The Most Important Thing To Do When It Comes To Self Love

you are in a relationship with you for the rest of your life and just like any other relationship love is not a oneandone it's not something you can achieve and then you can just go about your life ignoring it it's an everyday commitment it's an everyday practice that is as much or even more so about the little things than it is about the big things and just like loving in a relationship should not be treated as a chore self-love should not be treated as a chore there are so many ways that we can commit to

and practice self-love but today I'm going to share with you the most important thing to do in order to develop [Music] self-love first I'm going to tell you the punchline the most important thing to do in order to develop self-love is to see hear feel understand recognize the value of own and integrate the aspects of yourself that you have rejected and then to act in their best interests instead of against them now the you know that punchline I'm going to explain as children we are relationally dependent we depend completely upon our closeness with the social

group and this relational dependence does not go away as we get older it only somewhat decreases if we perceive ourselves being pushed away by someone like Mom or Dad or siblings or peers as a result of some aspect about us what we will do is we will triangulate internally we will try to reestablish the closeness with the person who's pushing us Away by turning against whatever they have pushed us away for for example let's say that Mom pushed us away because of our anger we will immediately push away our own anger we subconsciously disown deny

and reject it even if at face value we're violently defending it but we can't do this push away internal process physically we have to do it within our own Consciousness and we do so by creating a split in our own Consciousness we essentially create a fragmentation in our own being but specifically a fragmentation where one part of us is against another part of us it is essentially practicing the opposite of love it is pushing away it is dis including it's rejecting it's separating from and acting against the best interest of that part of us when

we do this we feel the feeling of shame we can then say that we are ashamed of our anger we do not love this part of ourselves if you want to understand more about this you can watch my video that's titled fragmentation the worldwide disease the understanding of fragmentation with within the self that your Consciousness can separate into different aspects that we may call selves provides for us the most straightforward conceptualization of self-love To Love Yourself is to see hear feel understand see the value of and act in the best interest of and include all

parts of yourself to love is to include something as a part of You by doing so you see hear feel understand and know it and because you have treated it as a part of you you cannot actually act against it without that harming you which is why naturally the choice to love carries with it the implication that you act in the best interests instead of against its best interests said another way love is an instinctual reaction or a conscious choice to pull something closer to you and include it as a part of you so self-love

could be seen as the act of pulling all parts of yourself closer to you so as to include them as a part of you and shame on the other hand is an instinctual re action to push yourself away from yourself therefore shame could be seen as the exact opposite of self-love if we perceive ourselves to be pushed away enough in our childhood that we either have to push away many parts of ourselves to be loved or could not find a way to push enough of ourselves away in order to be loved we will carry the

felt based experience of ourselves as essentially bad broken defective wrong undesirable at our core the emotions we feel at that moment become embedded as the feeling signature that is the foundation of our entire self-concept essentially our core self-concept is that of shame we want to push ourselves away at our core we hate ourselves the foundation of hate though is hurt we can only hate something we feel hurt by so this must mean that the foundation of self-hate is hurt right we only hate ourselves when it feels like something about us leads to a painful consequence

especially being pushed away by others and or not getting a need that we desperately need met the reason that everyone has been failing with shame and therefore most self-love techniques is because most methodologies involving overcoming shame and developing self-love are aimed at trying to get a person to see their worth and to see their positive attributes they're essentially aimed at trying to convince a person who is ashamed of his or her anger for example to see that he or she is not not an angry person this strategy only creates a greater split within the person

the approach that we have to take to resolve shame and therefore to develop self-love is to completely reown and accept the parts of ourselves that we have tried to push away from ourselves owning your shame is the first key to ending shame when we have pushed away aspects of ourselves we need to bring them back in people are usually terrified that when they reown parts of themselves and instead of keep pushing them away that they will become totally bad and totally unlovable or line up with any of the consequences they were trained they would line

up with as a result of that undesirable aspect of themselves but if you ever notice that it feels like you can't overcome your problems no matter how hard you try you can't overcome your problems because you can't overcome what's inside of yourself or part of yourself right as soon as you identify with something you see it as you from that point forward to try to overcome those things is to put one part of you at war with another part Part of Yourself the first solution to this is exaltation the concept of exaltation is actually an

ancient Alchemy concept simply put to exalt something is to transform it into its highest spiritual aspect I'll give you an example the old Alchemists thought that the exalted form of metal was gold if we are to live better lives where we are not continually made unhappy by our negative personality traits we must take each personality trait that we don't like and first recognize it within ourselves we must then accept it by both owning it and finding a way to approve of it from there we must find a way to amplify that personality trait into its

most in alignment or exalted expression here is an example of exaltation let's say that someone is a master at mental chess they play mind games with people the highest aspect of this trait what we would call the exalted aspect is to play mind games with people that benefit the people though this person could become a brilliant counselor or psychologist they could outsmart other people's Egos and help them to see things about themselves that they are totally unaware of or let's look at another example maybe somebody's a bully what bullies do is they push people the

exalted form of being a bully could be that they push people to be their best if they Embrace their forceful energy and use it in situations where people could be benefited by that Force right such as when someone needs especially strong encouragement bullies they establish dominance within a social group The exalted version of this dominance is leadership if this person Embraces their leadership ability and takes charge when other people feel as if they need direction they can rally people to cooperating with one another in a specific Direction anytime we love something which is to bring

it close and included as a part of us instead of push it away what happens is that we form a connection with that thing when that thing feels connected to us it can no longer hurt us without hurting itself and as a result its expression begins to take on a form that benefits us instead of hurts us one more reason why connection is so incredibly important exalting your negative personality traits and problems is not about going to war with yourself it is profoundly self-hating and counterproductive to want to rid yourself of these traits it is

resistant and whatever we resist persists so the key is to find the highest and best use for those so-called negative traits fall in love with what you hate about yourself turn metal into gold on an internal level so what I want you to do first is describe yourself what problems do you have what do you dislike about yourself what do you feel are the negative parts of your personality be very honest about what traits you don't like about yourself and even hate once you have your list spend some serious time thinking about what the highest

and best use of those traits could be what is the positive exalted form of those negative things next you want to try to see the parts of you that you push away from yourself as a different person or being within you this can be done in a very simple visualization or meditation you can close your eyes and ask to see the part of you that you feel bad about allow whatever appears to appear and then address this inner self with compassion I'll give you an example I like using you may be ashamed of the fact

that you're a bully right we've been talking about that before so you could close your eyes and ask to see the part of you that is a bully when you do this let's say that the image of a monster that looks like the Incredible Hulk might appear you can then spend some time observing that part of you and then trying to relate to that part within you your goal is to see hear feel understand it right see the value in it I'm going to give you a tip compassion naturally arises as a result of relating

to someone's suffering therefore all you have to do in order to feel compassion for someone is to deliberately look at how you relate to their pain so relative to this exercise you have to deliberately look at how you relate to the pain that is belonging to this part of you you have pushed away in the example we're using the Hulk personality within you how is your pain the same as its Pain by the way this should be pretty easy because it's part of you right it's a result of the things you yourself have gone through

can you identify with this pain looking back over the course of your life when did you experience pain that's similar to what this Hulk aspect of you is feeling try to remember what that felt like and what you were thinking what did you really need back then when you were in that same kind of pain if you are terrified of deliber really looking for how you relate to someone even if that is a Persona within you you need to ask yourself why what bad thing do I think will happen if I relate to this thing

or feel close to this thing that I've been pushing away or I'm the same as this thing that I've been pushing away using this example you need to try to see into this Persona this Hulk Persona that we've been talking about feel into it listen to it learn about it and understand it completely what are its needs and desires and why again you may not be pushing away an aspect that's like Hulk I'm just using an example the next step is to compassionately challenge the push away thoughts that arise as a result of asking these

questions for example if you think a thought towards an aspect that you've pushed away like this part is going to destroy people's lives I want you to get into the mental space of philosophical debate if you were a lawyer whose job it was to prove that this part of you is not going to destroy people's lives what would your case be keep in mind that if you would like can also involve other people in this process so they can help you to make a case for the parts of you that you have pushed away because

sometimes other people have a lot less resistance two aspects of us than we do to take this practice even deeper you can work directly with a part of you that you do not love you can do this using Parts work but specifically you do this with each and every part of you that you do not love as well as each and every part to the opposite the part of you that is not acting in a loving way towards another part of you to understand how to apply this process I really encourage you to watch my

video that's titled Parts work what is Parts work and how to do it the goal being to change the perspective that you hold inside of you toward the part of you that you do not love and to reach agreement on a new way of being that is loving towards yourself so that you can understand the most important thing to do in order to develop self- Lov here is an example Tuan was the first person in her family to be born in the United States her her family immigrated from Vietnam to Orange County California and it

is here that she developed a lot of her problems with herself it is here that her struggle with self- love began just to pick one of many things that were to become a self-love issue Tu Yen was a quiet and broody child and this was not received well her peers called her a weirdo and made fun of her incessantly she desperately wanted connection but no one wanted to be friends with her the way she was over time Tu Yen learned how to act like the their kids acted how to be talkative and bubbly and how

to act happy she learned to reject her Broody quiet self to push it away the thing is it didn't go away it was just something that she hid from everyone when Tu Yen was in her mid 20s as a result of a series of painful relationships in which she did not feel loved she became interested in the idea of self-love as a part of this process of trying to figure out how to love herself she finally got that the foundation of self- Lov was to practice love toward the parts of her that she disliked and

hated so first she decided to exalt the very things about her that she pushed away starting with being Broody and quiet she wrote a whole list of things that were good about it things like to be bruty you have to be mindful I really dislike people who are not mindful so I like that it makes me Mindful and broody people are deep in thought the people who I grew up around were not deep thinkers and that is why their lives are so void of meaning because of my broodiness I can't avoid having a life of

deep meaning and another one is broodiness means someone can see and identify problems for Tu Yen she's like oh wait I use the skill in my job every day in fact my paycheck depends on it and without it people could get seriously hurt and I was unhappy because the people around me were doing so much unconsciously like painful stuff to each other and to me every day my broodiness was an indication that I was affected by it if I were to not be affected by it I would have to be disconnected that would make me

part of the problem not part of the solution tuen then did Parts work with the Broody quiet part of her and the part that opposed it what she found is that the part of her that was quiet and broody was a six-year-old version of herself a child who embodied all of the things that her peers in school rejected her for not just the broodiness ironically and that that part of her that was rejecting that other Broody part was was the image of an Orange County Housewife this part of her didn't even look Asian instead it

looked like a Caucasian woman whose identity and values were an exact mirror of the people in her peer group and what they valued things like status wealth being on top of the ladder of social hierarchy Caucasian Beauty fun surface talk and Trends and this part of her looked down on pied ignored and rejected her other part the one that was Broody and quiet and Asian and had different interests than everyone else did Etc tuen realized that she had internalized her own earliest haters as a method of protecting herself from their rejection and as a way

of ensuring her needs for inclusion and connection and approval would be met through the process that she did with these two parts of herself tuen was able to see that she never actually got connection or approval why because what people were connecting with and approving of was a facade not really her so at face value it seemed to work but it actually made things worse due to the awareness of the damage that it was causing herself self-hating protector decided to repurpose itself the cause of putting tuen in places and around people whose worldview and interests

were compatible to tuan's core Tuan was able to understand the part of herself that she had not been loving towards for over 20 years and developed compassion and care towards it she was able to admit ad MIT that this part of her is in fact what is real about her and she decided to act in its best interests by designing a life according to its values and needs this meant spending less time with certain friends this meant prioritizing her volunteer efforts that she is super super passionate about this entailed not acting happy when she is

not happy and instead setting this very firm boundy for herself that she will only develop close relationships with the people in her life that are able to meet her where wherever she is emotionally this means people who are able to be in a relationship to what is real about her at any given time it also meant seeking out things that make her happy no matter how unique or weird that they may be we all know at some level that it's important to love ourselves but when people say all you have to do is love yourself

it's kind of like telling a child in kindergarten that he or she has to solve a college physics equation like a bewildered child we have no idea where to begin the answer is We Begin by integrating the very things we dislike about ourselves and the Very things that we are trying to push away have a good week [Music]