ASANTI'S TOP 10 RULES FOR SELF LOVE

What Is Self-love? 

Self-love is often wrongly yet outrightly categorized as selfishness when indeed it’s a necessity in our human lives. It's an appreciation and self-valuation of oneself, and recognizing that the life of another human being is no more significant than that of your own. It’s the conscious inability to sacrifice one's peace, happiness, and security for the livelihood of others. It’s the ability to be selfless yet self-preserving so that you may continue to give freely and wholesomely without expectation. The necessity of self-love is commonly overlooked, hence we have a world filled with poverty, corruption, bigotry, tyranny, debt, and duality. 

Maintaining a full cup of love is the only way that we can share ourselves, our teachings, and our fortunes with the world. It is the only way we can spread joy, laughter, and love and do so purely and wholeheartedly. Self-love is not classic narcissism characterized by a false sense of security displayed by arrogance and an obnoxious superiority complex. At its peak it provides a balance; a state of equilibrium that leaves us in the bounds of deep surrender and living in the absence of egoism.

The Difference Between Selfishness And Self-preservation 

Generally, most people find it difficult to ascertain the concept of self-love and how to practice it.  However, there is a distinct difference between selfishness and conscious self-preservation, and self-love. Those who aren't privy to what self-love entails and still indulge in behaviors such as habitual people pleasing and validation seeking will often mistake your healthy boundaries and structure for charitable giving for selfishness. Many will try to manipulate you, many will try to discredit you, and many will try to steer you into a place of self-disbelief, but take heed to intuition and truth.  Balance and solidarity are huge components of growth and transformation and are conducive to self-love. 

One person can't take on the burdens of the world that's why we each have a different purpose and role to play in this design. Sometimes for the preservation of our sacred energy and spiritual development, distance may be required; solidarity. Sometimes for the preservation of our finances and evolution or mastery of a skill, saying no and giving substantially less may be required; self-preservation. Balance is one of the most important skills to master in this world and is required to successfully fulfill and prevail in one's purpose. So be true to yourself and trust your instincts. 

The Components of Self-love 

Self-love entails several factors. It’s appreciating all of your imperfections and improving focus on nourishing the body physically, mentally, and emotionally and most of all it encompasses the achievement of milestones in the bounds of spirituality. It is the boosting of personal trust and truth, and the development of unwavering faith in oneself and in God for only with God can we do all things deemed impossible. Self-love enhances our self-awareness, mindfulness, creativity, and self-esteem. Through self-love, we become more conscious about how we treat ourselves and how we allow others to treat us and begin to reinforce our self-worth. It’s a mastery of self-forgiveness and a self-commitment that keeps us from cycles of self-rejection, self-sabotage, and self-betrayal. 

Self-love exists in the absence of self-loathing and has the following importance and is the pathway to our confounded expansion at the soul level and external evolution. The best versions of ourselves lie at the end of that pathway of self-love.

Here are ways in which self-love has proven to be beneficial; 

• It elevates energetic frequency, enhances positive vibration making you susceptible to positive experiences, and opens the door to abundance in all aspects of your life.
• It improves balance and brings you to a state of equilibrium internally so that your external world begins to reflect your inner tranquility. 
• It enhances your mental, spiritual, and emotional health, and invokes self-confidence and self-trust. 
• It improves the relationship we have with ourselves as we learn to love unconditionally and as a result, we can sustain healthy harmonious relationships with others because we have ultimately curated this kind of relationship with ourselves. 
• It induces progression towards self-actualization resulting in a magnitude of personal growth and transformations that make us all the more desirable and brings us to the pivotal of self-acceptance.   
• It provides us with an unbreakable foundation in which we can better navigate through the adversities of the world.

Here are my top 10 rules for self-love. These rules guide the practice of self-love so that we extend into the pillars of creation where metamorphosis begins but never ends. 

1. Speak Love Into Yourself:  Speaking love into ourselves means that we refrain from using negative slurs of self-  criticism and put an end to negative self-judgment.  Pay attention to the way that you speak to yourself and breathe positive affirmations back into your life. Start speaking to yourself in ways that you would speak to someone that you truly loved. Remove words from your vocabulary that convince you that you are less than worthy of love, that make you believe that you are unintelligent, that make you believe that you aren’t deserving of God's miracles.  You are beautiful and you are capable of extraordinary things but I shouldn’t have to convince you of that which you should already know. You are magnificent. Take notice of all your splendor. 

2.  Never Impose Self-limitations: Your possibilities are endless for we are limitless and our ability to expand and evolve is without restriction. Upgrade your lifestyle to one that is conducive to positivity, integrity, and love and you will ignite the fire that gives way to the birth of your miracles. God has bequeathed them upon you so do not limit yourself by limiting your ideas, limiting your knowledge, limiting your growth, hindering your transformations that wait in the bough of the tree of life.  Every second of the day you are manifesting what you speak into existence with your words and obsessive thinking habits and subconscious belief systems. Every second of the day you are creating your future with your present lifestyle and good deeds or lack thereof. We already live in an impeding society that has placed limitations upon us from birth so why on Earth would we impose such limitations on ourselves? Why encase ourselves in the ordinary and frivolous normality of conditioned reality? 

3.  Honor Your Instinct: If we don’t trust ourselves then we leave room for people to come into our world that distrust us. We leave room for subconscious external validation seeking; always looking to others for what is right and good for the betterment of our life. We leave room for indecision. Discover yourself so deeply that there can be no one on this Earth that can know you more than you know yourself. Chart your path as you desire and assure yourself that whilst you are doing that, you are on the right path and any mishaps can be settled and decreed as a lesson learned. Some people may be more knowledgeable in certain areas, but it doesn’t mean that they necessarily know more than you. They just know what they need to know in relevance to their journey and you need all that you need to know in relevance to yours. Neither one of us walk the same path so always listen to your intuition for inner guidance and trust that you know all that you need to know in relevance to your journey and get comfortable not knowing more than you need to know. 

4.  Practice Authenticity: Be honest with yourself and practice authenticity by taking accountability for allowing yourself to be deterred, distracted, or unhappy with your current circumstances. Life is as we create it to be and God supports us in that creation of new blissful realities. The Universe does not work against us, we work against ourselves and we keep ourselves from the happiness that God has ordained for us. Life can be simple if we practice living in our authenticity. To live authentically is to go back to our place of innocence, purity, and love, free from ego, false guises, and everything that has become societal norms.   Who we are at the soul level is our authentic expression of self, not the personas our egos adopted here. The egos have taken our experiences and what we’ve learned from our environment and exposure to tainted belief systems and created a false person that we become so engulfed in it becomes harder to see who we truly are with each passing day. 

5.  Discover Yourself: Take time to dig deep and uncover who you truly are. Once you’ve discovered this amazing truth of who you are you then can begin to shed the layers of who you are not.  Explore yourself and all the hidden parts of your sexuality and creativity. Discover what makes you comfortable, and what brings you joy, and discover your purpose.  and stick to it. We mustn’t allow ourselves to fall prey to societal belief systems that proceed to tell us who we are supposed to be, and who we are supposed to love. We didn’t come here to be anything other than our most authentic expression of self. Do you, be you, love you. 

6.  Let Go of Perfectionism: Perfectionism doesn’t make you whole so let it go. “It’s a belief that if you look perfect, act perfect and think perfect then you can in a way avoid criticism.” - Renee Brown There's nothing wrong with enhancing your beauty, your mind, your personality if you're doing it in an attempt to strive to be a better version of yourself, for yourself, in an attempt to move to deeper levels of self-acceptance without the thought of being valued, loved or positively judged by others. The attachment to your expected outcome should never involve how you will be perceived by others only by how you will be perceived by yourself. 

7.  Be Patient With Yourself: Learn to be patient with yourself and trust the process because the process is always working in your favor. Patience is not an excuse to become complacent which promotes stagnancy. Patience is a perpetual growth factor and when we learn to be patient with this persistent process we harbor feelings of contentment, gratitude, and inner peace. The recognition that growth is indeed happening overnight as long as we are exerting optimal effort in initiating those lifestyle changes and implementing new systems provides us with a sense of comfort. Divine intervention is inevitable and nothing spectacular was created instantaneously. Keep your growth and perseverance consistent and you’ll reach the desired outcome. 

8.  Prioritize Yourself: Learn to indulge in self-care and prioritize your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health. Solidarity is necessary to reach our full potential and nothing grows in toxic soil.  If you want to bear fruit you must cleanse yourself of all toxicity and free yourself from situation-ships and environments that compromise tranquility because they aren’t conducive to growth. 

9.  Be Assertive: Express yourself freely without fear of ridicule, judgment, or confrontation. Be assertive and set boundaries. Setting boundaries is how we protect our energy, our environment, our heart, and our glorious future. Speak out against harsh or unjust treatment. Don’t subject yourself to any form of abuse. It’s also important to know when and how to express yourself because there is a thin line between assertiveness and aggressiveness. Remember that true expression comes from the heart space and not from a place of ego. Never communicate with anger but always communicate with honesty and love.

10.  Know Your Worth: You must know your worth as an individual. Your sense of self-worth should not derive from monetary net worth, social status, or career-related accomplishments. Everything that you require of another in a relationship or a friendship you should be able to reciprocate. Discover yourself fully and you’ll discover your self-worth. The truth is we are born worthy and our conditioning from traumas we experience chips away at those feelings of worthiness. Our self-worth is determined by the purity of our hearts, the righteousness of our souls, and the wealth of our minds which is uniquely expressed through our creative talents. Align with your highest level of consciousness (soul) and you’ll come to the awareness of just how worthy you are. Once we know our self-worth we can reinforce it by setting boundaries and setting realistic standards that we need not deviate from. Know your value and uphold it.