The greatest love of all is Self Love.
“In 1956, psychologist & social philosopher Erich Fromm proposed that loving oneself is different from being arrogant, conceited or egocentric. He proposed that loving oneself means caring about oneself, taking responsibility for oneself, respecting oneself, and knowing oneself (e.g. being realistic and honest about one’s strengths and weaknesses). He proposed, further, that in order to be able to truly love another person, a person needs first to love oneself in this way.” Wikipedia
Keeping the “big picture” perspective in mind that Everything is Energy helps us integrate our human-ness with our spiritual-ness for the ultimate expression of self love.
Even our lowest emotions, like guilt and shame, are meant to motivate us to grow into higher awareness and self actualization.
Practical Self Love
Knowing how to love yourself is a lot more practical than it sounds. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs our “needs” motivate us to improve our selves and our lives. Acting from our lowest physiological need for food and shelter to our highest spiritual need for self actualization can show our love or disdain for yourself.
Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness
The opposite of high self esteem is self abuse and can be emotional or physical abuse. Abusing the self physically includes the most obvious forms like substance abuse, to the most subtle forms, like not caring for the body through improper diet, lack of sleep or pushing oneself to stressful extremes.
Emotional abuse is not always as obvious as physical abuse. It usually includes commonly-accepted behavior like negative self talk and blaming the self. Emotional abuse can even cause illness and physical death to confirm one’s lack of deserving or as an atonement or punishment for being bad.
In Dr Hawkins’ map of consciousness (from his book called Power vs. Force), lower human emotions can range from 20 (shame) nearly to 200 (pride).
As Dr Hawkins points out, “the critical response point in the scale of consciousness calibrates at level 200” and is the balance point between weak and strong.
Muscle testing shows that negative attitudes, thoughts, feelings, events, etc that calibrate below 200 make a subject go weak; and over 200 (positive) make a test subject go strong.
Below 200 is associated with personal survival and above 200 (integrity and courage) expand us to include the survival of others as well. As one moves from hopelessness and depression and crosses the mark at pride and courage (175-200), the well-being of others becomes increasingly more important.
Positive Self Talk
Dr Hawkins’ calibration of human emotions offers us a practical measurement for learning how to love yourself. It exemplifies the Law of Attraction in action.
If we want more love, joy and harmony in our lives, it becomes obvious and imperative that we should pursue people and activities that calibrate higher than 200.
Ultimately, releasing lower-calibrated emotions like shame, fear and anger largely depends on what we choose to talk and think about.
While negative self talk can drag and hold us down, positive self talk has the practical power to lift us out of emotional darkness.
Choosing to replace bad habits with healthy ones alters our view of ourselves and our environment.
How do you see the world? Do you filter the world through lenses of fear, guilt and shame or do you see through eyes of forgiveness and optimism?
What we choose to think about is an expression of self love, manifesting happiness or misery. Mind your mindset! Positive thoughts have the power to create heaven out of hell.
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