The UN-conditioning of Love: 7 Ways to Love Yourself More

What makes love unconditional? And which conditions can hold such love back?

Going through this process spiritually is a lofty undertaking - to love yourself fully means being able to love others just as fully. But how do you get there? And what does it take?

I’m in the midst of it, myself. I’ve struggled with self-love after a particularly traumatizing period of my life as a young girl taking ballet lessons (you can watch the video I made some time ago about it HERE). I’ve struggled with self-love due to many other reasons: bullying, self-doubt, losing someone I loved… The list goes on. Is there a person in our midst who DOESN’T struggle with self-love? Probably not. It’s being human that we all have in common, not being “perfect” or flawless.

So I decided to share the 7 Ways to Love Yourself More with you, my friend. These areas are all helping me transform the way I see myself, and liberate me from the “conditions” that used to limit how much love I could feel towards myself. Read through them carefully and see where you can surrender a bit more to the Unconditional Love that is at the core of your very being!

1. You Don’t Have to Be Beautiful to Be LOVED.
   Growing up many of us are shown a variety of examples of what “beautiful people” look like. It is often said that being beautiful means getting farther ahead in life, getting lucky in love, having a good job, achieving success, etc. As we observe these examples of “beautiful people”, we become socially trained to compare ourselves to them and to form conclusions about our own beauty based on the feedback we receive from others. Subconsciously, we start judging ourselves as worthy - or, often, unworthy - of love based on our looks (and more so, what others think about the way we look). This is a totally flawed premise. Men and women are often held to unreasonable, often even impossible standards of beauty at the expense of our ingrained uniqueness and individuality.
   This psychological programming can run very deep, and you may not even realize that it still holds you captive. Create a safe space for you to relax your body, let go of your thoughts and gently repeat to yourself, “I DON NOT HAVE TO BE BEAUTIFUL TO BE LOVED”. This can be a very emotional or even painful experience, so be prepared to process your emotions without rushing through them or trying to change them. Simply let them be.
   

2. You Don’t Have to Be the Best to Be LOVED.
   Similarly to comparing the way we look to others, we are also socially trained to be the best. Often, it comes from our parents: “your sister does it better than you! Don’t you fall behind!” Or our teachers: “only the best students will succeed in this class, so if you aren’t the best, forget about getting an A!” Later, it can be our boss: “the top sales person on our team will win a vacation, and all the rest of you are just going to have to deal with being sore losers!”
   There is no shortage of conditioning that wires us to compete with each other and to strive to be “The Best”. But what does being “The Best” mean, exactly? There is no specific definition. As human species, we have evolved past chasing our dinner through the jungle while simultaneously running away from a bigger predator fixing to dine on us - but we have not evolved past competing with each other for obscure titles such as “The Best”.
   Really think about it… Has anyone ever withheld love and affection from you because you weren’t “The Best”? Hold these difficult memories in your heart and extend your forgiveness to the people who did this to you. In the space of your imagination, tell them: “I forgive you. I don’t have to be the best to be worthy of love and neither do you. We are inherently worthy of love.”
   

3. You Don’t Have to Be Liked to Be LOVED.
   Peer pressure makes us adapt to our social environment. We practically change who we are in order to survive. Often, these experiences are extremely traumatic. Such can be bullying in school, ridicule coming from our friends and colleagues or outright blackmailing from our family members. We learn that to be “liked” means survival, so we link our being “liked” to whether or not we are worthy of love.
   Love, however, is very different from social acceptance. Allowing yourself to feel deserving of love, even loving yourself to the fullest has NOTHING to do with being likable. In fact, opposite is often true - the more you “edit” yourself to fit into the expectations of others, the more you lose the sense of who you truly are, and the harder it becomes to feel loved for who you are, unconditionally.
   Create a safe space to process this. Really feel into all the ways in which you’ve changed yourself to be more liked and accepted by others. This can be very difficult to process, because you will have to forgive yourself for it. As you embrace who you truly are more while releasing all the inauthentic modifications that you’ve made, repeat gently: “ I DO NOT HAVE TO BE LIKED TO BE LOVED. I AM WORTHY OF LOVE UNCONDITIONALLY”.
   

4. You Don’t Have to Compare Yourself to Others to Be LOVED.
   Throughout our lives, we see many different examples of love. We see relationships, friendships, family connections that become examples of what works and what doesn’t. Because of these examples, we often start comparing our own experiences with love to those of others… And that can get tricky.
   You may find yourself thinking, “If I was more like my friend Lucy, I’d have better luck in love! Look at the way her boyfriend adores her!” Or, “If I could only be more like my sister, my parents would love me more!”
   In reality, this perception couldn’t be more wrong. When you learn to love yourself unconditionally, you will realize that there are people out there who will love you for just the person that you are! Comparison is a thief of joy they say, and it is totally true. When you compare yourself to others, you make yourself feel small, insignificant and worthless. Instead, devote focus on RELEASING the need to please people, and work on pleasing yourself. What kind of love do YOU crave? What kind of unique, lovable, adorable qualities do YOU possess? This exercise may be challenging at first, but if you stay adamant, you will liberate yourself from the molds, labels and boxes that you were never meant to fit in the first place.
   

5. You Don’t Have to Succeed to Be LOVED.
   In our era of rapid advancement and ruthless competition, it may seem like there is scarcity. Many of us end up being forced into a zero-sum game mentality: “If you succeed, I fail” - and the other way around. However, the success you may be conditioned to chase from an early age may not even be what YOUR version of success looks like. Our lives are filled with busywork, are minds are overflowing with all sorts of information, and so many of us never get the chance to stop and think: “Do I really even WANT what I’m after”… In a lot of ways, asking this question is scary - what if the answer is no? Does that mean that you’ve wasted your life chasing that which you don’t even want?
   First, we must realize that there is no such thing as a “wasted life”. Everything in life is about learning, our life itself is a classroom for growth and expansion. Thus, even if you do realize that you are aiming for something that was imposed on you by the expectation of others, this exercise will help set you free and make room to set new goals for what YOU actually do want.
   More than that, you will have an opportunity to release the notion that you have to be successful to be loved. True love does not require the sacrifice of authenticity and happiness in order to exist. Allow yourself to be vulnerable. Allow yourself not to know what you want all the time. Allow yourself to feel unconditionally loved regardless of whether you are successful or not.
   

6. You Don’t Have to Be Perfect to Be LOVED.
   What does it mean to be perfect? For some it may mean getting a grip on your bad habits. For others - looking great all the time. Someone may define perfection by the merit of their professional work.
   It’s important to work on yourself and have goals. But it is also important to NOT be so hard on yourself all the time. Try to catch yourself each time you are beating yourself up over your imperfections and shortcomings. How many times during the day do you feel “less than”, “inadequate”, “unworthy” - and how does your mind justify these feelings? Awareness is key.
   We are socialized to be merciless towards ourselves from an early age. Parents, teachers, peers, employers and the society itself takes every opportunity to point out our failures, and soon we learn to come to the verdict of “guilty” and punish ourselves before anyone even notices how we’ve failed yet again.
   This pattern causes much misery throughout our lives, it is incredibly toxic and has no real psychological benefits. It may seem like a lofty task to try to let it go, but you don’t have to do it all at once! You can start by accepting that all human beings are inherently IMPERFECT (because, well, we aren’t robots - and even robots break occasionally). Hold space for your imperfections by ALLOWING yourself to malfunction, fail, break down and screw up. Every time you catch yourself beating yourself up for a shortcoming - stop, breathe, and tell yourself, “I don’t have to be perfect to be loved! I am human.”
   

7. You Don’t Have to Be Anything You Are Not to Be LOVED.
   Sometimes we get to the point of feeling so unlovable, so frustrated and disappointed that we just want to “scrap” our entire personality and start over. Be someone else. Have a completely different life. Have totally different relationships. Grass is always greener on the other side, they say. Sometimes you just want to begin again, erase the history and have a fresh new start.
   This pattern can also manifest as an unhealthy relationship pattern which leads you to the same type of unpleasant situations - different people, same problems.
   At the root of this flawed premise is seeming inability to “change yourself”. No matter how hard you try, no matter what new restrictions you try to impose on yourself, you end up falling back on the old ways and repeating the cycle, over and over again.
   The key to setting yourself free is SELF-ACCEPTANCE. You CAN’T change yourself at the core and become some other person. But you CAN release the old patterns. The only way to do this is to FACE the truth of your innermost feelings, your traumas, your anger, your resentment, your sadness; to own up to the ways in which you have sabotaged yourself time and again. You must find it in yourself to LOVE you, just the way that you are, with all the negative, positive and in-between. You have to ACCEPT where you are in this moment, RIGHT NOW. From that place of acceptance, you can then gently set a new direction for the future. You may occasionally slip up and go back to the old ways… But knowing that you don’t have to be anything that you are not to be loved will help you accept your mistakes and keep moving forward.