Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It

In dealing with others and reacting to their negative emotions with my own, I found myself asking this question: If I loved myself truly and deeply, would I let myself experience this?

Beautiful irony. Fall in love with yourself. Let your love express itself and the world will beat a path to your door to fall in love with you.

Here we are, thinking that one needs to be in love with another to shine, to feel free and shout from the rooftops, but the most important person, the most important relationship we'll ever have is waiting, is craving to be loved truly and deeply.

Fighting fear doesn't work. It just drags us in closer. One has to focus on what is real. On the truth. When in darkness, don't fight it. You can't win. Just find the nearest switch, turn on the light.

The key, at least for me, has been to let go. Let go of the ego, let go of attachments, let go of who I think I should be, who others think I should be. And as I do that, the real me emerges, far far better than the Kamal I projected to the world. There is a strength in this vulnerability that cannot be described, only experienced.

I ask myself the question, "if I loved myself, truly and deeply, what would I do?"

James Altucher, in one of his best blog posts, talks about how he stops negative thoughts in their tracks with a simple mind trick. "Not useful," he tells himself. It's a switch, a breaker of sorts, shifts the pattern of the fear.

I once heard someone explain thoughts as this: we, as human beings, think that we're thinking. Not true. Most of the time, we're remembering. We're re-living memories. We're running familiar patterns and loops in our head. For happiness, for procrastination, for sadness. Fears, hopes, dreams, desires. We have loops for everything.

After all, if you loved yourself truly and deeply, would you limit your life to what you previously thought possible? Nope. You'd blow your own socks off.