did. When I was young, you might’ve said I was a “nice looking young lady”, but never beautiful. My body has not aged well. My family didn’t have the money for me to get braces, so my teeth are very crooked. I have a large nose and rosacea on my face that makes me look sunburned. I have a big, fleshy area under my chin, I’m obese, and to “top it off”, I’m 6′ 2″ tall.
Here’s the “kicker”, I make friends absolutely everywhere I go and even the French were nice to me…ha ha!
I smile at everyone and share compliments to strangers. I wear loud, crazy clothes, because honestly, muted clothes aren’t going to hide me. I have friends who’d die for me, have a handsome, loving husband and wonderful kids. I don’t try to be pretty as I don’t use make-up and I cut my own hair. I’m huge, loud, funny, caring, trustworthy and smart.
Pretty shmitty! Just be wonderful, be successful and be a good friend. Being “pretty” is just not that important!
By Judith Begley Trimarchi
How can you learn to accept yourself when you’re not sure where to begin?
There’s something simple that some people don’t understand. It’s as if it were just too simple to grasp.
If you have a single match, you can burn down a whole forest. The match looks so tiny, how can it have that power? But of course the match only has a tiny bit of energy. It’s the chain of cause-and-effect which unleashes the power latent in all the fuel laying around, right?
The match is merely an initiating event that sets off a chain reaction: the conditions for fire are at hand, and it only takes a spark.
That’s a metaphor for how unity works with a human being. “Unity” is an abstraction which includes things like truth and love, joy and compassion, freedom and courage and creativity and possibility and stuff that we don’t even have words for, too. We need a word for all of that stuff that’s “whole and complete” and doesn’t need to be fixed, because it’s not broken in the first place. “Unity” is the word that I like for that.
Unity is like a match near a forest. If you have the tiniest little bit, you can can multiply it endlessly and morph it from one form to another and climb onto the back of that elephant and ride it all the way past the sunset into the stars.
Firstly, you have to have a little bit. And it turns out that the kind of unity you need to start a cascade of self-expression has to be self-generated. You can’t borrow it from someone else. You need the ability to rub two sticks together by yourself, which is what happens when you start to see your own ability to create truth about yourself.
This is the most sustainable and simple form of unity that I know: the truth of your own wholeness. What you do is provide a personal guarantee that you are whole and OK and do not need to be fixed, and you back it up like a promise that’s sacred and inviolate… like an absolute refusal to back down from that commitment.
This is not “I feel good about myself.” Nothing that psychological. This isn’t “I’ve proven my worth.” It doesn’t depend on proof of any kind. This isn’t “I always do the right thing” or “my actions are above reproach” or “I have high self-esteem”. It isn’t any of that stuff. It’s more like “I absolutely will not budge from the claim that I’m OK, in spite of whatever shortcomings I might have.”
There’s a unity to a promise that you keep, and if you fail at it then you make the promise again and you refuse to quit. And that unity is like a match: you carry it around, you strike it on whatever happens to be at hand, and you drop it on the ground. Walk to the next forest and repeat.
By Les Matheson
Check out our community at:Â https://bitly.com.vn/lo93us
How did you learn to accept your body?
I gained 20 pounds in one year.
For a 5’2 woman, it shows. A lot of my clothes stopped fitting. My face looks different. My tummy rolls more when I sit down.
But that year, from the end of 2018 to the end of 2019, was one of the toughest of my life. I was hospitalized for suicidal depression. My dad died. I had to drop out of college. And through all of it, the only physical change was 20 pounds.
Pretty incredible, right?
I could be dead. I could’ve taken up self-harm or addiction or some equally self-destructive behavior. But all I did was eat a little more than usual. How awesome is that?
I’m learning to love the fact that through the hardest times of my life, my body kept me going. She’s been here with me all along, no matter what happened. And in exchange, she held onto a little more weight — maybe to keep me safe in case times got tougher. Maybe because we were coping in the best ways we knew how, and gaining weight was part of that.
I’m learning to accept that bodies change, and the idea that we’ll always look the same is bizarre and hurtful. Our weight will change as our lives change. That’s not a sin. It doesn’t make you lazy and disgusting and whatever else fatphobes will say.
It just means that times change, habits change, and needs change.
I’m not the same person I was a few years ago. My life is very, very different and my weight is different, too.
But it hasn’t changed in the past year — up or down — so that tells me that my body’s finding equilibrium. I’m learning to give her what she needs right now, which looks different from what she needed one year or five years ago. Who knows? Maybe in another year I’ll look even different, feel even different, and need even different things.
That’s all okay.
So I’m learning to accept my body by learning that change is okay.
I’m learning that my body weathered tough times the best way it could, and whatever I look like because of it is okay. Because damn, if my body isn’t impressive for getting me through the worst.
And I’m learning that there’s no shame in having the body that I have. I’m not going to go out of my way to lose weight, because that’s not what my body needs. My body needs food that makes her feel good and movement that brings her joy. If I lose weight, great. If I don’t, great.
No matter what, the body I have is a good one.
She has survived a lot. And she deserves all the credit in the world for it.
By Jordan Yates
Read more inspiring stories:Â https://souljourneyy.com/category/life-hacks/inspiring-short-stories/
