The least you can do for yourself is everything.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” -Rumi

Give your thoughts weight.

Ask yourself,

Who am I? What do I want? What do I like? How do I feel?

Take those answers seriously. Give your thoughts weight. If you are giving the thought of someone you love attention and weight, you sure as hell deserve the same consideration. If not more.

Change the things you tell yourself.

Every time you hear yourself say, I can’t do that, I don’t have that, I’m not good enough, set aside some time to talk to yourself.

Do this because if you’re talking to yourself in a way you would never speak to someone else, the enemy lives inside. So learn to shut that voice down.

Give yourself what you need from others.

As a teenager, I always needed to run to someone. I’d wake up my mom and climb into her bed. Later in life, needing someone gave me a license to wake up whoever I was with. It wasn’t until many years later when I began to live alone, that I realized with horror no one was there to soothe me but me.

Today, I have learned to give myself what I need. I’ve got myself. I take deep breaths, so difficult at first, like gasps. I turn the lights on and walk around. I write. I give myself what I need.

We can give ourselves what we need from others.

We can support ourselves, be proud of ourselves, and we can self-soothe. I am not saying we don’t need anyone. I am saying we can stand on our own two feet, which makes any relationship we create healthy, light, strong, independent instead of heavy, loaded, grasping, needy, and suffocating.

Be your own knight in shining armor. You are powerful. You are all you need.

Allow yourself to process painful emotions.

When hurt, sadness, rejection, or betrayal hit your chest, the knee-jerk reaction is often to recoil and bury yourself away from these painful emotions. But you do not heal when you flip the light of difficult emotions. You bleed. You hurt all the way to the bone. That deep ache swells deep in your chest.

Emotions, when unprocessed, stagnate, and fester; acidify, become corrosive. Emotions, when unprocessed, become harmful and dangerous.

Like a knife continually poking your wounded heart, you continue to suffer. The glazing power of the sun does not reach you, even when it shines right above you in the sky. You suffer when you wait for painful emotions to fade away into thin air.

They don’t.

They creep up your spine like an army of spiders.

So, be willing to face and take on the intensity of love, loss, and the whole gamut of human emotions in between. That’s the way to love yourself because you don’t want dark emotions to bottle up inside you.

Life has taught you, you are not safe from ever being hurt again. You will get hurt, feel lost, confused, betrayed, and heartbroken. Someone you love will disappoint you in a big way or a thousand nameless secret ways. How do you get through something painful and start opening your heart again?

You let excruciating emotions crack your bleeding heart.

In time, your shattered heart will mend. You thought you will be heartbroken forever. And look. You will be horrified when you say this and will feel you don’t understand, but soon, very soon, you won’t be.

Give yourself the most difficult gift: your unwavering, unjudging, and fiercely loving presence. Allow yourself to go through painful emotions. Because, in time, you will find a stable ground, perhaps even higher ground, on the other side.

Don’t let the mistakes and failures you make in life stand in your way of trying again.

Remember back when you were a kid? You never turned your back on yourself. When you didn’t know how to play a new game. When unexpected rain destroys the sandcastle you built with your hands. You would try again the next day. No matter what.

As a kid, you let nothing stood in your way.

As an adult, to love yourself, stop building a tall brick tower with no windows and doors to shove your mistakes and failures you are definitely going to make in life. It’s difficult when failures and mistakes shatter your heart but face them because everything you want waits for you on the other side.

Be willing to disappoint the people you love.

It’s heartbreaking to say ‘no’ to those you love and start saying ‘yes’ to what you want to do.

But how else can you stay true to yourself?

If, for example, you want to be a writer and nobody in your family supports your dream; you pursue it. You walk in the direction of what you want, even if that means you will not have the support of your family.

Get comfortable disappointing the people you love to make room for who you want to be. Do this because if you listen to what others say you should be, you lose yourself. So, listen to what your heart whispers to you.

Give more attention to what you want.

Not what others want for you. Or from you.

The level of attention you give to people’s thoughts and opinions gives power over you. What makes others’ voices loud, what makes their voice ring in your ears, is any form of attention. If you listen to others, their voice gets louder. If you try to push this loud voice away, the voice gets louder.

This is because what you push pushes you back.

The only way to silence what others want from you or for you is to not give them your attention.

Instead, give more attention to what you want. Love yourself enough to know you are worth not betraying yourself in the name of getting others to approve of you.

Make space for what you love.

Pursue something you enjoy doing. Like writing. Start following through on something that would take time. See it through.

Show yourself what you can do.

Making the bed and doing the laundry has to wait. You jump over the shoes left in the middle of the living room floor to get to your desk to write. You used to tell yourself you required a neat space to think and your house reflected your brain. Now you know. To think, you need nothing and it’s your brain that reflects your brain, not your surroundings. And, eureka. It’s the laundry that can get done later, not your writing. This is how you find the time to make space for what you love.

You’ll be blown away by the incredible thing you can do.

Start saying no.

Boundaries are hard to set — saying no is difficult — because the underlying belief is that saying no will cost you the relationship. It’s a sign that you’re not giving enough, you’re not loyal enough, and not dedicated enough.

It must mean you are selfish.

But setting boundaries is not selfish.

It’s healthy. It’s how you respect yourself. Saying no is not just okay. It is necessary. Look around you. Boundaries are why fences exit, and walls and doors and curtains. They are indispensable for your well-being.

Start saying ‘no’. Honor yourself by acknowledging you have boundaries. Be brave enough to say: this is who I am. This is what I like. This is what I can do for you. You cannot push against who I am. You can’t get me to like something I don’t. You can’t get me to do anything that makes me uncomfortable.

Your discomfort for your loved ones’ benefit is not the way to love yourself.

To your inspiration,

Banchi