Self-Love: You Can Run But You Can’t Hide

Self-LoveSpiritualityLove & RelationshipsLoveFear of Love

Apr 28

The bulk of my clients over the years have been individuals (mostly women) who are desperately looking for love. Some are rather cool and nonchalant about it, afraid to openly hope for something that has constantly disappointed them, while others are more frantic and upfront. I can always detect a bit of frustration when I explain to them that love is not something to be looked for and found, and that the only way to feel the love they crave from someone else is to first feel it for themselves in the same quantity and quality that they wish to attract into their lives.

Self-Love is an Abstract Concept

At first, most react along the lines of, “of course I love myself.” But when I ask them to define self-love, they can’t seem to put their notions into words. And I’m sure that this isn’t the first time you've read that loving yourself is the source of your happiness, good health, and overall well-being during this human experience. But raise your hand if you’re not exactly sure what is meant by self-love.

See, self-love, like all the other formations of love, is an abstract concept. How do you know and recognize when you are truly loving yourself? What does your love for self look like? What does it act like? Feel like? Sound like?

You might be reading this and arguing, “Of course I love myself; it’s just my romantic relationships that are difficult.” You might be thinking, “I can’t see in me what other’s see, so yes, I need to love myself more.” There are others out there, however, who are reading this and saying, “but I do love myself. I am awesome. I’m successful! Confidence is my middle name.” But still, in the quiet moments, they are feeling anything but.

I understand why you might have difficulty relating because this was one of the concepts most difficult for ME—Dame Love a Lot, the love guru, love connoisseur—to fully comprehend and apply. And trust and believe, I still have days when I’m still trying to get it together.

Hiding in Plain View

It's quite interesting how this lack of love for ourselves plays out in our everyday lives. And the thing is, most of us don’t correctly identify it for what it is. We write off our inability to see our own unique beauty; to speak our individual truths; to feel comfortable in a room full of strangers; to make healthy decisions and take risks. Instead, we ignore our constant boredom and feeling stuck in a rut as the cost of eking out a living or raising a family. We tolerate physical, emotional, and verbal abuse from the world at large, and most unfortunately, from those we’re close to, as a show of our commitment and love. Because we ignore our emotions and the root cause for them, we create coping strategies by running away and hiding from what truly ails us—a soul searching for love within and not finding it.

Workaholics, beauty queens, slut puppies, workout fiends, adrenaline junkies, potheads—we come in every shape and size and create a million places to hide; places that we create in our minds to give us a false sense of security and acceptance. Some hide within the constant while of social interactions. Cocktail in hand, they’re always laughing but never seem genuinely happy as they continue to eat, drink, and be merry to cope with the gnawing want within. Others hide in their wanderlust—forever searching but never finding because their journey rarely travels inward with enough depth to make a difference. Some hide in their work, relationships, and family, catering to the needs of others to avoid addressing their own. We all know those who hide in their appearance or sexual conquests, mistaking virility, or sexiness for worthiness. And then there are those who hide in the calamity or confusion of the moment, which renders them feckless and unproductive. And all the while we’re hiding, we’re looking for the love and acceptance of others to make us feel whole.

Me, I tend to hide in my spirituality. For years I hid in my Zen (as in attitude), always accepting, always understanding, despite the emotional pain the actions of others might cause me. Over the years, I, like so many others, have experienced the feelings of betrayal, rejection, and the impact of these emotional and verbal bruises. In my quest to be live spiritually and soul forward, I enabled a lot of unfair and undeserved bullfuckery from people, some I eventually realized were simply foes in friends’ clothing. I acquiesced my desires to keep the peace, gave people passes and second and third chances, under the guise of understanding their underlying goodness. I was trying to give them grace and love them unconditionally, but at what cost to loving myself?

While these hurtful behaviors continued to secretly punch and bruise my self-worth, they never cost me my self-confidence, which led me to erroneously believe that while the circumstances were jacked up, I was cool because I was on the spiritual high ground. My point is, while I have always had a high level of confidence and self-esteem, I still had (have) work to do. The holes in my love of self came from a lack of feeling worthy, though I had no idea. This played out in many areas of my life—money, career, relationships. And the crazy dumbass part of all this is for YEARS, I’ve been coaching others how to recognize the root of their woes and learn to love themselves. YEARS! But it took me getting divorced, and living on my own, to learn to use my spirituality to face my issues, not hide from them. I had to do some serious, next-level inner work, but once I did my reality was forever altered.

The Love You Seek is Your Own

Once you do the work, you'll also realize that it isn’t that you don’t love yourself, it's that you don’t love yourself enough, or as the Angels would say, with completeness. You’ll also come to understand that the love you seek is your own.

To bring all this home, here’s the bottom line: As human beings, we’re all imperfect, but as souls, we are exquisite in our perfection. This is our soul truth because we are created from pure and Divine love. Our mission, while we are in this human experience, is to rekindle that Divine love, and explore this world in joy and with total abundance. The hitch is, until we are complete in loving ourself, ego and free will have a nasty little way of messing with our minds, causing fear and clouding up the way we view ourselves and others. This, of course, impacts the quality of our choices, which dictates our reality—a reality that often features unhealthy and unsatisfying relationships.

Here are your three basic touchstones to remembering self-love within: Seek. Assume. Believe.

SEEK. You are love and are meant to live in joy and abundance. To get to that place, you must come out of hiding and follow your emotions to their source. In other words, if you’re gonna hide, you gotta seek. And what you’re looking for are all the ways you block love from yourself and others. Once you remove the barriers, love awaits.

ASSUME. I think most of us are familiar with the golden rule taken from the Bible (and all its varied spin offs): Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Right there, in the “as you love yourself” part, sits the underlying assumption that every human already possesses self-love, which is the fuel and foundation for all that is right in the world for you and your neighbor. This jives nicely with what the angels say, your job isn’t so much to find love within, but to remember it, celebrate it and share it.

BELIEVE. Believing in your own worth and greatness is always the hardest part, usually because you’ve invested a whole lot of time and energy believing in someone else’s ideas about you and trying to survive in this alternate reality. My suggestion is as you go about learning the amazing truth about yourself, believe this: You can be a work-in-progress and a masterpiece at the same time.

Self-love is the ultimate building block when it comes to our relationships across the bar. No matter the concern, issue, or situation you are currently facing, the quality and quantity of how you love yourself will either exacerbate the problem and delay the solution or accelerate your healing and progress, especially when it comes to attracting the love you crave.

SELF-LOVE IS: