On Valentine’s Day, we are encouraged to show our love for others with gifts, cards, dinner, and much more. It is all about showing others how much we care. Although this is a fun and lovely tradition today, I am going to change things up a bit. While I do encourage you to express your love for others today, I am going to write about loving yourself and loving yourself before anyone else.
While it is important to show others just how much we love them, we often forget that loving ourselves should be first and foremost in our lives.

This Valentine’s Day I encourage you to add yourself to the list of people that you love dearly. I know that many of us have bought into the crap that we have heard all of our lives about how we are not worthy. We have been lied to by well-meaning, well at least they were well-meaning for the most part, adults. They told us that it is selfish to love ourselves or to make our personal joy the most crucial thing in our life. We have been told we are not worthy by some religious organizations and let’s never forget the advertising media. They seem to constantly bombard us with the fact that we are nothing until we purchase this or that product.

Today we are going to discuss the fact that you cannot serve from an empty vessel. You cannot give away something that you do not already own. So it stands to reason that when we try to give someone else our love without first loving ourselves, it almost always ends badly.

Due to our conditioning, many of us do not feel comfortable placing ourselves first or doing loving things for ourselves because we have been taught that it is selfish. Many times our loved ones don’t like us doing for ourselves first, and they let us know that they think we are selfish. They say, or imply with their actions that we are selfish for meeting our own needs first instead of meeting theirs. How, ould you dare to meet your needs when you should be meeting mine? The funny thing is that they have taught us to believe that they are right and we bought into this craziness.

Quite often we do things for others in the hopes of pleasing them and receiving their approval to bolster our self-esteem. Unfortunately, this never works because as soon as we don’t do something that they want, in the time frame that they want, and the way they want, they become angry or disappointed with us, and we feel bad about ourselves. We have been taught from small children that other people opinions of us matter when in fact they do not, because other people can be fickle and since most likely they don’t love themselves they, in turn, don’t love us when we don’t do what they want us to do. It is insanity to base your self-worth on anyone else’s opinion of you. If you do, you are basing your happiness on their whims, and moods. “If he or she would only be different then I could be happy.” Can you hear how crazy this sounds?

When we give other people the power over our self-esteem and self-love, we give all of our power away. Why would we want to depend on other people’s opinions of us when we have a perfectly wondrous inner being that is happy to show us just how very much we are loved, cared for, guided, and prospered.

You, my beautiful friend, are a Divine Being having a human experience. You are surrounded by loving guidance and cared for more than you can possibly imagine. You have an entire Divine Team at your disposal just waiting to help you, love you, prosper you, care for you, and always remind you how much you are cherished. You are worthy of all of this love, guidance, and prosperity just because you were born in the image and likeness of your creator so how could you be anything but worthy.

Now that you know something different isn’t it time to look in the mirror and see just how beautiful you are. Look into your eyes and say to yourself “today is the day I start to love myself. Today I give myself a huge hug. Today I forgive myself for buying into the herds thinking about my self-worth. Today I forgive myself for doubting my Creators’ perfection. Today I choose to see the real me. Today I allow myself to look beyond the mask that I wear to try to please other people and today I allow myself to love me first. Today I am ready to see my true self-worth. Today I appreciate the entire journey that has been my life. Today I forgive myself for anything that I believe I have done wrong. Today I know that everything that I did in the past was done with the knowledge that had back then. I now have new knowledge. I now know that I can ask my Inner-Being about anything and it will never lie to me. Today I know that I am guided every step of the way. All I need to do is ask and then get quiet and allow myself to hear the answers. The answers always come. Today I know the importance of taking care of me. Today I know just how important it is to love myself. Today I know how important it is for me to live a joyful life. Today I understand that as I fill myself up with self-love and fully recognize my self-worth, I can enjoy doing things for other people when it feels right. I will now do these things from a place of self-love, and their opinion of me will no longer matter.

Today I know that the world is a better place simply because I chose to love myself, fill my vessel up and then serve others from a place of love and joy instead of stress and obligation.