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What Happens To People Who Don't Have Self Love?

If you don't have unconditional self love within yourself, then automatically you end up seeking it outside of self. Love is a survival need. Children have actually been known to die in institutions from lack of love.

The ideal is to give love to yourself and to allow yourself to receive God's unchanging unconditional love. If you don't do this then you end up seeking love, approval, acceptance from other people. This puts you in a compromised position. Other people become your computer programmers and the cause of your reality. Your worth is in their hands and control. Do you really want other people to hold this power and control over you? Not having self love puts a hole in your protective bubble so that when people criticize you, you can't protect yourself.

The ideal is to give yourself so much love, and to allow yourself to feel God's full Love, that you go into life feeling totally powerful and totally loved before you meet another human being. You are ideally feeling full, whole and complete within yourself, and feeling your oneness with God.

You are so filled with love that you can give love to others even if they don't love you. In essence, you want love; you don't need love. You prefer love; you are not attached and addicted to getting love. The attitude of a more self actualized person is to form a right relationship to yourself and a right relationship to God first.

These are the two most important relationships in your life. You then can move into life as a whole, causal, masterful, independent person; A person who is in the world to give rather than needing to get, to fill an empty void within the self. This is the work of the spiritual path.

We actually have it all right now. The only problem is that we think we don't. We live in the nightmare of self inflicted limitations that isn't even real. We can get rid of these limitations any time we want by owning our power and taking command over our minds by the denial and affirming process.

What Do You Do When You Make Big Mistakes?

When you do make big mistakes, keep the critical parent out. It is okay to make observations about yourself or others. This is also called spiritual discernment or discrimination. It is called this because it is done in unconditional love.

Whatever the mistake is, gain the golden nugget of wisdom from the experience and it then becomes a positive experience. If you truly learn from this "mistake" you will never have to go through a similar suffering ever again. Tell yourself that you are worthy and lovable even though you made a mistake or error in judgment. Tell yourself that mistakes are positive and unavoidable. Pick yourself up and get on with it.

A crucial part of self love is forgiveness. You have a choice whether to subscribe to a philosophy of forgiveness or holding grudges. This applies to yourself also. Remember if you hold grudges, you are holding it against the inner child. Would you hold the same kind of grudge against your real child when he was little? If you want to be forgiven by God, don't you think it is necessary to give the same energy back in return to your self and others?

Self Love Affirmations
The following are self love affirmations for reprogramming your conscious and subconscious thinking:

l. I love and forgive myself totally for all my mistakes, for I now recognize that mistakes are positive, not negative.

2. I now fully recognize that I have worth because God created me, and I do not have to do anything to have it.

3. I now recognize that I am a diamond, not the mud on the diamond.

4. My worth is unchangingly positive because it is a spiritual inheritance. It is not increased by my success nor decreased by my mistakes.

5. I realize now that I have total worth and value as a person whether I learn my lessons in life or not.

6. I now recognize that everything that has ever happened in my life has been positive, because it all contained lessons I needed to learn.

7. I choose to live in the "now" and not hold the past against myself.

8. I hereby choose to approve of myself, so I do not have to go around seeking approval from others.

9. I deserve love because God created me, and my mistakes are not held against me.

l0. I realize that everything that happens in life is a teaching, a lesson, a challenge, and an opportunity to grow.

11. I now realize that I am the "I" person, chooser, consciousness, and spiritual being and that this part of me deserves unconditional love at all times.

12. I am the light and not the lamp shade over the light.

13. I deserve love because my true identity is not what I do in life. I am the "chooser" of what I do.

14. I now understand that I am here to learn lessons and grow in life, but if I make mistakes I am still totally lovable and unchangingly worthy.

15. I hereby choose the attitude of being very firm with myself and unconditionally loving.

16. I am the master of my life and I choose to be my own best friend instead of my own worst enemy.

17. I choose to love me as God loves me unconditionally.

18. I now choose truly to understand that I want to be perfect, with the understanding that the mistakes are positive and part and parcel of the growing process.

l9. I now realize on the level of my true identity being the "I", the chooser, the person, the spiritual being, the soul. I am a perfect equal with every other person in the world.

20. I now choose to awaken and recognize that it was only the faulty thinking of my ego that has caused me not to love myself.

21. I now choose to undo all the faulty thinking society has programmed into me and replace it with self love.

22. I choose to recognize that I deserve love and so do other people.

23. I choose to recognize that I am guiltless and sinless, because all mistakes are just lessons and opportunities to grow. Mistakes, in reality, are golden nuggets of wisdom and are positive.

24. I now realize that God does not hold my misuse of free choice against me, so why should I?

25. I love me. I forgive me. I approve of me, and I commit myself from this moment onward to treating myself in a spiritual manner rather than in an egotistical manner. I now fully realize that the way in which I think is the reality in which I live. I have been living in my own self created hell of faulty thinking. I now choose to and will live in my self created heavenly state of consciousness. It is really that simple.

26. I unconditionally love me because I am a son/daughter of God, and my misuse of free choice or faulty thinking is not held against me.

27. Could what God created not be lovable and worthy?

28. I love me because I am innocent and not guilty.

29. The only thing in this infinite universe that says I do not deserve love is my "ego". I hereby reject my ego and its false attitude and get back in tune with my true spiritual attitude and self.

30. I now, once and for all, release the ego's game of "having to do" in order to deserve love and worth. I now fully recognize I have always been lovable and worthy and will always be so.

Personal Power, Emotional Invulnerability and Self Love Visualizations

Self Love Visualization:

Begin by imagining a beautiful nature scene. Visualize and imagine yourself as smiling, happy, joyous, loving and at peace with yourself and the world. Look around your nature scene and enjoy the colors, smells, sounds and feeling of being in harmony with nature.

Next, imagine one of your favorite pets being with you in your nature scene. See the pet come up to you and give you love and affection. Then imagine that your best friend is walking toward you from the distance and is carrying a 6 month old infant. See yourself greeting your friend and giving him a hug and talking a little bit.

Your friend asks you to baby sit this infant for a couple of hours. He carefully and gently hands you the infant. See your friend leaving and promising to return within two hours. See yourself holding, rocking and giving love to this beautiful baby.

Next, realize that this infant is really the inner child within you. You have a choice as to how you are going to parent this child within. You not only have a child within you, but also a parent within. You are that parent now who has a choice as to how you are going to raise this infant, that is you. The ideal is to give firmness and unconditional love. Firmness and love create a well adjusted inner child.
The other options are to be the critical or overly firm parent or the permissive spoiling parent to yourself. If you are too critical with this inner child, grow up feeling unworthy, incapable and unloved. If you are too permissive this child will grow up spoiled and inflated. The key question is: How do you want "you" to grow up? Make this choice now and give this firmness and unconditional love to this infant that is you as a baby.

Now imagine that five years have gone by and this little child that is you is playing in your nature scene. Again practice being this ideal parent to yourself. Talk to the child and tell it how you feel about it. Now imagine that ten more years have passed and this child that is you is an adolescent of fifteen. Be the parent you want to be to this teenager.

Now imagine that this adolescent has now grown to your present age. See yourself as you look and are now. Recognize that you are still parenting this adult person within you. Now that this child has grown to be the adult you, have you thrown unconditional love and firmness out the window?
Make a choice right now to communicate with yourself to get back to the right relationship to yourself. Go up to yourself and give yourself a big hug, recognizing that this is, in truth, your best friend. Apologize to yourself for being so hard on yourself in the past. Forgive your parental self for its mistakes and forgive the adult child self for its mistakes.

Tell yourself what kind of relationship you want to have from now on. Make a choice to love in the now and get a fresh start from this moment forward. Make a choice to look at the past as positive experiences because you now choose to look at everything that happened as opportunities to grow.
Give yourself approval and acceptance because you now recognize that mistakes are positive, not negative. Tell your child/adult self that you love him unconditionally from now on instead of conditionally. Tell him that you are not going to base your love on what he does but rather on the fact that he was created by God, so of course he has value and worth regardless of mistakes or successes.

See the consciousness, the "I," the person, the spiritual being now, as differentiated from behavior, mistakes, successes, personality, physical body, thoughts, feelings, emotions, or content of consciousness. Make a commitment to yourself from this moment forward to form this right relationship to yourself.

Take time now to have a heart to heart talk with yourself to come to a place of treating yourself spiritually and with love. Take the time now to talk out all unfinished business, unclarity, faulty thinking or incompleteness, so that when this meditation is over, there is a fresh start and rebirth in your relationship to yourself.

Your True Self: The Causal Consciousness Self

Recognize that you have both a child and a parent self within you. It is important to realize, however, that even though everyone has to deal with these psychological dynamics, the real you is neither the parent nor the child. The real you is "consciousness" or "I" that is choosing what kind of parent and what kind of child dynamic you are creating within yourself.

The real you is the observer self, who is the controller, director, chooser and causer. The key to being the causer is the understanding of the need to be disidentified from the content of consciousness. You are not your thoughts, feelings, emotions, body, behavior, actions, personality, mistakes, successes, abilities, past, future, beliefs nor any of the content of consciousness.

You are the essence and not the form. You are the consciousness, not the creation. You can direct and control only that from which you are disidentified. That with which you, as the consciousness or "I" are identified, will be your master. In living in this world we must deal with form. This is why it is essential that you choose and cause the form of what kind of parent you are going to be to yourself.

Do a visualization, putting all the things you have thought were you (the content of consciousness) into a big metal pot that is now in the middle of your nature scene. Put everything in it until you are naked of all mental, emotional or physical form. All that is left is a center of pure awareness with nothing in it.

Practice taking qualities, attitudes, feelings, beliefs, abilities, and non abilities and trying them on and then throwing them back in the pot. Practice identifying, then disidentifying. Practice being the controller, causer and creator of your life, like you would in a play or theater. Always remember what your real Self is and who and what you are.

by Joshua David Stone