20 Ways to Love Yourself

​by Candice Wu, LPC

When we truly love ourselves and our moment-to-moment experience, we free ourselves up to move through life with more beauty, ease, peace, and connection with others. Explore 20 Self Love practices- not just on Valentine’s Day – but every day.

  1. Be where you are. Know that you are doing the best you can. Embody who you are at this moment.
  2. Speak your truth. Express without trying to impress. Let others take what they will from what you share. When you show up genuinely, others may feel that they can show up too.
  3. See your life as a process. Let growth happen, as it is in your nature. View mistakes as “takes” for continual learning. Let yourself and others be human.
  4. Completely engross yourself. Do things on purpose. Wash dishes with complete awareness. Feel your whole body as you are walking. Show up in your life.
  5. Be action-less. Suspend yourself from standard time.  Sleep, rest, meditate (without expecting it to be a certain way), breathe, and sense your true nature. Just Be.
  6. Go deep. Seek your essence, what you are about. Ask yourself, what makes you feel most self-expressed, alive, and like yourself? The deeper we go internally and value what we find, the more we profoundly we love ourselves.
  7. Simplify and get essential. Prioritize and pare down the fringe activities. Shed the distraction and the energy-drains. Reconnect with what is important and valuable.
  8. Balance giving and receiving. Experience giving and receiving as acts of kindness to both yourself and the other person.
  9. Be in nature. Explore, play, breathe, wander, and feel the grandness that you are part of.
  10. Believe in your essential worth… Just because you exist.
  11. Take pleasure. Make it essential to do things that feel good. Use any experience as a moment to honor and find enjoyment in your body and experience. Nurture yourself.
  12. Forget about “good.” With an expected outcome, we can only accomplish what our limited minds have defined. Release control and open to possibilities that weren’t even fathomable.
  13. Get messy. Play in the dirt, get the paints out, create creative chaos. Postpone or release criticism and judgment. Get your juices flowing.
  14. Value your imaginings. Give yourself permission to daydream or mentally wander. Treasure your ideas no matter how absurd and hone in on what energizes you.
  15. Observe yourself without judgment as you would a baby. Be fascinated with your thoughts, reactions, and internal sensations. Let everything that is happening inside your body happen more. Approach each reaction as an opportunity for self-understanding.
  16. Observe your critical parts without criticism. Noticing your negative thoughts instead of getting hard on yourself for having them. Talk to yourself kindly as you would a sweet friend.
  17. Experience every emotion as valuable. Reclaim your emotions as powerful allies that guide wise action and bring wholeness. Find ways to acknowledge all of the parts of you.
  18. Let yourself be affected. Peel off some heart-protecting armor and live with your heart open. Let events change you. Put up your armor when needed.
  19. Empower yourself. Trust or learning to trust your intuition. Find internal approval. Release the “shoulds” and act purely from the integrity of your intentions. Only you truly know your own path.
  20. ____________________. (For your personal idea of self love).