How much love do you deserve? (Or: Why we need to stop being so hard on ourselves)

Do you believe that you’re fully deserving of love? I mean, totally 100% worthy. I’m talking about not even having a flicker of a doubt about it (but I’m not talking about arrogance or feelings of superiority). Can you put your hand on your heart and say ‘Yes, I’m full of love for myself & I’m enough just now in this moment, and every moment’?

If not, why not?

What is it that you’ve done to be below this benchmark?

What is it about you that has lead you to feel unworthy of the most natural feelings of self-love?

Can you clearly remember a time you loved yourself fully?

If you can, what happened to erode this feeling? What did you do that put you beyond forgiveness and unable to love yourself anymore? Do you have feelings of guilt, shame, regret, or maybe blame for something you did? Or do you blame another for your woes in life?

If you cannot ever remember feeling full of love for yourself, have you then been carrying this lack of love since before the time your memory can reach back? How can you possibly have a truthful, real reason not to love yourself if you were that little? Children are born full of love for themselves, and it’s through observing & learning from others & the world around them that they learn to feel that they are acceptable or unacceptable in some way. But this is never the truth. It’s just conditioning – what we are told is good and bad and how much we are told we are not living up to expectations. When we are small, vulnerable and suggestable, we easily mistake other’s pain and fragility for our own, concluding that we are somehow lacking what we need in order to be okay. Being teased or scolded at home or in school are small examples of how these feelings can be triggered. It’s all a misunderstanding.

The fact is, we are all deserving of 100% love, 100% of the time. And best of all, we need not rely on anyone else to provide this for us. It’s not whether we deserve love in anyone else’s eyes that counts, because it is for us to start loving ourselves this fully. We do deserve it!

Why do we deserve it? Because our beliefs about not being worthy are totally fake.

Maybe a few of you are scratching your heads in confusion. You feel you have genuinely done enough ‘bad’ things to not meet this magical 100% deserving status. But think about it, you are born with a clean slate. You learn from all the other people around you, who have learnt from all the people around them (and so on) that you don’t meet up to the standards needed to be ‘good enough’. Who set these standards? Are they a kind of universal law? Or does every society in every different country and different historical period have their own unique set of standards about what is and is not acceptable? Take the example of beauty – so often a reason that women, and increasingly men, feel they are not good enough or not deserving of love. Is what is considered to be physically beautiful the same in every society at every point in the history of mankind, or is it constructed by that society? So does it make sense to judge ourselves as lacking or not good enough based on something as intangible as a temporary, constructed image?

Intrinsically, we are beings of energy. Our true nature underneath all the conditioning we have gathered around us, is pure and loving. No matter what thought, feeling and behavioural patterns we have built around us in this life, or how far we have moved away from our original happy, loving nature, we are fully deserving of love for ourselves.

So ask yourself: Who am I underneath all the layers I have built for protection, all the images I have formed about myself? And if you’re keen to follow this question through, and to journey towards those feelings of self-love that you fully deserve to feel, do get in contact with us if you want support. This is at the heart of what we do at Aware Conscious Living.

Love & light,

Ruth

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