I don’t know about you, but for years and years and years, I’ve been hearing something really important in the personal development community: “Love yourself”. But that’s not all. Supposedly, you can’t love someone else unless you love yourself first. Or, you can only truly love another human being as much as you love yourself.

Now, whether or not that’s true is for only you to decide. But I’d like to share my thoughts and feelings with you about what I think it means for a person to love herself or himself. And I invite you to think about these concepts with me. At our very core, we are love. It’s just that many life experiences have a negative effect on us, and our love gets clouded over. It’s like we forget love is there.

But love is always there. It’s always available to us, and it always has been. Throughout my life, I’ve learned that the more loving I am toward myself, the more loving I am with others. This happens because love is our natural state of being. The more we allow it to come out, the more it presents itself. When we love ourselves, we love others. When we love others, we love ourselves. We are mirrors and reflections of one another. Let me share what helps me access the ability to be loving with myself.

Vanessa Standard, MA