During human story, we’ve been in charge of creating our own beliefs regarding how we must live; among those concepts is the perception we’ve created about love.

I like talking about love because I believe that’s the most important and fundamental state for humans existence. Within the information of the first man who stepped the earth, was the need of the perpetuation of the species; from that belief, love started to emerge as a requirement in order to don’t cease existing.

On several occasions I’ve mentioned that love is a state that isn’t sought because it’s already present in oneself; a place no one told us about, due to the belief that love can only come from the outside.

Last week I was training at the gym and saw a couple having a photo shoot; the girl was blond, tall, very thin, and the boy was muscular and blond as well; the photo shoot was to promote the gym and invite people to register at it.

I live and was born in a country with indigenous roots; where mexican women are short and our physical traits are not those of a white woman, men on the other hand, are medium height and brown skin. If I conditioned myself with the femenine stereotype described on that advertisement, my result would be far away from the concept of beauty the collective is telling me I need to follow, because that archetype of a woman is far away from my posibilities because I won’t ever be a natural blond, super skinny, tall nor have blue eyes, simply because that’s not part of the collective I come from. Now, imagine that’s the truth we’ve been told and we’ve been dealing with this notion for generations; unfortunately as mexicans it’s harder for us to identify ourselves with our true nature because we’re living conditioned to an image that’s only part of an unattainable illusion. This caused our rejectment wound to be more profound and for this reason we hardly connect with love from our own essence and this has a direct impact on our self-steem.

Since I have memory, the world has bombarded us with information about how we must be, see and what do we need to have to belong to a environment; those beliefs have induced us into a collective amnesia which prevents us from reminding who we are and what we want to be, without fear of what the others may think.

When I started my career as a life coach, I knew one of the processes that I’d have to face would be my self-encounter and I understood that I’d face my physical, emotional, social and mental complexes. I want to share with you that this process has been one of the most rewarding and challenging I’ve had to struggle with, because being with myself represented breaking with conditionings about what I believed I was and with the ideas of how I had to be in order to be accepted; in turn, breaking with that has connected me with the most enriching freedom that I know I could never find on the outside.

In all that process I started to give therapeutic sessions because I wanted to guide other people to the unknown encounter; in most of the sessions I‘ve discovered the lack of self-love my patients have; when I talk about this with them in addition to their big confusion, the first question they ask me is: What do I have to do to love myself?  

What does it mean to love oneself? In our duality, we insist on being good persons and we avoid at all costs our darkest polarity that contains all our complexes and insecurities; a place where hate, envy, resentment and rancor live, and in the need of denying those states as our own, we face relationships that teach us that everything we deny from the outside also lives within ourselves, that’s why we are capable of recognizing those states. When we’re ready to love ourselves we need to integrate both polarities without judging them as good or bad, because both of them are part of life, as well as of ourselves.   

“You are the most influential person you’ll talk to all day, please be careful with what you say to yourself.”

Zig Ziglar.

When we decide to identify with those beauty labels, we avoid being face to face with our self-love because those external dialogues become real and we turn them into our internal expressions; if you’re all the time positioning on being perfect and you want to look in a certain way, you’ll feel the most undesirable person in the world and from there, you’ll choose the most hurtful words to speak to yourself because you’ll believe you don’t look the way the others perceive acceptable.

Have in mind that in order to love ourselves, we have to be conscious of that self-love and observe from which place we’re creating it, if it’s from your own truth or from the created lie, according to a nonexistent archetype. Remember that in the infinite wisdom of the Universe everything you think, say and do is what you’re condemn to experience because in that same way you’re creating your image.

Sometimes to feel loved we do everything in our hands to be liked by others and when they reject us, it’s because they’re teaching us that in order to receive love we have to first give it to ourselves, otherwise, when we wake up from that challenging situation, we’ll find that “self” tore apart; someone who believed s/he had to abandon him/herself to fill what s/he understood as love.

When you really decide loving yourself, I can tell you that your life will take another sense because you’ll never see anything again with the same perspective you used to visualize everything around you; possibly from your life will leave people you believed loved you and you’ll finish with the situations you thought were real; this will happen because loving yourself involves an inevitable growth; on that path you’ll find an “unknown self”, that being is a permanent guest who’s yourself and only in you is to decide if you treat him/her with love and respect or if you separate him/her from you and treat him/her as a stranger and undesirable enemy.

Start loving yourself,
Shary ChavLó ∞