Pillar 4 - Being own best friend

Amazing exercise to help you love yourself a little bit more

Love meditation
Inspired by meditation from Kamal Ravikant’s book Love yourself like your life depends on it.

Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It

At Happiness Academy, we often talk about Pillar 4 of happiness: Being own best friend. It is a code name for everything that is about connecting with ourselves, both to know ourselves more and to connect in a more loving way.

Under that umbrella, there are quite many topics from positive psychology – among others, self-acceptance, self-compassion (one that is the most crucial one for happiness), and self-love. Of all of these, self-compassion is one with which we work most because it is crucial step to feeling truly good in our own skin and fully happy in our life – without developing this, nothing else works.

But there is something that is even higher, sometimes more challenging but also much more beautiful and powerful than the self-compassion – it is self-love.
Connecting to ourselves in a truly loving way, wishing ourselves well, thinking and acting from the position of someone who deeply loves us.

Now, this can be difficult and scary. It is also something that is not easy to develop or train our brain for – many hidden “demons” rise when we open up these topic and it is easy to get stuck.

Yet one man discovered for us this most beautiful way of working on self-love, while being gentle yet honest, being open yet brave. It is a short meditation – you can do it in 5 or 10 minutes – which Kamal Ravikant shared in his beautiful book Love yourself like your life depends on it.

Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It

Try it out – just, make sure to be gentle with yourself in case you find this exercise challenging 🙂

P.S. we would also highly recommend reading the book 🙂

“I love myself” Meditation

Sit with you back against a wall.
If you wish, put on your headphones with some gentle, relaxing and positive music.
Get grounded: you can or imagine roots growing out of your feet into the ground, or just become more aware of where your body is touching the ground beneath you.
Get connected: Imagine galaxies and stars and the Universe above, and imagine all the light from space flowing into your head and down into your body, going wherever it needs to go.
Breathe slowly, naturally.
As you inhale, think “I love myself”. Then exhale and let out whatever the response in your mind and body is, whether there is one or not. Breathe out and along with it, anything that arises. Any thoughts, emotions, feelings, memories, fears, hopes, desires. Or nothing. Breathe it out. No judgment, no attachment to anything. Be kind to yourself.
That’s it. Simple. Don’t overthink, just focus on Inhale: I love myself. Exhale: Breathe out what comes up. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Natural.
If your mind wanders, don’t get stressed about it – each time it does, gently go back to the breath. Notice where you are in the breath. If inhaling, shift to I love myself. If exhaling, shift to letting out whatever is in the mind and body.
If you wish, you can shift you attention to the light flowing in from above. You could do that occasionally or each time you inhale.

How did you like it?

If you tried this, we would love to hear how did you find it.
Was it relaxing or challenging? Beautiful or uncomfortable? Any surprises or interesting emotions rising?
And most important – will you do it again?

Do share in comments – but also to start a conversation in our Positive Psychology Tribe virtual community
https://www.facebook.com/groups/positivepsychologytribe/
for meaningful conversations.

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