You can’t pour from an empty cup. You can’t give what you don’t have. With that, I’d like to remind you that you can pour love to everyone and everything you value by first loving yourself.

I’d like to share with you seven ways you can truly take care of yourself and truly practice self-love: 

1.Express and live your core truth.

When we were children, expressing and living our core truth were our nature. We were experts at this by design. As we grew up being raised and influenced by adults and environments that shamed us, scolded us, made us feel bad or wrong for expressing and living our truths, we have learned to develop masks, personalities and other coping mechanisms to hide and protect our truth while getting the approval of the people around us. 

Although this helped us protect ourselves from being hurt and being disapproved of, it also disconnected us from our authenticity. It also indirectly programmed us to think that our true core selves are not loveable or good enough.

Naturally, if we are not expressing our authentic selves, we also can’t have authentic relationships.

As adults who have become oblivious to our true core selves, we have to really dig deep and reconnect with our core selves again. One actionable way to do this is meditation and self-inquiry. Others call it soul-searching.

Go find that core or soul within you and courageously live your life from that place. In my soul-searching journey, I have found that our true core selves or the soul is an infinite reservoir of wisdom, courage, strength, power, peace, joy, light, inner guidance, and love.

2.Do not diminish your true desires.

Go and ask for what you truly desire unapologetically. When you do this, you communicate to the world that you are radically honest with yourself, you are confident and courageous to desire big, audacious true desires because you believe in your inherent power, deservingness and capabilities to manifest them in your life. It’s very hard not to love or be inspired by such person.

3.Realize that you are inherently, uniquely & unconditionally loveable

A lot of us as children were conditioned to think that we were only loveable and approved of when we got good grades, when we won at sports competitions, when we behaved at school, or when we wore the best clothes. We were directly or indirectly conditioned to believe that love and approval were dependent on external things, and not for who we uniquely and inherently are.

But true love is unconditional. Notice how the people you love and naturally feel drawn to wanting to be with including your best friends can show up however way they like, and you still feel drawn to wanting to be with them. They can be happy or sad, rich or broke, become ugly or more beautiful, and you still love them.

It is because true love is unconditional and energy-based, not based on what you have or don’t have externally. You have to trust in the inherent and unique loveability and desirability of your energy, your core soul self. When you do, you will stop doing things that you don’t really want to do just to get the approval and love of others. You can then freely love and be loved freely. 

4.Honor your words to yourself.

When you honor your words and promises to yourself with the little things, you will inevitably honor your words to yourself when it comes to your big goals and aspirations. For example, if you promised yourself you will work out at 7:00 in the morning, commit to that goal so as to not let yourself down. You can definitely see results when you truly commit to yourself and to your goals. 

People will feel it in your energy that you are someone who will honor your words to them, and so they have to step up and honor their words to you too.

5. Have that radical self-acceptance.

It is human’s dark nature to compare ourselves to others, to focus on what we lack other than what we have. But thinking that others have it better is just your perception. It is just a meaning you choose to give to the circumstances you observe. This means that you can choose to give the circumstances better meaning that serve you best.

Loving yourself is about accepting yourself, flaws and all. If you can love others unconditionally, then you can love,uplift, empower and encourage yourself.

6. Treat yourself the way you want others to treat you.

You want people to respect you? Respect yourself. You want others to trust you? Trust yourself. You want your date to take you to beautiful places, take yourself to beautiful places. You want your date to gift you nice things, gift yourself nice things.

The way we treat ourselves communicate to people our standards.

7.Forge Fabulous Friendships

Forge fabulous deeply-connected, mutually respecting, mutually accepting core group of a relatively small number of closest friends who encourage and support your growth.

You wouldn’t want to drain your energy and spread yourself too thin with managing too many shallow, often fake friendships. Be highly selective of the energy of the people you share your energy and your life with. The energy of the people we are in constant contact with highly affects our own energetic field. They say you become the average of the people you spend most of your time with. Energy is contagious. We can’t choose our family, but we can choose our friends. Choose wisely.

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