Self-Love: The Foundation of Caring For Others & Thus Meaning in Life

Today we are going to go back to the importance of a healthy love of 'self' never to be confused with selfishness.

When I think about my own journey into a deeper sense of self-love which is really just a sense of self-acceptance, I recall the many years that I worked so hard to achieve a grade of 'C' in some of the subjects in school. My mind just couldn't get around them. I recall in middle school coming to a point where I had nearly given up because all that effort I put in did not improve my grade. It brought me to a place where I was deeply wondering what the point was to putting in all those hours of being tutored after school to do no better.

Then something miraculous happened in high school when I realized that there were just some subjects that I was better at than others and that this could be accepted for what it was. Then came college where I truly fell in love with the whole idea of learning because I was learning about how the mind worked in the realm of child psychology and in the process of learning itself as I was in school studying elementary education with moderate special needs. This was especially poignant to me being a learning disabled student. I learned in that program that the learning disabled needed different approaches to learn and was effectively integrating this knowledge into my own college studies. I had finally broken the code on how to get much better grades and even enjoy the process. Twenty years later I was learning about the different learning styles in my studies of neuro-linguistic programming. It became even more evident to me why some kids would never be able to learn in a lecture-note-taking manner - some kids (and adults) need to be able to physically do the thing they are learning in order to learn it. They are known as kinesthetic learners in neuro-linguistic languaging terms. I have found that my kinesthetic learner clients gain the most from the work we do together as they need to go deeply into their feelings first to be able to identify their thoughts and put them into words. Somehow that process allows them to learn so much more than the visuals, auditory and audio digitals (they think in terms of ideas instead of the 5 senses).

So, the idea of being willingly able to accept and acknowledge who I was, and what I could achieve if the given subject that mattered to me came into my own world of exploration. This brought a much deeper sense of meaning to my studies and thus a love of learning.

Over the years I had to overcome many challenges, however, the one that was the most difficult was that of bipolar 2 when it was simply known as manic depression. This is my preferred term for it to this day as this is the way life felt for me - up and down on two poles of emotions with 6 months 'up' and 6 months 'down' never did a neutral place of emotion exist during that time). It was an illness that was thought to be of life-long duration to be managed with heavy-duty medications and therapy for the rest of my life.

My imagination wouldn't accept that as my fate and though I had no idea how I was to turn this around, I was determined to do so. It all happened because I cared so deeply about my clients in the conventional mental health system who were going through much more serious mental health issues than myself at the time. It seemed to me that there could be a better more holistic manner of treating people for these issues and indeed there is - but not if you leave it to the conventional means where psychopharm rules.

And, this is where I got into the willingness to create a new reality - first for my clients and then for myself as it turned out. Because the tools that I was taught to use to let go of negative emotions were the same tools that I needed to free my mind of the endless cycles of ups and downs.

You see, it is when one is willing to realize that there are better ways of doing things - allowing one to be creative enough to even allow that idea into one's head, that the answers will come. But, first, you have to love yourself enough to be willing to do whatever it takes to find that answer. Many times, it is through our observations of the ill-treatment of others that we figure these things out. And, then we realize that the answers to our own issues are right there in our own hands should we choose to apply this knowledge to ourselves. And, it is when we apply this knowledge to ourselves first that our clients are able to receive the best results from their work with their practitioner.

But, to be willing to apply this knowledge to ourselves we have to love ourselves enough to care enough to actually do the work to allow the knowledge to transform our lives.

The people who make the best clients for me are not necessarily the ones who feel worthy, but the ones who want to feel worthy enough to find their way back to health and wellbeing. The ones who realize that they and their families (those with whom they share their homes) deserve an up-leveled sense of self - of maturity - of self-realization - culminating in that of self-love. Only when we realize that we are worthy of creating a life of meaning can we become that life that brings meaning to others.

***If you are a person who is feeling sick of being stuck - a person who is finding it difficult to navigate your world because of perhaps a feeling of loss of 'self' you can contact me at:

https://dawningvisions.com/contact_suzanne/

Fill out the form. I will connect with you and we will determine a time to have a free Chaos to Clarity Conversation to find out what we can do to release you from these negative feelings and get you into a life of meaning for yourself so you can move onto a fulfilling and joy-filled life.