Self-love is The Foundation of Love

Love, without a doubt, is the most beautiful feeling in the world.

But what does loving someone have to do with self-love?

 The truth is love and self-love are intricately linked.

When we are in love, the person we love seems so fascinating and adorable.

But how does love develop within our hearts? 

Is it the person we love, or is there something much deeper and more profound that stimulates love within us?

On the surface, it seems that the person we love has given rise to love within us. 

This is because we weren’t able to feel the love before they came into our lives. 

But can someone generate something within us that is already absent or that we are not capable of? No! 

People we love only bring out what we already have inside us. 

These people are just a trigger, and we are and have always been the actual storehouse and source of love. 

So, if we don’t love someone yet or ever,  love still resides inside of us. But what form of love is it? 

It is self-love! 

The love that is necessary to keep you alive, interested, and happy.

Nature has created us with a certain essential amount of love or self-love within us.

It’s upon us whether we maintain, grow, or reduce it. 

If we are not able to expand self-love but we fall in love with someone, this is the beginning of a big problem in our lives. 

A relationship without self-love is bound to become a mess. It’s the standard way a war between love and self-love begins.

‘Love’ in The Absence of SelfLove

Love and self-love are inter-dependent.

When we are in love, everything feels right. It helps us face life’s difficulties with calm, ease, and confidence.

Love makes even the most demanding partner seem endearing to you.

But when love within you declines, it becomes difficult to love others. 

For some time, you try to stay away from people. 

Eventually, you realize that you need someone to love you and raise your love quotient. 

The problem is that you don’t have enough self-love to share with someone, but you are in a situation where you need love from them just for your own survival.

When love becomes a desperate search, your “love story” is bound to become ugly. 

Even when you find the perfect person, you tend to feel otherwise and start messing it up. 

You put the added burden of generating love for you on that person, and when they are unable live up to your expectations, you feel the person doesn’t love you anymore.

It’s important to know here that it’s nobody’s fault. 

It’s the underlying problem, which is the lack of love, that weakens and ultimately breaks a beautiful relationship.

This is how most of the relationships break and come to a sad end.

A lack of self-love can root out even the strongest of relationships. 

When someone stops loving themselves, even their decades old relationship lands in the threatened zone. 

Either they start expecting an unreasonable amount of love from their partners, or their partners, in search of love, find themselves having an affair outside the relationship.

Both love and self-love suffer in this situation.

Self-love is A Super-Power

When handled well, the connection between love and self-love can be empowering.

If you know how to love yourself, even if someone cheats on you or leaves you, you can handle it maturely. 

It’s because you know that you won’t go love-dry without them. 

1. You have enough love for yourself and you can also produce more to adapt to the adverse situation.

Thus, self-love lets you forgive others by making you self-sufficient. 

Your dependence is only on love, which you can create for yourself. 

Also, you know that your self-love abundance and capabilities would attract many other people for your lover’s position. 

Thus, self-love gives you multiple options and always keeps them open for you. 

With self-love, it feels like the world belongs with you. 

You can pick and choose what you feel is best for you. 

Thus, we must know how to consistently grow self-love within ourselves. 

When you can, you not only stay happy yourself, but you also nurture happy and successful relationships. 

Love and self-love both flourish in our lives to make them beautiful. 

Thus, the relationship between love and self-love depends on your self-love quotient.

Developing Self Love and Self Compassion

Before we try to enhance love and self-love, we first need to develop self-love and self-compassion in our lives.

Self-love and self-compassion don’t rise on their own, you have to cultivate them through effort & practice. 

Ways To Practice Self-Love

There are simple ways to practice self love that you need to adopt. 

Some of these ways to cultivate self love and self-compassion include: 

• Not harboring unreasonable expectations from yourself and trying too hard to accomplish them.

• Stop trying to multi-task every single moment.

• Giving up judging yourself constantly.

• Not being too harsh on yourself for failures or sub-optimal results and giving yourself the benefit of the doubt.

• Not blaming yourself for every single thing that goes wrong in your life.

• Accepting yourself the way you are to calm down and find peace within.

• Keeping your inner child alive by keeping your childhood likes, hobbies, & habits active.

• Embracing the changes, improvements, & evolution within you.

• Being gentle, kind, and forgiving to yourself.

• Take care of yourself, esp. when you need it the most, and stop being dependent on others.

• Giving yourself the time to relax and find inner peace.

• Take help from guided meditation sessions to access your tranquil core or your true self. Meditation for self-compassion has always been one of the most effective tools.

• Adopt the habit of journaling to know yourself better.

• Filtering, planning, & organizing your thoughts to develop a stable, positive, & progressive mindset.

• Value every word you utter and use them to be a better person.

• Utilising every moment to do something productive and meaningful.

• Finding the optimal work-life balance.

• Setting boundaries in the right places in everything you do to keep them within your control.

These practices to cultivate self love in your life would go a long way in making you self-sufficient in love. 

They will fill you with love which will help you in establishing and nurturing successful relationships.

Both love and self love would get a boost.

We all know that as a whole, love is in shortage in this world. 

Having an abundance of self love means harboring a surplus of love in your own life. 

It helps you share this surplus love with people who need it. 

It makes you valuable to them and a good person in their eyes. 

In short, self-love makes your life meaningful by becoming kind of a “love manufacturer”. 

Thus, self-love is very important to keep love alive in the lives of people and hence in the world.

That’s how important is the connection between love and self loself-love is.

The Difference Between Love And Self Love

Love and self love may look very similar buty have a fundamental difference.

What is the difference between love and self-love? 

As the words themselves suggest, the difference is ‘you’ or the ‘self’. 

Love is a natural emotion but human beings are instinctively outward-oriented. 

So, they think that love is only an external emotion and act and in the process forget to love themselves. 

And this is the reason why the question of the difference between love and self love arises. 

When we start loving ourselves, this difference gets eliminated and love and self love become synonymous.

When you forget how to be compassionate to yourself, you can refer to selfcompassion by Kristin Neff and be guided to self love.

It will raise the amount of love and self-love in your life.

Which Love Is True Love?

Love and self-love compete for the tag of true love in people’s minds. 

Now, is self-love true love? 

To put it simply, self-love is the best love.

When God made us, he intended to keep us alive and kicking. 

Can you imagine yourself living a long life without having love within yourself? 

It would be nothing less than a torture. 

So, yes, self-love is true love because in its absence, we might not be able to survive. 

This doesn’t mean that every other love is not true. 

You may love your family or your partner in the truest sense of the word. 

But for that to happen, your self-love needs to be true, i.e., only if you can truly love yourself will your love for others be true. 

It’s because every other love is just an extension of your self-love. 

Self-love teaches you how to love, hence the better you can love yourself, the better you can love others. 

So, if you are still thinking, ‘Is self-love the best love?’, try finding a love relationship that is purer and more natural than the love for keeping yourself alive. 

Anything that is keeping you alive at this moment, despite all the challenges life poses, has to be the best love for you, doesn’t it?

Thus, the competition between love and self-love for the position of true love is comprehensively won by self-love.

Is Self-Love A Love Magnet?

Are love and self-love attracted by each other? 

Self-love attracts love like a magnet.

Why does self-love attract love? 

You must have seen or experienced that when we are full of self-love, people get attracted to us. 

Why is this so? 

One reason is that they are short on their self-love quotient. 

When they see someone capable of self-love, they want to support and love them and feel good about themselves. 

Also, people who can’t love themselves are looking out for people who can love them. 

So, when they witness your self-love, they feel you can fill in their gap of self-love with the surplus love you have within yourself. 

They try to invest their love in you in the hope of receiving a greater return of love from you in the future.

The third and most obvious reason is the power of positivity. 

Love is the strongest and the most positive thing one can have in one’s life. 

So, it’s the sheer strength of this positive trait that attracts people. 

They want to fill their lives with positivity, and when they see your self-love, they see an opportunity to do so by showering love on you.

That’s why love and self-love are often seen together.

Does Guided Meditation For Self-Compassion Help?

Are love and self-love connected to guided meditation in any way?

Guided meditation for self-compassion does help in some instances. 

Although the ideal way to cultivate self-love is through self-realization or simple meditation practices, not everyone is capable of it.

Many people need to be guided to open themselves up to self-love and self-compassion. 

These people are the ones who have faced excessive trauma or torture in their childhood or their past, due to which they are scared of opening up other own. 

Guided meditation sessions may help them immensely in opening the doors of self-love in their minds and eventually in their actions.

Thus, guided meditation sessions effectively enhance love and self-love in our lives.

Conclusion

Love and self-love are intimately connected. 

Self-love is the foundation of love. 

Only when you love yourself will you be able to build happy, strong, and successful relationships. 

So, practice self-love and self-compassion to attract all the love in the universe and fill your life with the things that matter the most – Love and Self-Love!