You are Lovable and Loving

There’s been a lot of advice going around self help circles about self care and how to learn to love ourselves.

Actually we don’t have to learn how to love ourselves. We already love ourselves. All we have to do is to recognise where we withhold love from ourselves and stop. It’s not some new skill we need to learn – it is the innate condition we arrived with, lovable and loving.

To recognise this involves identifying the conditioning that led us to believe we are not worthy of our own love and then to drop those filters of conditioning and beliefs that obscure our natural authentic state.

Many of us were taught early on in life that we first have to please people or to contort ourselves in some ways to get that love and approval that we needed to survive as children. Or that we must strive hard to gain greater recognition for our achievements to demonstrate that we are ‘good enough’ and deserving of that love and approval from others. What is implied is that if we don’t use self criticism to be a ‘good’ person, please others or achieve more we will fail at being acceptable to others and achieving our potential.

Those were simply untruths that have been passed down unconsciously from generation to generation. We are perfectly lovable exactly as we are and we always have been. And once we realise that, we automatically become less afraid of being more honest with ourselves and others, and we allow our love to come out as it is naturally inclined to. We automatically become more of a joy to be around for others by being our authentic and unique selves.

We may even achieve more, pursuing avenues of learning and skills that we enjoy and we increase our usefulness to others and to society by sharing those skills.

In other words, we still achieve and strive to realise our potential, but for different reasons. Not to gain approval or love from others but because it comes naturally, we know we deserve to do what we love doing, and we no longer hold back due to self doubt or fear. We no longer do what we feel we ‘should’ be doing to gain success and approval, making ourselves and those around us often miserable as a result.

This is a restoration job. Nothing needs to be added to us or learned to make us better or more complete. Just a few layers of dust and dirt in the way of our realising our natural confidence and to allow ourselves and our potential to shine and to be a benefit to ourselves and to the world.