I Love You: Rethinking Self-Love

The conversation

You look at yourself and go hunting for a good enough reason to love who you are: an achievement, a success, something that would justify it. The way Gili sees it, self-love isn't supposed to work like that at all. She suggests adopting the model that parents already know with their children, loving yourself simply because you belong to yourself, and nothing else has to justify it. From there she moves on to places that look completely unrelated: relationships, making a living, health, even the way you react to the people around you. She shows how all of them start at exactly the same point.

The truth

Self-love is the real foundation for a relationship, for making a living and for health, not a nice-to-have. Every illness, at its root, comes from a lack of it.

The romantic model of love doesn't work when it's turned toward ourselves. It's better to adopt the way a parent relates to a child: not because of achievements, but because the child is theirs.

If you don't really love yourself, you can't love anything else, because everything outside is a reflection of us, and resisting someone is also resisting a part inside ourselves.

Self-love isn't people-pleasing and it isn't falling into line with what's expected of you. It's the exact opposite, and people-pleasing only feels good for a moment before it blows up.

A crisis breaks the old vessel, the boundaries that kept us small, and opens up a choice between crashing and expanding to build a wider vessel.

Real joy doesn't come from a screen, even a funny one. That's an artificial stimulus that leaves you empty the moment it ends. Joy comes only through connection with people.

Questions and answers

How am I supposed to love myself when there are moments when I really can't stand myself?

Gili suggests giving up the romantic model of love and adopting in its place the model of parents with their children: a parent loves their child because it's their child, not because of achievements. In the same way we can love ourselves because we belong to ourselves, with no need for another reason.

Why do I need to prove myself in order to love myself, and why do people call a crisis an opportunity instead of just calling it pain?

When a crisis comes, it breaks an old vessel, the boundaries and definitions that had kept us small until then. From that moment there are two ways to go: to crash, or to expand and build a wider vessel. That's how a crisis turns into an opportunity, into growth, and above all into a chance to love ourselves a little more truthfully.

Why can I only love myself when I'm succeeding at something or in control of it?

One of the ways she suggests is letting go of control, which she sees as wounded masculine energy, because we don't actually control anything here. The way to let go: build faith and trust in a higher power, and hand it the worries that were never in our hands to begin with.

Why do I love myself only when I've succeeded at something? And why is it so hard for me to ask for things instead of just waiting for them to happen by themselves?

The only way to get anything in this reality is to ask, both the Creator and the people in your life. If a person has no plan and doesn't know what they want, it's hard for a higher power to know how to help, so ask clearly and directly, and don't be afraid to be vulnerable.

Gili's original episode description

Surprise! Episode 72, I Love You, is back in the library after editing.

Self-love is the foundation of everything.

For your relationships, for your financial situation and most important of all, for your health!

Emotionally and physically too, because every illness, at its root, is a lack of self-love.

(And the question comes up) how am I supposed to love myself if there are times when I don't even like myself?

So here's the thing.

I realized that we'd have to give up the romantic model of love that we carry around in our heads, and adopt a completely different model for this idea called self-love.

Think for a moment about parents and children.

When you ask a parent why they love their child, it isn't because the child got a good grade or succeeded at something or because the child is good looking. Ask parents: why do you love your child?

And they'll answer: because it's my child!

That's it.

By the way, this holds for dog owners too.

You can see a person with the ugliest dog you've ever seen, and the owner is crazy about him and loves him. Why? Because he's his!

So, exactly like parents or dog owners,

when people ask me why I love myself, I don't need to go looking for why or what for,

it's much simpler than that.

I love myself because this self here, this one is mine!

Whatever you're going through right now, my heart is with you, but this isn't the place you want to be in at the end of this year that we're starting now.

We have to make a decision, a conscious decision:

I'm going to change. Starting from this day, I'm going to change the things that stop me from getting where I'm meant to get to and being who and what I came here to be.

And that doesn't depend on anything at all. Only on you.

The only thing that will make a difference here, in this reality and in your self-love, is your thoughts!

So yes, she left you! That's true!

And yes, you got fired from your job, true! It's all true! But this is in your control!

What's in your control is only your thoughts, and if you know that everything here comes from the Creator and that He's working for your good, then you can put your mind at rest.

The Creator doesn't plan your life!

That's our job, to plan our own lives!

The Creator has a plan for us,

and He points us in a direction too, but the right to choose is ours.

So if you want the Creator to guide you, it helps to have a plan, to know where you want to get to. You know the ones who say:

I don't feel that God is with me.

God isn't directing me. Where is God?

Sweetie!

If you don't know where you're going and what you want,

how are you going to get there?

It's like crying out to the Creator: Dad, help me!

And He answers: sure, with what?

"Cast your burden upon the Lord," as it says.

Meaning I have to do my own part,

but all the worries about what I can't do, I cast onto Him. He's my partner! And He's also the one in control here.

So why would I spend my time on things that aren't in my control?

That's how I love myself. I hope you do too.