010: Self Love - Love Yourself First!

Spiritual Awakening - Expanding Times Fireside Chats

Once more Karen and I set ourselves another daunting task! In this week's Fireside Chat, we take on the topic of self love and what it means to truly love oneself!

We've all heard that New Age platitude, "Just love yourself!" Personally it actually infuriates me sometimes because it can sound so trite and make it seem so easy! It is in fact, just like everything else, a habit we need to cultivate and a daily routine that comes with practice.

So what is it? What does self love mean? And how on earth do you develop the habit of putting your own wants and needs above everyone else's when we have been so conditioned by society, family and especially religion, to feel guilty and selfish when we look after numero uno!

WE maintain that if we DON'T take care of ourself first and keep the well filled up and flowing, that eventually we get dried up, resentful, diminished and even sick. Happily we are becoming more educated as a species that self love is valuable and now an integral element of raising happy, creative and confident kids, but when both Karen and I were younger, social customs and practices had not yet quite reached that enlightened stage; and as a result we were not raised to have healthy self esteem, belief in our abilities or faith in the mysteries of life!

These are all skills and qualities I for one have certainly had to work hard at to help them expand in my character and have found that nurturance to be one of the most fundamental elements of my spiritual journey.

To become your authentic self and become all that you have the potential to be requires you to love yourself - full, unconditional and unequivocal self love!

Oneness can only come from loving oneself... unconditionally.

Inner peace = outer peace!

Osho's insight on self love

“The first thing to remember is to “be more loving to yourself.” The moralists have poisoned the whole world. They say, “Don't love yourself. This is selfishness.” They say, “Love others, but don’t love yourself. The love of the self is sin.

But I say to you that this is absolute nonsense – and not only nonsense; it is dangerous nonsense. Unless you love yourself, you cannot love anybody. It is impossible, because a man who is not in love with himself cannot be in love with anybody. If you are in love with yourself, only then can your overflowing love reach somebody.

In spite of that, emotionally, we have all been excessively trained to search outside of ourselves for meaning and fulfillment. Yet spiritually, the more we realize that claiming our strengths, seeing our beauty, validating our own rightness, and loving ourselves unconditionally, the more we discover our proven road to fulfilment.

Today we discuss:

* Giving to yourself first - guiltlessly!

* Showering yourself with loving words instead of criticism and comparison

* Going for your dreams with conviction and courage

* Choosing the situations and relationships that make you happiest

* Discovering and exploring your deepest thoughts and desires — and how to act on themWhen we are feeling unworthy, we are in our minds, replaying the messages that we've picked up along the path of our upbringing that said that we weren't good enough or worthy of love. We are in a 3D model that rewards us for what we DO rather than for who we ARE!

By grounding ourselves and moving into our heart space, we move into the flow of love that is always there.

So what practices can we adopt?

In this call we run down several prescriptions for Self-Love that we absolutely love … plus we share the single most life affirming question you can ask yourself not only every day, every time you need to make any kind of decision or when you need to "tune in"... but several times a day to simply keep yourself on track ... downstream, paying attention to your heart, following your bliss and EXPANDING!Of course we're not going to tell you what that question is in this blog post!

So Listen NOW and get all the 'goss'!!