When you think of love, what is the first think of?

Do you think of how it makes you feel, or what it means?

I want to tell you what love is not. I am telling you this because for me it was something that I always had the understanding of and I knew how to love others. But the problem was not knowing the other type of love. When I say the other type of love. I mean self-love. When you think of love. I want you to think of love as a combination of self-love and love for others. In order, for you to love. You have to first love yourself completely.

In order to love others, you must first love yourself completely or have a foundation of self-love that cannot be changed by the negative thoughts of others.

In order to have self-love you must:

1. Have unconditional love for yourself while loving others with conditions

What I mean is you must begin to love yourself with no limitations, love yourself when you aren't dressed up and looking amazing, love yourself when you are going through the hardest of times, etc. You should love yourself no matter the circumstances. But in order to do so, you must love others with limitations. Thus meaning, if loving someone means you have to endure belittling yourself then love them from afar or situations of similar nature.

2. Understand yourself and the sources of your thinking

The process of understanding yourself consists of things such as figuring out what your insecurities are or what aspects of yourself do you consider to be flawed. Another step is understanding how you think or view others. For example, if you often judge a person when you see them, something that helps both of these steps is understanding where exactly all of these things may have come from. For example, if you consider one of your flaws and insecurities to be your weight. Then after digging and peeling back the layers of yourself, you realized that you didn't start to feel that way until you got picked on in school.

3. Figure out times in your life in which you felt like you experienced self-love

I want you to think about times in which you experience loving yourself and being happy. When you figure this out, I want you to think about who, what, when, where and why were you feeling this way. Then start to go into detail and think about why these aspects helped you to experience self-love. When you have done this, then I want you to figure out ways in which you can do things the same or similar to these details to help boost your self -love.

Lastly, I want you to continue to peel back layers of yourself. I want you, in the simplest way, to form a relationship with yourself. So everything that you do when you are in a relationship with your significant other. I want you to find ways to incorporate that into doing for yourself. I want you to make having a relationship with yourself a priority in which cannot wait or take a break.

Congratulations. Just for reading this article, you are one step closer to loving yourself beyond your wildest dreams.