How to Find the Greatest Love of All

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, you’ll be noticing articles peppered across the internet forcing love garbage down your throat. ‘How to find the one’ and ‘how to keep him interested’ yada yada yada. As humans we place such a focus on finding the one and once found, we search for more and more ways to improve our relationships that we forget the most important love of all; the love for oneself.

How can you expect to truly love someone else if you cannot first love yourself? And once you’ve found a loving partner, how can you expect to improve your relationship if you do not take the needed steps to love yourself? Surprisingly, it is often those who are coupled up that are in most need of self-love. Those in relationships may be heavily reliant on their partners, fishing for compliments along with ways to elevate their feel of self-worth. By spending copious amounts of time with your partner you may forget to spend time with yourself. Alone.

You may or may not be with your partner forever but like it or not, the longest relationship you will ever have is staring you in the mirror. May as well get to work!

When you decide that it is time to focus on loving yourself you strive to take care of yourself on three levels: physically, mentally and spiritually. You take extra care in listening to what you deserve, to feel and look your best, and accept that no-one is perfect. If you are looking to stop the arguments in your family, to improve your relationship with your partner, or even to find a partner, you must love and respect yourself first. En Vogue’s song lyrics seem to put this very nicely, “Free your mind, the rest will follow”. To truly love yourself you must accept yourself for who you are. You must come to terms with the ‘imperfections’ that cannot be changed and exude a positive self-image sprinkled with unconditional self-acceptance.

Steps to take to love yourself:

Physically

Here’s a challenge: Take a picture of your face and remember that in 10 years from now, you will be in awe at how beautiful you were. Now stop and be amazed NOW!

Take the time to love and treat your body well, be it through diet, make-up or dressing in a way that makes you walk with your head held hig

Mentally

Make sure to do something every day that truly makes you feel good. Be it stopping still for one minute to appreciate what you have, changing your thought patterns or even having a glass of wine whilst watching your favorite show for the 50th time. If you are good to yourself you will inadvertently show people that you respect yourself and they will respect you in return.

Spiritually

Diminish the weight from your shoulders by choosing to forgive yourself and others instead of building anger and guilt. What can you forgive yourself for right now?

“The mind is everything. What we think we become” – Budda.

Your relationships are built on the foundation of the love that you have for yourself and is your right. It is impossible to experience true love without loving yourself first. So start focusing on you and everything else will surely fall into place. It’s not said enough but maybe self-love is truly the greatest love of all.