Sunday 24 March 2013

Unconditional Self Love- The second Golden Key to Psychological and Spiritual Health


The most important relationship in our lives is our relationship to ourselves. There are two types of “love” – conditional and unconditional. The latter being of the spiritual nature, (transpersonal). Conditional love is based on ego (personality based).

Do you love yourself unconditionally? Our ego says our worth and lovableness is based on meeting certain conditions. Do we have to look a certain way, have a high paying job, a high education, be spiritual, meditate, exercise, have the perfect partner in a relationship and so on? None of those things have anything to do with our self-love and self worth!

We can determine where we are on our spiritual path by seeing how much we love our neighbour and how much we love ourselves. We also need to learn to allow ourselves to feel Divine Love. Divine love is like the sun, always shining. It is just a matter of whether we are going to give ourselves permission to step out of the darkness to receive it. 

In the most recent of our classes the focus has been based on us attempting to get out of the illusions of faulty thinking so that we can see our true selves. Our aim is to align our identity with the Divine as we are perfect creations. It is only our ego’s false, negative, pessimistic interpretation of us that makes us feel unworthy or unlovable. Earth is a school, our mistakes are not held against us, in fact, they are lessons where we have choices to learn or to ignore. If we choose learning we grow spiritually, if not, we become stagnant and unfortunately life presents its headaches.  

Remember your thoughts create your reality, your thoughts don’t create truth. Thoughts merely create the reality of the people who are thinking them.

Another aspect of love is the selfish-selfless balance. There is a time to be selfish and a time to be selfless.   To be selfless is to direct your energies towards helping others. To be selfish is to take care of yourself. Walking the spiritual path requires balance.  We are not here to be martyrs and completely sacrifice ourselves for others.  We must learn to be spiritually selfish. To be spiritual is to be of service to others, but never forget service to yourself.

Each of us has an inner child (child consciousness). Think about how parents operate ... some are excessively critical, others too lenient. A firm loving parent helps the child become balanced and well adjusted. The inner child reacts to the same type of parenting. Give that some thought ... how do you parent your inner child? A pattern in the way you treat your inner child may have been adopted from your own real childhood. Was your parents parenting style excessively critical, or too lenient? Also known as learned behaviour where what we know and believe is stored in our subconscious.      

One more note on this – if you are being excessively too critical, this may be a form of child or self abuse? As we learned last week, the subconscious mind is easy to reprogram, rid any of the old abusive habits, and replace with a positive affirmation about a balance form of self parenting.

Besides feeling good about who we are, we also need to feel good about what we are doing and creating in our lives. The critical parent spends a lot of time being a perfectionist in a negative sense, looking for what we are doing wrong. Start a journal to reaffirm the positive things you do and have done and focus on the positive not the negatives.

When you do make mistakes, it is important to keep the critical parent out. It is okay to make observations about yourself or others; this is called spiritual discernment because it is done with unconditional love.
Whatever the mistake, look at the golden lesson of wisdom from the experience; it then becomes a positive experience. If you truly learn from a mistake, you will never have to go through similar suffering again. Tell yourself that you are worthy and lovable even though you made a mistake or error in judgment. Mistakes are positive and unavoidable. Pick yourself up and get on with it. 

A crucial part of self-love is forgiveness. You have a choice of subscribing to a philosophy of forgiveness or to holding grudges. This applies to yourself also. Remember that if you hold a grudge, you are holding it against your child consciousness. Would you hold the same kind of grudge against a real child of yours? 

If you don’t have unconditional self love within yourself, then automatically you end up seeking it outside yourself. Love is a survival need. The ideal is to give love to yourself and to allow yourself to receive Divine unconditional love. If you don’t do this, you end up seeking love, approval and acceptance from other people.  This puts you in a compromised position. Other people become your programmers and the creators of your reality. Your worth is then in their hands. Do you really want other people to hold this power over you? Not having self-love puts a hole in your protective bubble, so when people criticize you, you can’t protect yourself. 

Ideally, you will give yourself so much love, you will feel full and complete within yourself and feel at one with the Divine. You are so filled with love that you can give love to others even if they don’t love you. In essence, you want love, but you don’t need love. You prefer loving relationships but are not attached to getting love.  When you are a self-actualized person, you first form a right relationship with yourself and a relationship with the Divine, before seeking a relationship with others. This is the work of a spiritual path. We all have it within us, however, the only problem is that we think we don’t.                       

SELF LOVE AFFIRMATIONS:
1.      I love and forgive myself totally for all my mistakes, for I now recognize that mistakes are positive, not negative.
2.     My worth is unchangingly positive because it is a spiritual inheritance.  It is not increased by my success or decreased by my mistakes.
3.     I now recognize that everything that has ever happened in my life has been positive, because it all contained lessons I needed to learn.
4.     I choose to live in the now and not hold the past against myself.
5.     I hereby choose to approve of myself, so I do not have to go around seeking approval from others.
6.     I now realize that I am the “I” person, choose, consciousness, and spiritual being, and that this part of me deserves unconditional love at all times.
7.     I deserve love because my true identity is not what I do in life.  I am the chooser of what I do.
8.     I now understand that I am here to learn lessons and grow in life, but if I make mistakes, I am still totally lovable and unchangingly worthy.
9.     I am the master of my life, and I choose to be my own best friend instead of my own worst enemy.
10.  I now choose to awaken and recognize that it was only the faulty thinking of my ego that has caused me not to love myself.
11.  I now, once and for all, release the ego’s game of “having to do” in order to deserve love and worth. I now fully recognize I have always been lovable and worthy and will always be so.

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