Self Love

 

All love is self-love. It all starts and ends with self. In order to love another, you must love yourself. In order for others to see your worthiness, you must feel worthy yourself. In order for you to appreciate others, you must learn to appreciate yourself. You will only ever be able to truly love another in an amount equal to your love for yourself. Loving yourself is the first step in radically changing your approach to life.

Self-appreciation defines who and what you can appreciate. If you appreciate the beauty of a sunset, you must appreciate your ability to see and understand nature’s beauty. At some level you must understand that you are worthy of this beautiful sunset.
If you do not feel awe at the sight of the sunset you do not see yourself as worthy of that beauty.

There is no fear in the sight of a beautiful sunset. You do not worry that the sunset will fade away never to return. You know it will come again another day and may be even more stunning next time. You do not fear that the sunset will reject you or that others will scoff at your appreciation of the sunset. In fact, you would think it odd if you could not appreciate the sunset. This is a form of love without fear.

When you look into your baby’s eyes, you feel love and there is little fear. You do not worry that your baby will not love you because you can see that she does love you. You instinctively know your baby loves you unconditionally. Your only fears are for her safety and well-being. It’s only later, as she grows, that you will allow fear to enter into the relationship and you’ll start to modulate your love.

You see that pure love does not allow the presence of fear. But as fear is allowed to enter, love is reduced. Love and fear work within a sliding scale. The more love, the less fear and the more fear, the less love. You have control over your fears through your ability to choose your thoughts. The ability to deliberately choose loving thoughts over fearful thoughts will allow you to be who you really are.

You can see how this sliding scale works if you have ever fallen in love. At first, the love flows freely and you feel intense emotion, connection, and ecstasy. You love every aspect of the other person and they love you as well. You feel all is right and in the beginning there is little fear. However, as soon as something happens to cause doubt, fear enters and you begin to restrict your love. As soon as your new love forgets to call you when promised, or does not return a text quickly enough, your untrained mind allows fearful thoughts to rush in.

As these fearful thoughts enter your awareness, you automatically shut down love. It is like you have no control over the situation. You just feel differently, you now act differently, and your new love picks up on this very quickly. He now allows fear to enter his mind and also begins to limit his love towards you. Once fear begins its rampage on your fragile emotional state, you must fight the negative momentum and consciously return to love. If not, you will end the relationship and fear will continue to linger and will be ready for your next encounter.

This is the common method of behavior among most humans. New love is easily diminished by fear. Even the tiniest issue allows fear to barge into the relationship. It’s as if you have prepared yourself for fear, not love. It’s as if fear is more practiced than love. It’s as if you chronically think more fearful thoughts than loving thoughts. Is this true of you?

Love and fear must be practiced in order to enter your thoughts. Which one do you practice more often; love or fear? Do you believe that fearful thoughts are natural and loving thoughts are more difficult? The opposite should be true for you. It should feel natural and good to think thoughts of love and appreciation. It should not be an exercise or a struggle to think about love. It should feel strange and uncomfortable to entertain a fearful thought. You should find it unpleasant to worry or complain.

From our perspective it seems as if you enjoy fear. You talk about your fears, you complain about everything, and you rant and rave against what you do not want. You rarely talk about what you do want. You seldom speak of love. You are addicted to drama, gossip, and tragedy. You watch the news, you send out alarming emails, and you rally against this and that. Once in a while you’ll look at a video of cute animals, but this is not prime time TV. You are mired in negativity for most of your adult life. Why is that?

You look at portrayals of love as cheesy or corny. You don’t believe them to be realistic. Even when you’re watching a chick-flick or a rom-com, there is always drama in the story line. Why can’t you enjoy portrayals of true, undramatic, love? Don’t you think that’s strange?

Your lack of allowing love stems from self-insecurity. The cure for self-insecurity is selflove. Self-love is self-appreciation. You must learn to love who you are now, in this moment, in order to become who you really are. You cannot love yourself only after you’ve become who you really are. This sounds like a catch-22 situation. How can you love who you are now when you are in the process of becoming who you really are? How can you love the imitation and the original at the same time? How can you love
your inauthentic self when all you want to do is love your authentic self? This doesn’t seem to make sense.

Oh, but it does make sense. It makes a great deal of sense. It is the most important aspect of becoming who you really are. The whole idea is to love more. You must love more to be able to transform into the highest version of you. You are not being who you really are because you have been limiting your love. Mostly, you have been limiting your love of self. In order to become who you really are, you must learn to love more and more and more. You start by loving who you are right now. You love the you that is reading these pages. You love you for all of the reasons you have found not to love yourself.

You must come to terms with who you are now in order to transform into a higher version of you. You must love the moment and the conditions that are present in your life. You have been loving conditionally your whole life. You love people when they’re being good and you don’t love those same people when they’re being bad. You love yourself when you’ve done something right and you don’t love yourself when you’ve made a mistake.

Forget about that approach to life. It doesn’t work. It’s never worked for anyone. Your parents loved you when you behaved like a good child and they withheld their love when you behaved in some way that they saw as wrong or bad. Did this approach work
for them? Did their style encourage you to love them unconditionally? What if they loved you no matter what you did or said? How would you feel about them now? It would be better, wouldn’t it?

Unconditional love is talked about in your society as if it is the unattainable answer to all your problems. It is the answer to all problems and it is attainable. In fact, it is natural. Animals do not love conditionally, why should you? It is only your approach to life which makes this natural love seem difficult. This is why we’re asking you to radically change your approach to life.

We Are Joshua

“Joshua is a group of nonphysical teachers channeled by Gary Temple Bodley. Their practical teachings provide a greater understanding of the mechanism of physical reality, the Law of Attraction, and how to leverage universal forces to enhance our lives. Joshua’s first book “A Perception of Reality” explains the nature of reality using plain english in an easy-to-understand format. This book is the next step for those awakened individuals seeking higher levels of consciousness and awareness.

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