what makes self-love so hard if it was really as simple as just doing the things that every smart successful person tells us to do online don't you think more of us would have achieved it already I don't mean to sound like a Debbie Downer here but I honestly think that complete and total self-love is an unattainable goal over the past few years of my self-improvement journey I've been learning to love myself and accept those cracked damages parts of me more and I know that I've still got a long ways to go but the more that
I actively try to put in the effort to love myself the more I realize that self-love often comes when we least expect it allow me to explain I want to start this off by saying that the usual ways in which we go about achieving self-love are not useless in fact I think it would do you a great bit of good if I briefly went over them here before I get into the more unique ways that we come to love ourselves if you do not like yourself you are essentially saying there are parts of yourself that
you wish you could get rid of the parts that always make you stutter and stumble your words whenever you try to talk to someone new the parts that make you feel like no matter what you do you'll never achieve as much as your peers or parents or the parts that make you an easy target for getting harassed and insulted and for the bulk of these negative feelings towards yourself they can really be boiled down into two words social conditioning since you were a kid your brain has taken in different inputs in the form of the
environment you grew up in what your parents told you was true about the world the feedback you got from doing certain things how those things made you feel and how you chose to react now if most of the chat are your head that is directed towards yourself is negative or the things you do on a daily basis clearly reflect the identity of someone who does not like themselves it's safe to say the inputs you've gotten up until this point haven't been too beneficial your environment was hostile and involved parents who would scold you when doing
something wrong and provide no support and they started to convince you that maybe you're not too capable of doing this life thing after all then to cope with this you resorted to doing certain negative things which only further reinforce that you are someone undeserving of self-love and on top of all of this maybe you didn't fit into society standards of someone who deserves to be happy either the clearest example of this biological social coexisting relationship of self-hate is someone who is obese on the one hand you probably don't like yourself as much because you biologically
feel like very frequently your hormones are out of whack you can't breathe as well and your brain doesn't function as optimally which makes it way harder to realize you are capable of loving yourself and life is worth living but at the same time you're getting reinforced from society in the form of Social ostracization and insults that essentially tell you you're worthless if you really analyzed everything that's happened to you and what you've done up until this point in your life the reason as to why you can't love yourself most of the time would be quite
clear and that leads us to the usual solution that I've gone over in several videos now it involves an Engaged effort of realizing many of the beliefs about yourself and what you think you need in order to be happy are false beliefs created by shitty people changing the actions you do do on a daily basis to make positive thoughts come more easily such as keeping promises to yourself that you will do challenging things that induce growth changing the types of things you listen to and the people you surround yourself with and accepting your insecurities flaws
and negative thoughts and becoming friends with them I've been trying to brush up on these Solutions as well as further my understanding for them by listening to the texts of different experts on the topics of stress and self-love and one of the audiobooks I'm loving right now is the myth of normal by Gabor mate on today's sponsor audible audible is the home of Storytelling you probably heard of it and it's a platform that I've been using for over 6 years now as an audible member you can choose one title a month to keep from the
entire catalog including the latest best sellers and new releases once you're a member you also get access to a growing selection of included audiobooks audible originals and podcasts I'm usually using audible when I'm cleaning my apartment going for a walk or when I need to fill the Silence of the Endless void of incessant negative thoughts like I said an amazing resource for better understanding why you chronically feel stressed tired and deprived of love in the modern world is the myth of normal and Gabor really goes into detail about a lot of the stuff that I've
mentioned here such as how your environments and what you consume changes the way you react to Life's hardships so if you want to try Audible and get one title for free when you sign up which you should use on the myth of normal if you're interested in the topic of this video then you can go to my link which is the first link in the description which is audible.com /co Hastings or you can text the word Cole Hastings that's all one word to 500500 so if you follow these steps that I went over there's almost
100% guarantee you'll be saying you know what maybe I'm not so bad after all more but what if life has beaten you down so hard that you just can't shake off that hate what if no matter how hard you try your old self slowly Creeks open your bedroom door and says I'll always be here and I'll show you that you can never get rid of me if that that is the case you might have to go through the experience of what I like to call the spontaneous stumble every once in a while we will experience
a moment in time that instantaneously pulses a new world into our field of vision a moment that changes our fundamental understanding of ourselves so intensely that we don't even see the same person in the mirror anymore usually this moment comes when we least expect it we will be searching for answers to common questions like who am I why doesn't my life Feel Complete and how can I finally just start enjoying my company more but come up short because we are trying to force the solution but then after all that effortful work you'll be put into
a trance completely out of the blue you'll feel a state of such Blissful self-love that there won't even feel like there's a self to criticize and the last thing you will be worried about is the next thing you need to do in order to be happy these moments cannot be brought about voluntarily but the signs will be there you'll know you're in a moment of spontaneous stumble if you feel temporarily ly dissociated from your body and become the very experience of the present moment itself in other words the you that you are now will cease
to exist and when your ego dissolves all that's left will be an overwhelming sense of gratitude for everything in the world just the way it is right now this is the type of self-love that cannot be taught and as much as I try to continue explaining what this state feels like I'll come up short because reality isn't words they say that life is the best teacher for a reason and one of those reasons is because love cannot be defined it can only be experienced it's one of the only emotions that after hundreds of thousands of
years of human evolution Still Remains as elusive as the act of finding out who you really are but I'm more than positive that every single one of you listening to this right now has experienced what I'm talking about here at least once in your life it might happen when you're on a walk in the blend of orange and red colors in the sky hits your eyes in just the right way it might happen when you're in the middle of an excruciating workout and you've reached your physical limit or it might happen when you stumble upon
a remix of your favorite song on YouTube which will completely change your mood for the rest of the week and you won't be able to stop replaying it until you can hear its Echo even when you aren't actually listening to it but for me the most visceral spontaneous stumble experiences have happened when I get the opportunity to become deeply intimate with another person and that has been all of my past serious relationship ship it's common for people to say that you cannot love others until you love yourself but what I found is that in many
cases it's actually the opposite it is often the case that you cannot fully understand how to love yourself unless you expose yourself completely to another person and you can only do that if you're willing to give your heart to someone fully falling into love comes with the risk of being brutally humiliated heartbroken or receiving a lifetime of grief but you have to be willing to take that risk of opening yourself up to the World which includes all of these other vulnerable insecure humans if you really want to start loving the parts of yourself that you've
been unwilling to love because you did not yet have the right perspective with which to see those parts and that's what a close relationship with another person will give you in my most intimate relationships which have now spanned over 9 years with three different women I have learned more about myself in my blind spots than any amount of imposed self-reflection and journaling could ever do because in that time I learned how to truly take care of another person and make them feel seen and appreciated and learn how to meet their needs to the best of
my ability for the vast majority of my life I wasn't even willing to do that for myself partly because I didn't know how to but when you're with someone who you really admire there's no other option along with that someone you experience love for who feels a similar way towards you can also point out your weaknesses or impulses that you've been either unable to see or unwilling to acknowledge and those might be the the parts of yourself that you've needed to become more aware of all along to finally start realizing how incredible of a person
you are but this whole process and the best relationships I've ever been in have all come and blossomed when I've least expected them to they've all been spontaneously stumbled upon and that is the constant amongst all of these experiences what I'm describing here doesn't necessarily have to be with just one person let alone a person you call your boyfriend or girlfriend but it does need to involve being vulnerable enough to give a part of your love to another person who will reciprocate that closeness and companionship back to you so take the risk pay attention to
how you love other people and in that experience you'll find that how you love is often a reflection of how you need to start loving yourself life is this very strange NeverEnding link between things experiencing one another changing based on that experience and becoming something new and because of that I don't think I'll ever have the definitive answer answer to the question how can I love myself forever and always if that depresses you it really shouldn't because that means you're human and humans carry the heavy weight of being conscious of themselves if you're around the
same age as me which is 26 and you've only started this journey towards self-love within the past few years that's 15 to 20 years of Social and biological conditioning that you have to unlearn that taught you why you are undeserving of love and that unlearning process will be a lifelong journey so please go easy on yourself so many of you guys are so hard on yourselves and just enjoy every moment of this journey even if it feels unbearable in a way the fact that I know self- Lov is a lifelong journey and never has an
ending kind of gets me excited I know I'm going to keep stumbling upon love when I least expect it and I know that those experiences will keep bringing new insights that I can provide for myself as well as you guys I will always be ready to give love and be open to receiving it no matter how much it gets me hurt so I can learn new ways to love myself in whatever moment I'm in more I'm willing to pay the Hefty price of vulnerability that comes from falling in love with people places objects or anything
else that will eventually be gone nothing lasts forever and that's what makes it love because if you didn't have the ability to lose it it wouldn't be true love in the first place thank you very much to all my patrons on patreon this is where I put out exclus exclusive content Link in the description to that if you want to check that out and I mentioned I've made several other videos on this topic check out this one provides a lot of resources for like the typical Solutions of How To Love Yourself more if you don't
know about those or if you just need a refresher which I even need sometimes so check it out click it right here and I'm heading out I love you guys thank you for supporting me I appreciate it so much peace
