It is a popular topic today. Many people and headlines advice us to love ourselves more, like it is the solution to everything. All these ”why don’t you love yourself,” ”you can’t love anybody else until you love yourself” and many more. It starts to sound like an obligation already, but what is self-love? Just a right or justification to be egoistic or exactly the opposite?

Self-love is important to live a healthy and fulfilling life. It makes us think about our priorities, we make decisions based on this and we might even change our lives completely once we start taking ourselves more seriously.

Self-love can be anything, it can be you saying ”no” to everything not supporting you but also the opposite, saying ”yes” to everything that makes your heart shine and soul giggle. Self-love for me is enjoying life while being the best version of myself. By that I do not mean that we should all always aim for the perfectness but forgive ourselves. Sometimes we are feeling low and do not want to do go out of our bedrooms, we want to eat junk food and make childish jokes and we should let ourselves to do that. It is our freedom to love and respect ourselves and nobody else should have a say in that. Also forgiving ourselves for the mistakes we have done, because we are living our lives for the first time in this body and should not know everything, we are learning and improving day by day. Usually, we give the best we can at any moment and it is okay when some day the best we can do is only brushing our teeth.

Practicing self-love is an everyday job. It should always be the most important priority. I have learned that everything is possible in this life and we should all do what we love the most. Our society makes us believe that only the lucky ones can be happy and enjoy life but it is our job to prove ourselves the opposite. We all deserve to be happy and respected just because we were born to this world.

There are different ways how to practice self-love, Internet is full of articles but I think the most important is to really listen to ourselves, simply because there is not a second version of us, we are all unique. Once my friend told me about a meditation she did and it was told there something like this: “Imagine somebody who you really love, feel the feeling, sense it with all your senses. You can help yourself with questions like what do you love most about the person, physically, mentally, about their personalities etc and in the highest moment turn that love to yourself. Feel all of this towards yourself, look at yourself through the eyes of love, through the eyes of somebody who loves you unconditionally. Remember the feeling and love yourself like everyday”.

For me, the hardest part was not feeling selfish. It is a cliche but one can really not pour from an empty cup. If there is nothing that makes us happy, how can we help others or make them happy? A woman in peace with herself, for example, is a happier mother, better employee, more supporting friend etc. It can be hard sometimes taking time to yourself but the time you spend later on whatever you should be doing will be a real quality time. Everybody wins.

There are many ways to understand self-love but the most important message from me, is to notice, take time and practice loving yourself. Whenever you feel like being a mess, do not punish yourself for that, just do whatever you have to do and enjoy your life.

Triine Viisma