How to Love Yourself

Love is the path. Start the day with love. Spend the day with love. Fill the day with love. This is the way to God; expansion love, not contraction, and selfishness, not ‘my’……. Without love you live in death. Love is life.
Sai Baba

Now that we’ve laid the groundwork required for you to know why others need you to love yourself in a balanced way, let’s begin the work of making that happen. The first place to begin is with the language we send out to our world. Have you ever found yourself using the word ‘should’? How about the words ‘have to’, even ‘try’? If you truly want to love yourself, Stop Using Them!! I will show you why in the words that follow.

Let’s begin by taking a closer look at the word ‘should’. By making it a part of your vocabulary, you place the authority for your actions outside of yourself. Even if you (your conscious awareness) think you’re in charge, repeated use of this expression reinforces for your subconscious, over and over again, the perceived fact that you’re not good enough to decide what’s right for your own life.

A quick review of the subconscious is in order here. While whole books have been written about it, they all point to one accepted awareness: your subconscious is like a little robot that only acts on the orders it receives without judging any of them. It accepts every thing you say or think as fact.

It should be obvious, then, that continued use of the word ‘should’ is like the seemingly harmless water droplets, that in time wash away the stone. Its repetitive use pummels you into an unquestioning submission to the will of all those around you. It shields you from seeing the unlimited powerhouse, the awesome miracle that you yourself truly are.

The words ‘have to’ are an extension of this thought. They make your life one of continued such slavery by making someone or something else a better equipped entity to decide what is right for you. You never ‘have to’ to anything. You do what you do because, unless you are incarcerated, there is always reward for your actions, words or thoughts.

The impotent word, ‘try’, excuses your actions, words or thoughts in the same way. When you use the word ‘try’, it is as though you are apologizing for your imperfection in advance. It’s almost as though a quick review of your own personal history is reminding you that failure is a probability.

But the problem with this kind of thinking is that you never fail. God, the Universe, the Supreme Being, whatever you want to call the Infinite Intelligence that makes your heart beat and your lungs pound, loves you unconditionally. And in his, her or it’s eyes, every action or thought that brought you up to this ephemeral now, was perfect.

In an omniscience we can never know, this Infinite Intelligence knows that every thing you have ever said or done was based on the best data you had available to you at the time. Based upon what you knew, who you knew, what you had or didn’t have and an unending slew of other such variables, you did your best even if that meant you did nothing.

Because time always shows us the reason why things happen the way they do, we need to accept the perfection of our imperfection as human beings in order to more fully love ourselves. And that begins when you stop ‘trying’ and start doing. Or as the wise yoda said in the movie classic, “the Empire Strikes Back”, ‘There is no try, there is only do and not do’.

When we use words like ‘busy’, ‘I don’t have time’, ‘lonely’ and ‘stressed’ we sabotage ourselves in a different way.

When we tell people that we are ‘busy’, oftentimes the subtle message that we think we are sending out is that we are now worthy because in some way or the other we are active. But asking others to approve of you in this way can make you question your worth at those times when you are not doing something.

In trying to prove your validity as a person by telling the world how ‘busy’ you are, you also ask your subconscious mind to show you those ways to do things that will take up the most amount of your time. In making such requests of life, demands, oftentimes frivolous and unimportant, press in from every direction. Even though they may make you feel worthy and needed, they keep you from being in your center where the most effective you exists. In order to get to that place of quiet and stillness where more of your actions and words are coming from a place of mountain moving, self love, then, stop saying you are ‘busy’.

Another variation of the word ‘busy’ to be on the look out for is to say ‘you don’t have time’. When you dismiss the requests of others with this phrase, you gain co-conspirators whose mission is to help you honor your self-limiting words. What they hear is that they are not worthy of your efforts. Others might hear that you do not have control of your time and that lethargy, accidents and mistakes are to be expected whenever they deal with you.

When you use it to describe your own efforts, ‘I don’t have time’ has the same effect as ‘busy’. It keeps the clock working against you. It overloads your schedule with pure activity, or what is called “busy work”.

If instead of ‘busy’, or ‘you don’t have time’, you were to say something like, “I always have time for all the things that compete for my attention”, your subconscious mind will go out and create those shortcuts and people you will need to make that statement a reality. You will begin to welcome quiet and stillness as those places where you can find much of the inspiration and inner peace you will need to be effective in the world of action and movement.

It is in such inactivity that you will learn to go to recharge your batteries for those more active parts of your life. And when you start getting results in this way, you will begin to understand the perfection of being active as well as that of being inactive. As you begin to welcome both states of existence, the love you have for yourself will be enhanced in all of your moments because you will have a deep knowing that you are in control of each of them.

When you are truly at peace and in love with all moments, others will not judge you about the size of the work load life has given you. Instead of some hearing ‘get a job’ or ‘get a life’ when they are not hurriedly scampering about, they will instead make others curious about why it is that they appear so satisfied. This is so because when your own heart is full and rich, those outside of you will want to know how they can make that true for themselves.

‘Stress’ is another word to be on the lookout for. ‘Stress’ is to ‘busy’ what ‘have to” is to ‘should’. It supercharges the word ‘busy’ by asking your subconscious to mobilize your body with all of the tension and holding you will need to ward off any of those threats you may perceive as coming from the outside. It gives others and other things power over your ability to be in charge of how you spend your time.

Using the word ‘stress’ to describe any of the pressure you may find yourself toiling under also means you have given control of you life to the world and not surrendered it to to God. Instead of looking for a pill, a drink or some other form of escape, it is here that a quick prayer to the Higher Omniscience that resonates best for you will often help you get the release you need.

In sum then, do not use the word ‘stress’ unless you want yours to be a life of suffering. Good ways to describe yourself in situations that may warrant use of the word of this word are to instead say that “you are experiencing technical difficulties”. If you make such expressions fun, you will be able to take yourself a lot less seriously (which we talk about later in this chapter). Another way to help you and others to see you as in your center when there is a lot going on, is to simply say that you are ‘challenged’.

“Problem’ is a variation of the word ‘stress’. It, too, makes our lives more difficult than they have to be. Instead of being victimized by the images of struggle that this utterance tends to convey, eliminate it from your vocabulary

When, you call ‘problems’ the ‘opportunities for growth’ that they really are, you unleash the creative powerhouse which resides within all of us. You begin to see difficulty as a tool which can help you transcend your current limited perspective. Another good way to feel indomitable, when ‘problems’ present themselves is to call them ‘bugs on the windshield’.

‘Lonely’ is another word that is better left unsaid. Webster’s Dictionary defines lonely as: 1) alone; solitary 2) standing apart from others of its kind; 3) unhappy at being alone; longing for friends, company. By definition then, it’s almost as though society has conditioned us to believe that being alone is a bad thing; that we can’t be happy just being with ourselves. That there is someone or something better to be with.

In order to really love yourself, however, you must learn to savor and appreciate any of the alone time you can manage to obtain for yourself. You have got to become your very own best friend. Instead of looking outside for any of the feelings you may seek, you need to find them inside first before you can ever hope to love, honor and appreciate who you are as an individual.

One more way to keep yourself from being minimized by the self limiting words we are discussing, if you must use them at all, is to qualify them with a time frame. This technique will, however, require a far greater presence of mind on your part, but it does reinforce the temporary nature of all situations. If, for example, you still feel a need to include the word ‘stress” in your vocabulary, say that you are “temporarily stressed”.

Besides watching your words, you will need lots of other tools in order to truly internalize a genuine self love. Later in the book, we will talk about one such tool, affirmations, that can help you change the way you describe your world. Before we get there, however, here are several samples that you can modify to fit your own circumstances:

I ALWAYS LOVE, HONOR AND ACCEPT MYSELF

I AM PERFECT IN MY IMPERFECTION AS A HUMAN BEING

I LOVE MY ALONE TIME; IT IS THERE THAT I FIND MYSELF

I AM MY THOUGHTS AND WORDS, I AM LOVE
LOVE CURES ALL, LOVE SOLVES ANY PROBLEM

Now that we’ve begun to get your words right, I will offer you new ways of thinking about yourself as well as other tools and ideas that will help you redirect the focus of your love. The mountain moving implements that follow, just like the right use of words, must be used on a regular basis if you want to make your own self love the kind of love that can be of effective service to the world.

If you agree that we are really hard on ourselves have you begun to wonder if besides changing our self talk there really are other ways to change that? What if we made a habit of always looking for the most joyful way to get things done? Let me illustrate this to show you what I mean.

Suppose you have a garage full of things that you no longer have any use for and you’ve been beating yourself up because you haven’t gotten around to clearing it out. As you consider the following options, you will either be energized by the love that could result or ground into a sense of hopelessness by the drudgery you may see ahead. You can:

1 – Take your junk to the landfill
2 – Give your junk to charity
3 – Have a garage sale

Within each alternative is a hard way and an easier more loving way to get the job done.

1. If you decide to make a landfill journey:
Easy: You can borrow or rent a truck and use a weekend morning to dispose of your unwanted items.
Hard: You can fill your auto’s trunk all day long as you go between the dump and home until you get the job done.

2. If a donation is in order:
Easy: You can arrange for your favorite charity to pick your things up while you are at work.
Hard: You can make many trips to the charity in question right after work when the traffic is the worst.

3. If you decide to hold a garage sale:
Easy: You can give your goods away at the price people have offered to pay as you make loads of new friends, get to know your neighbors and have a lot of fun sending your unneeded junk off to better homes.
Hard: You can spend days meticulous labeling and pricing each item as you visualize how everyone will insult you with their lowest offers. When you then have your sale, call The Salvation Army or Goodwill the following Monday to pick up all the unsold stuff that is then cluttering your garage or driveway.

I’m sure you see how ridiculous this process looks when it is on paper, but in our minds, where they are hidden from others, we often choose the more difficult option. It is as if we give ourselves some form of self defeating bragging rights by choosing the harder of the two options. If you really want to make love the dominant force in your life, however, let joy and ease be the guideline within which you flavor all the decisions you must make. Here, then, is another affirmation we can add to our collection:

I ALWAYS CHOOSE THE MOST JOYFUL WAY

You can reinforce this awareness by always remembering to pamper yourself. Here are some ways to do just that:

– Take a bubble bath. You don’t have to be a child to play in this way. Dim the lights. Light a candle, burn some incense. Celebrate You!

– Get a massage. If you don’t know where to look for this, find out from a health club or chiropractor’s office who is doing this type of thing in your area.

– Take a steam bath or a sauna. If you belong to a gym already, which is another way of loving yourself that we will talk about later in this book, regularly schedule those days where all you will do is soak in the heat. If you don’t belong to a health club, you can often find hot rooms like these at a YMCA or YWCA, some public swimming pools, bath houses that you can find in the phone book or hot springs that you can find advertised in the back of many alternative news magazines.

– Do volunteer work. Becoming part of a group whose mission is for a greater good will help you to feel good about yourself. This is especially so when you find yourself helping those less fortunate than yourself through groups such as Big Brothers and Big Sisters, the Lions Clubs (whose ultimate purpose is to help the vision impaired), the Grey Bears, and all the other groups too numerous to list. Ask the reference librarian at any city library for such a list with contact people and you’ll be surprised at how needed you really are.

– Play in a city park. Swing on the swings. Slide down the slides. Lay out in the sun for a few minutes. You don’t have to make a trek to a mountain resort or the nearest lake or beach to be able to just be a kid again or to savor the sun, take such time outs right here right now. And take them regularly.

– Don’t always buy the cheapest item. Try to buy quality when you can. It makes you feel better about yourself to surround yourself with the best.

– Make your grocery purchases a priority. Don’t place any of your discretionary purchases such as additions to your wardrobe, luxuries for the home, even visits to the yogurt shop or ice cream parlor in front of the foods you need to excel. Since it’s an accepted fact that you are what you eat, when you make food a number one consideration, you begin to feel the same way about yourself.

– Learn about nutrition. When you take the time to really learn about how to properly nourish yourself, you will discover that simplicity is the rule of the day. And as you become more and more aware of this, (I talk about nutrition in the nutrition chapter near the end of this book) you will pride yourself in knowing why caviar or expensive meats and cheeses are not the healthy options you will need for a healthy well loved power plant.

– Read the ingredients on food packaging. Take an interest in what you put in your body. When you think of it as a temple to which you offer only the best, you feel better both physically and then mentally.

– Regularly schedule naps or mediation periods for yourself. Make appointments with yourself for such alone time and let everyone know that you are not to be interrupted during this time.

– If you are single, try to get yourself around small children. Offer to baby-sit for a friend. Observe the ease with which kids forgive and how curious they are about all of life.

– Get a pet. A dog or a cat will always make you feel loved and show you that you are needed.

– Buy yourself flowers. Whether you are a man or a woman, you don’t have to have someone else in your life to enjoy the simple beauty of flowers.

– Take yourself on a date. If there’s a movie you want to see, don’t wait for a special someone to go out and enjoy it with. Take yourself out to dinner and don’t be afraid to go by yourself. Remember: it’s you who is being spoiled here.

Something as simple as grooming can help you love yourself more. And you don’t have to only look good in this way when you are going to work. Any time you step out your front door you are walking into a marketplace, the world, which judges your worth by how well you take care of yourself. It doesn’t even take a lot of money to make sure that you always have your best foot forward.

I have a friend, for example, who works for not much beyond the minimum wage at a health food store. She doesn’t have a very big budget for clothes but she always looks sharp and bright in or out of her place of employment. She buys a lot of what she wears at second hand stores and garage sales. And yet, all those who encounter her give her much attention, honor and respect.

What’s her secret? She irons everything she owns, even those articles of clothing that claim they are permanent press. She states that it just makes her feel good to put on a freshly ironed blouse, skirt or pair of pants. By working to improve what she already owns, my friend always has a healthy amount of self love because others are always reflecting it back to her.

In this light, many will feel like they have just gotten a lecture from mom but it works. If you can find the time to iron your clothes, keep yourself well shaved and make sure that your hair is always combed, you will find that people will give you more of the honor and respect that can make it easier for you to love yourself.

One mountain moving tool that many people mistake only for sexual love is hugging. Such activity, however, when used as an expression of the genuine connection you feel in your heart for another is a way to many times multiply the love you hold for yourself.

In embracing another, you are reminded of the fragile nature of the human condition and the very humanness of all of us. It is a demonstration of love and acceptance, and as you allow that for others, it becomes easier and easier to allow that for yourself. As any of those walls that may have stood between you and another begin to fall away, your feeling of belongingness adds to the love you hold for yourself.

As a form of communication, hugging lets you express at levels that go far beyond words. This is, however, not to say that words are unimportant. They are! If you truly want to love and honor yourself, COMMUNICATE with your words as well as your actions.

When you realize that what you are thinking is important and what you have to say matters a great deal, you will not hold things inside, especially if you know how to make the other party win with what you have to say. The world and everyone in it, needs the unique contribution that only you can make. And the only way any of us can ever hope to know what that is, is if you speak up.

On your road to a healthier dose of self love, it is important to be able to laugh at yourself. Human beings are never perfect and yet that is why we are still here on the earth plane not flying around somewhere off in the ethers. In the grander scheme, life can be thought of as one grand trial and error filled with mistakes from which better always results.

Nature is filled with what we can call mistakes. And yet does such imperfection ever warrant an inferiority complex on Her part? When an earthquake hits or any other calamity anywhere around the world, do we blame Mother Earth for being a failure? Or have we not become wise enough in our detachment to be able to see how new life always results from such “disasters” as volcanoes, forest fires and rampant flooding?

It is within this context that I ask you to consider babies as they are first learning how to walk. Have you ever heard of an infant that just stopped trying? Or an adult that later developed some kind of psychosis that could be traced back to how many times he or she fell down as an infant walker?

As individuals, none of us are at the center of it all. So laugh see the grand folly of what being human is all about. You can’t be afraid to be a fool, because if you are, your life will stop growing.

As a civilization, we make mistakes, we learn, we grow and we continually spiral up to higher and higher levels of awareness about what life is all about. Any of the great inventions that have made life easier for those of us here, for example, have been the result of someone being able to laugh at him or her self.

Thomas Edison failed, some people say, 10,000 times before he created the first light bulb. Along the way he had to be able to see the folly of what he was doing or he would have ended up in a mental institution. Even the Japanese car manufacturer, Soichiro Honda, stated that, “Success is 99% failure”. Our homes are filled with conveniences because someone risked making a mistake; someone risked being the center of laughter.

Study after study and many books all talk about the healing power of laughter. One book, already a classic, “The Anatomy of an Illness”, by Dr. Norman Cousins, talks about how he healed himself of an “incurable cancer” with comedy. Dr. Cousins watched as many Groucho Marx, Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy films as he could find from the comfort of his hospital bed until he had successfully laughed his illness away.

Many have called laughter the nectar of the gods. So get out and laugh, and while you’re doing so remember the saying:

GOD’S BUSINESS IS FUNNY BUSINESS,
SO LAUGH DUMMY YOU’RE THE JOKE

Now that you better see the importance of mistakes and of laughing at yourself, practicing the art of forgiveness will make you a lot more loving toward yourself. Always begin by forgiving yourself and do so throughout the day whenever you know or think you could have done better. If you lost your keys, said something mean to someone or forget to bring your credit card to a store, for example, don’t hang on to it. It’s done. See it as a wake up call to be more present, understanding or attentive to detail the next time and just let it go. When you lighten up on yourself, you send that same luxury out to others.

As you forgive yourself and others, it also becomes easier for you to be vulnerable. When you don’t have to worry about being perfect, always having all the answers or never looking weak or afraid, you will find yourself the recipient of much love from others. You will find it easier to open your heart and keep it open.

Another helpful tool along the road to self love is appreciation. You can never be thankful enough as whatever it is that you are focused on is what grows in your life. In my own case, for instance, I continually express a very genuine gratitude for bicycles. I write about them, I do community work for them and I’m always riding one about town with a big smile on my face. As a result, I always have anywhere from four to seven of them around no matter how many of them I loan out or sell or give away.

When you know that you can create in this way, every day can feel like Christmas. And it’s a lot easier to love yourself when you know your life is a masterpiece you know you are painting.

Another way to make each day a cause for celebration in this way is to say thanks for the little things. When you say thanks for a cold glass of drinking water, for example, you are acknowledging the essence of what it has achieved for you — refreshment. In so doing you also lay the groundwork for other ways in which you can achieve this quality.

Some people may find the refreshment they need in regular good food and drink and nothing else. There are those who may feel they require a hot tub in their back yard for the rejuvenation they require. Others still, may need a house on the hill where getting away from it all is the only way they feel they can get the recharge they need. In order to get to any of these places, however, there are often steps that must be climbed; levels of accomplishment that must be attained. And in order to live a life of love along the way to any of them, we must, beginning with that glass of water, express our appreciation for all the little things along the way.

When you can train yourself to see those qualities or attributes that you like in others, as visualization tools you can use to help you grow and advance, you will also begin to love yourself more. To better understand what I mean here, suppose you want to be a stronger person and you tell someone that you admire how they were able to keep their calm in a tough situation.

Let’s take a closer look at what happened when you did this. To begin with, the person you have directed this to begins to feel a little bit better about him or herself making you feel better about you. When they say thanks in return, they have acknowledged you as worthy of extolling such praise which brings the impression you hold of yourself to an even higher level.

And once the exchange is completed in this way, your imagination then goes to work. It will take you to that place where you will begin to see yourself in this others person’s shoes, making the object of your compliment a reality in your own life. You will have used this other person to vicariously act out the feeling, in this case strength, that you desire for yourself.

When you make it a habit to genuinely praise those qualities that you see others demonstrating for you to see, you will begin to love others and then yourself as the mirrors we really are for one another. You will also have a working knowledge of why an important part of helping others to love themselves as well, is to also be able to accept compliments with a simple ‘thank you’.

You can also use affirmations to help you make appreciation. and the self love that will result, your general approach to life. On my first bike ride across America, for example, I taped the words “Look for Good” on to the handlebars of my bike once I reached Nebraska. I had used this trick to get better before I left home so when I began use it to help me dwell on all the things I liked out on the road, my ride became filled with magic.

From Portland, Oregon to the eastern Colorado prairie, however, I had experienced just enough indifferent store owners and rude passersby to make me question the value of even living in this great country of ours. I thought about living in another part of the world. And yet America only became great when I changed how I wanted to see it.

As a result of the new mantra I had chosen, “Look for Good”, I began to talk about only the great things that the people along the way were doing for me. As a result, the new friends I was making tried to outdo one another with free lunches, dinners, night’s stays and new hats and T-shirts on an almost daily basis. Donations such as lemonade and beefsteak tomatoes, as well as autograph and photo requests from some of the cars and trucks who drove by, made much of my time out on the road even more joyful.

You don’t have to go out on a bike ride across the U.S., however, to experience magic with the “Look for Good” mindset, you can do it right here, right now. Go out of your way to say thanks. Send thank you notes at every opportunity.

You don’t have to run down to the store to buy a special card for each occasion, just have a stack of 4×6 blank, unlined index cards and a small packet of post card stamps on hand, ready for such quick notes of gratitude. An email or Facebook personal message of gratitude works too. As you acknowledge others in this way, you will be amazed at how great you begin to feel about making others feel good.

If you like the way someone smiles, tell them. Look for things that you like. And it doesn’t even have to be people. Remember to say thanks for your health, the house or apartment you live in, even the city in which you reside. Say thanks and watch how everything you appreciate aggrandizes the amount of love you hold for your life.

Take time for nature. Marvel at the miracle of an insect’s wings. Look into the sky. In the day, watch the clouds as they very slowly move across the horizon. At night, as you look into the stars, feel the awe that comes with knowing that these fiery maelstroms look benignly upon you every moment of your life.

Wonder at the magnificence of trees for all the life and other microcosms they support. Watch a sunrise and commit to make this the first day of the rest of your life. Take in a sunset as you resolve to make your next day even more grand. Feel it all the way to very inside of your bones and in each of your cells.

Feel the sun on your exposed arms and face as it warms your body. Thank it for regularly coming to you and sustaining all of the life all around you. When you then cover yourself with clothes, thank the clever beauty of zippers and buttons and velcro.

On your bike, thank a tailwind when it blows at your back, the road surface when it is smooth and those cars that give you a wide berth when passing. In your car, bless the brakes for stopping, the light switches for switching, the heater for heating and all the gauges and other instruments that let you see how your vehicle is doing from one moment to the next.

The preceding transportation exercise is especially good for your morning commute. A momentum builds from saying thanks for such simplicity in this way that you then bring into the rest of your day. We will talk more about this in the chapter entitled “Loving Transportation”.

In your newfound search for things to be grateful about, then, there is even a way to feel appreciation for those parts of life you disapprove of. To do so, all you’ve got to do is learn about them. The following example can apply to people, places, activities, really anything you can think of that has been the object of your disdain.

Let’s say that you have always associated low rider cars with trouble. As they sleuth along in any many cities in America, their occupants, oftentimes young men wearing stocking caps, barely appear above the dashboard. All of what you are seeing has a sinister like quality to it which you associate with bad.

If you take a closer look, however, you’ll probably feel differently. You’ll learn that modifying and maintaining such a vehicle makes the owner a more resourceful person; it is what can often keep him out of trouble. The many hours he spent buffing and polishing his vehicle will soon become evident to you. You’ll discover the associated car clubs and magazines, even the elaborate hydraulic mechanisms that have been built into the suspension systems of many of these reconverted automobiles.

In soon enough time, you will see why the members of this car culture have reason to be proud. In learning about their vehicles, you will have also acquired a newfound appreciation and respect for their owners. You will begin to see the youthful innocence behind the costumes they are wearing. And whenever you see them slowly promenading through town, you will bless their efforts as benign.

With such an approach to life, when you try to make all of life a classroom in this way, you become like a young child once again. All things will have a magic and a mystique to them that make your life one of daily adventure. All the judgments that all of us limit one another and everything else with start to fall away. We begin to love life as a play school full of new things to discover and appreciate. We begin to understand what a privilege it is just to be alive.

One way that may not seem like an obvious attempt on your part to invoke self love on your part is exercise. Whenever you take the time to put your physical body to use, you are also taking the time to honor the awesome miracle that you are. As I show you in the chapter, “Optimal Health, Optimal Love”, since you are not merely a mind with a body attached, it is important that these two parts of you are honored equally before you can ever hope to be at peace and in any kind of genuine love with yourself.

If you don’t like what you see when you look at your naked self in the mirror, for example, you can change that with exercise (and proper nutrition as I show you “You Are What You Eat”). And as I showed you earlier in the chapter you must like the total bill of goods that you are selling to your world if you ever hope to be effective in it. Get back in touch with your body, love to perspire, feel the miracle that you are as your physical you works its daily magic just to keep you alive.

It is here that I use the mirrors at health clubs to glorify the miraculous instrument that my body is as it lifts and pumps and pulls and pushes. I wonder at my muscles as they show me they are performing with their assorted expansions and contractions. Doing so also gives me confidence to know that I can sculpt and change my own body; that I am not a victim of it. In my many years of working out in gyms, I have also learned a lot about accepting myself.

It quickly became obvious to me that no matter how far I moved beyond my rehabilitation to actually devoting myself to improving the look of my physical structure, there was always going to be someone with a better body. And yet I found that when I began to appreciate even the smallest advance and was able to love and be happy with just me as I was, the more I began to like what I was seeing in the mirror. And I still train with weights and I still say thanks for who I am as I am and as a result, I find that I am better able to send the love that I feel for my body to my thoughts, friends and family.

Loving yourself in this way doesn’t even have to be serious. In fact it is most effective when there is laughter and joy. Several champion bodybuilders and those with some of the best body’s that I have known over the years have always been the ones with the best senses of humor. Their smiles are always the quickest, their grins the biggest and their laughs are always the loudest. When the workout world is approached as though it were play, it keeps one coming back for more and relieves any of the tension life may be sending your way.

In fact any exercise when approached in such a lighthearted way can have this effect. When I go for any of my bike rides, for example, I feel everything that had been on my mind melt into the road (being car-free, I bike almost everywhere I go and will talk more about how you can move mountains with your transportation efforts near the end of “Loving Transportation”). In order to be able to love ourselves, then, all of us need some form of physical release. Whether it is walking, jogging, swimming or playing tennis, whatever it is, we need to be able to play to be reminded of life’s joyousness.

Such play will help you keep your heart open when you return to your everyday world. It will help to keep you more in your center when people say unkind things to you or act in ways that you do not approve of. To keep from closing up or shutting down in such instances, there is something else you can do.

If, for example, someone is yelling at you or talking in a tone of voice that sparks anger, defensiveness or sadness, pretend that you are sending this person love telepathically. Instead of becoming a part of the fear they are sending out, attack it with love. As you keep your heart open in this way, such moments will often change in their nature and character right before your eyes.

Such defenselessness is an important way to keep recycling the love we need for ourselves in our relationships, especially our primary ones where we find ourselves saying the meanest things to the very ones we love. When, as I suggested earlier, you also communicate with your true feelings, you open up a channel of communication which can deepen your connection and your own feeling of self love.

There are many of us who are afraid to love because they think it makes them vulnerable to hurt. If this describes you, make it a point to love whenever you are afraid to. As you do, it will become easier and easier for you to feel love in all situations.

Whether it is a relationship, a potential one or something you find bothersome, make it a point to look for what you like about anything that is tempting you to shut down. Analyze it from as many angles as you can. See it from some point in the future where the very powerful lessons you will have learned will become apparent. See it as your teacher, challenging you to keep your heart open at all times where it is impervious to attack. Know that as we spiral up into a greater awareness about all situations that challenge us, we will see that all of life is love.

In this regard, one very powerful affirmation that continues to be a huge part of my second opportunity to live is this one:

DO WHAT YOU’RE AFRAID OF
AND THE FEAR WILL BE OVERCOME.

For example, whenever I attempted to make conversation with strangers after my long hospitalization, people often times ignored me. Frequently, I was laughed at. If I drooled on myself, many would leave me in disgust. There were those that tried to finish my sentences. My garbled, stilted utterances made some people angry. Others couldn’t see beyond my nervous, trembling body.

I never knew how people would react to my poor communication skills. The simple act of talking frightened me. In my hyper-sensitive state, I oftentimes fought to keep from urinating on myself whenever the exchange was unfavorable. I knew my life would be a lot easier if I just kept my mouth shut. But I kept trying to interact with others with my words and in time, like everything else about my recovery that I challenged in this way, it got easier and easier.

So, if you know in your heart that the outcome of what you endeavor to do will make you a better person, then, I suggest you also:

DO WHAT YOU’RE AFRAID OF
AND THE FEAR WILL BE OVERCOME.

By doing whatever it is that challenges your own level of comfort, you are exposing the object of your fears. You are making it familiar, like you did with the low riders we talked about earlier in this chapter. And as you do, it will become a friend to you, a friend that will take you to higher and higher levels of self awareness. Not only will it show you how to love when things are progressing smoothly, it will also remain with you through any of the tougher situations that life may have to offer. And it will be there to help you move through them with greater and greater harmony, ease and joy.

A great way to prove the Power or Love to yourself on a daily basis is to make the world outside your front door a Laboratory of Love. In order to do so for many years, I placed the affirmations:

BOMBARD WITH LOVE or ATTACK WITH LOVE

on the inside of my front door.

Even now, whenever difficult situations threaten me, I use these words to try to find out what there is that I can love about them. They allow me to take the safety, comfort and familiarity of home wherever I go. By assailing everything and everyone around me with love, I seem to create some kind of force field that makes me magnetic to magic instead of vulnerable to any hurt that could result.

On some level, when you make love a part of the communication you share with others, even other things, it seems to affect them at the atomic level. It is almost as if it has an intelligence of its own which knows how to alter the chemistry of everything that gets in its way. As you liberally apply it to all areas of your life, you will soon begin to see that all of life is held together by one common denominator — Love. With increased usage, the prophetic wisdom given to us in the words of a song by the Beatles, “LOVE IS ALL THERE IS” will become your daily prescription for wholesome, effective living.

And as it does so, you will know that there is no limit to what you can achieve with love.

As we conclude this chapter, then, it is my hope that you now have some skills to better equip you to make love your everyday reality. You must, however, remember to use what you have just learned on a daily basis. The words in the rest of this book will be of no use to you unless you do.

If you promise me that you will study and reread and reread this chapter as you apply the principles in the rest of this book, I guarantee you that my words will help you reach the top of all the mountains you endeavor to climb with a full heart. Let’s make that journey complete, then, as we now turn the page. And as you read on, may my own love travel with you.

The above is from “How to Move Mountains with Love and How Love Can Revitalize You, Our Communities, Nation and the World with the National Bicycle Greenway”.

Get your name in this book before 3/31,
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