Baby steps to loving thyself...

As I had mentioned in my first post, Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life played a big role in healing my life. The first thing she taught me through her book was to love myself. It may sound like a simple thing for most of you, but for me it was very difficult at that point in time.

Somehow, I had always put others’ preferences ahead of mine and thus the things that I wanted to do was always pushed to a later that. Something I would do, once life started!

But ‘life’ just refused to start. It had almost reached a dead end. Almost. With my mother’s illness and botched up dream of relocating overseas, I had no hope in myself. That is when I started reading the book and that is when the book started working its miracle. Loving thyself was very difficult, but still I decided to give it a try. The first step I took was to list down the things I wanted to do. Or rather, the things that I thought would make me happy.

This was a really difficult task. Whenever I would get down to list something, I would not be sure whether that would make me ‘happy’. For example, buying a house in Mumbai was one of the contenders. The moment I listed it, I thought to myself – so what? Will that make me happy? Or will I get more worried about the huge loan I will have to take? Something inside told me that it would be the latter.

Thus continued the search for things that would make me happy. After almost a week long effort, I zeroed in on things that would make me happy. And most of those were simple things like learning to play the keyboard, having my own library of books, doing up the place where we lived, spending more time with family every day, carrying myself better, improving my wardrobe, eating at good restaurants, etc. Of course there were some apparently difficult things like saving a lot more for the future, but overall the list seemed pretty doable.

The next step was easier – put a target date to every activity that would make you happy. So I did that as well. Suddenly, happiness did not seem such an elusive topic after all. It was well within my reach! The moment that realisation dawned upon me, suddenly I felt a force within me urging me to complete the tasks.

And before a month passed by, I realised some of the tasks has already been completed. I was beginning to feel happy. I had started to love myself!

So my journey towards happiness continued. Though I have not ticked every item in the task list, most of them have been. And I am a much happier person than I was eight months ago.

Three cheers to loving your ownself. More about that in my next post.