“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself you have built against it.” —Rumi

This is the quote of today’s meditation, from the 21-Day Meditation Experience with Oprah Winfrey and Deepak Chopra. By the way, I can only recommend this “Finding Your Flow” meditation experience.

“Et voilà”, today I have kept playing the song of the beatles in my head: All you need is love

And it is true, what is more important in our lives than love. All we need is LOVE. However it starts with SELF-LOVE. Too often, it seems that we seek love from an external source, from a partner, our family, our friends – what I would call our extended family. In order to love someone, we must love ourself first.

Yes but how do we love ourselves? When we love someone, a large part of it is accepting the person “as is”. It is the same with ourselves. This week, I have been told that we are loved for who we are, not for what we do. It sounds so simple, yet it was really liberating for me as I have this tendency to define myself by what I do or what I have done. To come back to this quote from Rumi, it has helped me to find one of the barriers within me.

So a few tips to loving ourselves would be to:

1. Accept ourselves the way we are right now.
2. Celebrate our accomplishments…  and also our progresses toward them.
   Sometimes we set high goals and we are moving toward them. We are human and far from being perfect, so let’s celebrate our steps toward our achievements. It also means letting go of the things we have not done yet.
3. Set healthy boundaries by practicing saying “no”.
   It is okay to say “no” to people when we do not feel like doing something. We have the right to do so and should not feel guilty. We cannot please everyone.
4. Nurture ourselves.
   We need to set up some time to be by ourselves, just by ourselves. This weekend has been just about it, spending time to nurture myself, it is after all about self care.
5. Forgive
   This is so important. It starts with forgiving others and letting go of the past. Even more importantly it is about forgiving ourselves, for what we should have done or not done: it is sometimes the most difficult thing to do.

Let’s spread the love…