The term self-love has been trendy in the self-help world for a good few years. The term is so popular that it has gone completely mainstream. It is marketed on t-shirts, in magazines, books and referenced in songs both positively, 'Love me', 'ME' and negatively, 'Love yourself'. It has gained a lot of traction and attention, but it has never left a good taste in my mouth.
I couldn't work out why how something that was supposedly so positive could never sit right with me. I wondered if there was something wrong with me to feel that way. If perhaps I needed to practice it more, in order to feel comfortable. So I tried countless activities, but gave up on them as quickly as I began because none of them felt right. It always felt slightly ridiculous and inherently wrong to be trying to love myself more. As the bible states, 'love your neighbour as you love yourself' Loving ourselves is the supposed given. We mostly already do. When we don't it is not incredibly hard to tap into. We want to be able to think we're amazing and special etc. We are born inherently selfish and self-obsessed. We are taught through love to give.
Self-love has benefits. It can ease us momentarily from our dark thoughts, make us feel comforted and help us temporarily believe in ourselves. We can learn through it to treat ourselves more kindly, but it is not a catch-all trick that will help us feel better in the long-run. It is a rabbit-hole, in which we can fall into narcissism and bad, selfish behaviour, all in the excuse of self-love. It can even hinder our relationships with others and with ourselves. This is because we can make an excuse in the name of self-love to be more self-obsessed and selfish. We can easily lie to ourselves that what we are doing is for self-love because we want to make excuses for ourselves. No-one wants to wake up to the reality of themselves and realise that we aren't so great. We are all wonderfully flawed in amazing and terrible ways.
Our world does not benefit from how much we love ourselves and how much we give to ourselves. It benefits from how much we are able to love others, give to others and how much we are willing to give of ourselves to the world. When people say that you need to love yourself in order to love other people properly I don't think that is true at all. I think it is through loving others that we learn to see the beauty in ourselves and that we can learn to accept ourselves.
It is through indifference and the acceptance of what is that we can truly be at peace with ourselves. By letting ourselves just be as we are, by not judging ourselves for our thoughts and our actions we can realise that we are more than that. We are more than our physical bodies, we are more than our thoughts and we are more than our actions. We are part of the universe and every being that belongs in it.
Indifference does not mean that we don't value ourselves. It means that we lose self-importance, but gain the feeling of belonging to a greater importance, the world's fate and source. We are here as part of the world's purpose and are of equal importance to everything else within it. Take away one person from history and nothing would be the same.
Indifference enables us to detach from ourselves, our egos, our thoughts, our emotions and our desires, which enables us to therefore attach to what our true purpose is. Through this we can see the path of action which is actually right and best. Self-love and loathing will always obscure our decision making process, as our decisions will be coloured in either favour, or disservice to ourselves. Indifference will allow us to make a choice that is based on pure truth.
We can practice indifference through watching our turbulent minds without identifying with them, or judgement. We can also practice it through the art of self-reflection, where we look at how we can improve, what we could do better and what we did well. By balancing these things carefully we will see that we are flawed and good at the same time. However one thing we must do to make it even is to write 3 positives to 1 negative. This is due to the fact that our brains are wired more to the negative, we give negative information more weight. Overall though the best method is Meditation and through it we will learn to be the most at peace.
I hope that you find peace with yourself and see the beauty of indifference.
Much Love
Naomi Leila Xx
p.s. What are your thoughts on Self-love? do you think it is essential or do you think that we need to be more self-indifferent? Please leave a comment below, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
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