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Friday, February 10, 2012 Hi Friend You are receiving this message because you requested information on how to handle depression. To unsubscribe from these mailings, click on the link at the bottom of the page. Or, if you also receive my ezine Emotional Times, then you may as well unsubscribe from this list, since from now on it will be the exact same message. (Unless you just want to read it twice...) This issue is devoted to self-love; loving yourself. While everyone gives 'lip service' to love and self-love, very few people actually do it, or even understand what it means. There are some words in the English language that have essentially had all the 'juice' wrung out of them. Love is one of those words. While the words 'Osama Bin Laden' can stir up quite a passion in many people around the world, the word 'love' has become rather ho-hum. Very little passion can be stirred up just from saying the word love. Usually, it's used as a euphemism for something else - sex, attention, manipulation, control, punishment, etc. My purpose here today is to bring a little bit of passion back into the word 'love'. Specifically, the focus will be on loving yourself. Essentially, it amounts to receiving the love you already have. Very few people will allow themselves to receive a nything, much less self-love. Influences against loving yourself. Parents want you to love them instead of loving yourself. But loving your parents came naturally to you, at a very young age. Loving yourself, however, is a skill to be developed. It doesn't come naturally. Schools are based on 'order in the classroom'. Rather than being taught self-love, you are instead conditioned to be part of a group - 'be docile, like a sheep' but don't even think about loving yourself. Society in general is based on containment and 'being normal'. There is no room for loving yourself. Even in religion, we are essentially taught that only God can love us, as opposed to loving ourselves. The failure of the 'Grand Promise'. The unspoken idea all people hold, consciously or unconsciously, is that of a 'grand promise'. The grand promise of our civilization (oversimplified) is that unlimited production equals unlimited consumption. It became the 'American Dream'. I don't want to go off on a tangent here (well, okay - I do - but I won't!) because the failure of the grand promise has created so many problems in our society (and in others before ours). For now, let's just say that while of course you - as an individual - can indeed live the American Dream - as a whole, it is unattainable because it is built on faulty premises - and one result is that it becomes more difficult to love yourself. The 'collective unconscious' itself. Perhaps one of the strongest influences of all in the denial of self love is the collective unconscious - the mass mind of which we are all a part. This is where so many of your limiting beliefs come from. The beliefs about the value of struggle... and hardship... about how it's a 'dog eat dog world out there'... about how unfair the world is?. As well as, beliefs about how unnecessary, how difficult, how impractical, it is to love yourself. For these reasons (and there can be others) it can be hard to love yourself. It just doesn't come naturally to most people. It becomes a challenge. Part of the problem is that there is nothing to do. See, with self-esteem, (the love that you earn from yourself) you do have to go out and conquer something. With self-love, there is nothing to conquer - you just have to hold out your hands, and ask yourself! To get self-esteem, which is the love that you earn from yourself, you have to go out and slay a dragon. That dragon may be your fear and ignorance, or your pride and arrogance, for example. But with self-love, there is no dragon to slay. There is no monster to attack. There is nothing to do. You just have to receive. It can be the hardest thing in the world. But it can also bring the greatest rewards. The problem is, we've judged ourselves as unworthy of love, and now we are living with the consequences. As a child, you made value judgments about yourself. This happens in all arenas of life and especially around self-love. Sometimes it starts out merely as melodrama, as in 'poor me - nobody loves me!' Other times, it's done as a way to survive the pain and the shame that was so overbearing. The important thing to keep in mind is that they were your decisions (necessary or not). Decisions that became rock-hard and even now exert a powerful influence over your life. You were the 'arresting officer' who took yourself away from love. You were the 'grand jury' who found enough evidence to bring charges against you. You were the 'prosecuting attorney' who argued for your unworthiness of love. You were the 'defense attorney' who unsuccessfully defended you. And you were the 'judge' who finally judged yourself to be unworthy of love. The end result is that you languish in a prison of your own making, cut off from your endless supply of love. It's kind of like when you were a kid and went out and got really dirty. Then you come home and refuse to take a bath, because you are too dirty! It's a catch-22. You refuse to take the corrective action because you need it too badly. You cut yourself off from love because you don't have enough of it in the first place! "Because I am suffering, I will make myself suffer more." Like a prison guard, you dole out your love to yourself. You have a ration of love. You have to. You must have some love, just to survive. Some people are getting by on a very small amount, and their life reflects it! You can see it in others. If someone has little self-love, it shows. Just like it shows in you. People can tell how much you love yourself. I'm not talking about narcissism, which as you know is an unhealthy obsession with one's self. (They can see that too!) Narcissism, (the opposite of love) pushes inward, while self- love actually ends up pushing the energy outward. When you love yourself, it flows outward, enhancing your impact, uncovering your self-worth, and making it easier to build your self-esteem (among many other things.) Why not just give in? Love will win. Like a fish in the ocean, you are surrounded by your own love. It keeps you going. Love is not optional. It must be there. You could not exist without it. You will always be seeking more love. Either in a positive way, by opening up to the love that is already there, or in a negative way, usually by trying to manipulate or control others. Many people think love is a function of outside validation, and thus try to extract it from others in the same way that so many seek esteem. While you can certainly be loved by others, you must first love yourself. (In the same way that you must first put the oxygen mask on yourself before putting it on your child - as they tell you every time you get onto an airplane!) How to love yourself more. One way to start loving yourself more is to go back to the earlier decisions you made about loving yourself and change them. For example, you had to make a series of decisions that determined how much self-love you would allow yourself to have. It really was like a trial. You just didn't see it as such. Well, now you can! Why not let your case be heard again? You're the one who makes all the rules. Why not make a rule that it's okay to have a retrial? First, set a date for the trial. Make it at least a few days away. Set a specific time and day, when you know you will have some time alone. You may even want to arrange the room it will be in. Keep in mind the more solid, the more real you make it, the more your subconscious will go along with the results. (Where do you think all that self-love is stored?!) Next, prepare your defense. This is the hardest part. See, if you really believed you deserved more love, you would probably already have it! We almost always get what we think we deserve. "You're just getting what you deserve!" is a sadly-overused phrase that is usually meant to add insult to injury, rather than to provide insightful information. If you're waiting for your 'deserve-ability' to provide you with ANYthing, then you will be waiting a very long time. Deservability (if I may coin a word) doesn't cause anything! It just doesn't have the power to bring you self-love any more than it has the power to bring you a million dollars. No. What you have in life is caused by your willingness!!! The reason we so often get what we think we deserve is because that is all we are willing to let ourselves have. It's the willingness that can bring you self-love. Don't play the losing game of trying to convince yourself that you deserve love. Just be willing instead! If you try to argue for your deservability, you can always come up with some very good reasons why you don't deserve. Besides, 'deserving' is not a causative agent. So even if you did convince yourself that you deserved, it wouldn't matter. Nothing would change. But what if you were willing instead? There's no way to argue with that! What can you possibly say to yourself? Even more importantly, willingness is a causative agent. Your willingness opens the door to what you want. It doesn't guarantee anything. It just allows the possibility of it happening. If your number one argument for more love is because you are willing, you are in a much better position to get it. Why not be willing to have self-love? Denial of self-love is often done as punishment for real or imagined offenses that you may or may not have even committed. These are things you have done in the past that you determined were bad and wrong, and for which you need to be punished. (Sounds like a lack of forgiveness to me!) You need to look at these offenses and decide whether you have suffered enough, or whether you need to continue to punish yourself. This is the key to having more self-love in your life. Remember, you already have some self-love. The problem is you have locked it away from yourself, thinking you had a limited supply that must be guarded, even from yourself. How precious it is! As 'you the warden' - instruct 'you the guard' to double your ration of love. The technique of loving yourself more. Actually, this technique is the way to love - either yourself, or someone else. The rest of this newsletter outlines the technique of love as described in the book, "How To Create Your Own Reality": There are seven specific actions that you take, to produce seven specific responses. The first seven steps are the same for love as they are for intimacy, namely.... 1. Giving which leads to.... 2. Respecting yourself, 3. Being responsible for yourself and your actions,... 4. Knowing yourself and what you are doing,... which leads to... 5. Having the humility to let things be new,... 6. Making a courageous commitment, which leads to the action of... 7. Caring for yourself and what you want. As you proceed through each of these seven steps, you will be setting in motion the force of love, which by its very nature will make it easy to experience the seven qualities of... 1. Security and safety, for yourself and what you are creating... 2. Pleasure,... 3. Honesty and vulnerability,... 4. Trust... 5. Intimacy and caring... 6. Reducing the fear of loss, and finally... 7. Knowledge - to really know yourself more. These are the fourteen steps that, taken together, are the experience of love. If you want to love yourself, or anyone or anything else, follow these fourteen distinct steps, and they will produce love. You do the first seven steps, to experience the last seven steps. Like intimacy, you may want to sit comfortably, and ponder what each of these steps means to you. Allow the resonance of the words to change you. There is so much more that could be said about love, but this is an excellent starting point. As you work with the steps of love, you will find life becomes easier and it becomes more likely you will manifest what you want. Remember, love is the ultimate technique. (End of excerpt) You may wish to print out the 'technique of love' and spend some time with each of the fourteen steps. It's an excellent way to start loving yourself more! And now, I'd like to end on a totally unrelated subject... Every so often someone writes me and mentions they are either starting a web site or they already have one going. If you would like to learn how to do it the RIGHT way - I strongly urge you to click on the link below and find out exactly what it takes to create your presence on the web. I wasted two years and many hundreds of dollars before I stumbled onto their products. You can learn quite a bit just from their free downloads: http://freetrial.sitesell.com/ivar.html What to do next: 1. Read next week's issue as we continue to explore emotional healing techniques. 2. Order your copy of the e-book, "How To Create Your Own Reality". 3. Forward this newsletter to your friends. If you enjoyed this issue, and know someone else who may also, forward a copy to them. 4. Send all feedback regarding this issue to feedback@join-the-fun.com. best wishes, Mark Ivar Myhre The Emotional Healing Wizard fiercely slaying your emotional dragons! join-the-fun.com thanks for reading!