Learn To Love Yourself
As many people have realized: you cannot compel someone to love you. Love is like the wind. It comes when it does, it stops when it does, it changes direction when it does. Who are you and I to criticize the wind? You should feel that love has its own independent form and formlessness, and when someone loves you, you accept their love and be grateful for it.
If they love another, let them love! Who are you to say what they should or shouldn’t do? If they stop loving, you should be grateful for that. Know that life, which does everything perfectly, is now moving you in a new direction. The chess piece of your existence is being moved to a new square on the board of life. A new situation will develop.
There is, however, one person you can make, you can ‘compel’, to love you. And that is: you. Yes, you can work on loving yourself, and once you do, it will do wonders for every area of your life.
A large part of the path of love is learning to love yourself – not to love yourself in the egotistical sense but just to enjoy being with yourself, hanging out with yourself, doing things by yourself. You have to love yourself even when you don’t measure up to your own expectations. You have a certain idea of what you should do and what you should be and what you should become. But from my point of view, it’s only a silly idea, one in a continuing series of silly ideas that passes through your mind.
How to do it:
It’s good to be inspired. If you have a real inspiration of what you should try to do, so go and do it. But if you don’t measure up to your expectations, realize that you should just live life without expectations, that your expectations weren’t necessarily correct. You need to accept the fact that you will often do exactly the opposite of what you think is right, what you think is proper and natural, and you need to be able to accept that you’re going to do that and still love yourself for doing that.
Love yourself when you change, love yourself when you don’t change. Love yourself day and night, in season and out. Love yourself when you’re modest, love yourself when you’re immodest. Try to have a more expanded sense of that which you are. Try to feel that you are eternity. There is no morality in this kind of love. There’s only goodness. There’s only light. And who can say what’s right or wrong? Love is its own truth, and if you live the truth, the gospel of love, then you will be fulfilled and happy.