To gauge your level of self-love, all you have to do is ask yourself, what have my romantic relationships been like? If your answer is that you’re currently in a committed, mutually satisfying relationship, you rate high on the scale of self-love. If you have a pattern of picking relationships that have been abusive and demeaning, or if you’ve thought that most of the men who cared about you were “boring” or “losers,” that too says a lot about how you feel about yourself. If you haven’t been in a committed relationship at all, or if you’ve convinced yourself that you “shouldn't even bother getting out of the house because there is no one out there,” that’s a sign that you’re creating scarcity for yourself because you feel unworthy of love.
-- Brenda L. Richardson and Brenda Wade, What Mama Couldn't Tell Us About Love

Perhaps when you find it difficult to open your heart to receive your honeylove, barring other adverse reasons, it could be a sign that you don’t feel worthy enough to receive that honey and all he or she has to give and share with you. Maybe you don’t feel emotionally capable of maintaining the relationship. Maybe you don’t love yourself enough to love another.

Or, maybe that honey’s just not your type.

While an inability to cultivate and maintain a loving and committed relationship can speak to a lack of self-love, perhaps an even more thorough gauge of determining your load of self-love can be found in the way you treat your career, finances, physical and mental health, and other important aspects of your life. Think about your job. Did you get to work on time today? Did you spend an unreasonable amount of time on the email sending jokes and chain mails? Have you spent most of the morning talking about your weekend, catching up on everybody else’s, and gossiping about the co-worker that everybody habitually talks about? All of these are a reflection on you, your work ethic, and your character. If you have love for your Self, you’ve gone above and beyond the normal call to set yourself apart from the rest of the latecomers and break room chatterers.

Is your checkbook always out of balance? Are you always paying bank fees for insufficient funds? Do you check your account online everyday, sometimes 2 or 3 times a day? Don’t you owe it to the Self you love to make and keep your finances in order? You don’t want to end up penniless, do you? That wouldn’t honor the Self you know and love.

And what about your physical health? How’s your weight? Are you eating healthy foods? Is everything internal working as it should? Have you been to the doctor for a check-up lately? Have you been to the dentist? And your mental health? What do you do to preserve it? Do you take a day off just to rest and replenish, thinking of nothing but rest while you’re taking off. Do you laugh, have some fun? Do you seek professional psychological help when you feel the need to? Are you loving your Self enough to acknowledge when you’re not doing these things then scheduling the necessary appointments to take care of your Self?

Self-love is more than lighting scented candles, taking a warm aromatherapy baths, drinking chamomile tea, and relaxing. Those are just the icing, or maybe the bandages. Self-love is examining recurrent patterns of neglect and scarcity in your life, getting to the root cause of those feelings and events, then making plans to rectify where you’re lacking. It is only after your issues, circumstances, and situations have been examined and you tell your Self some hard truths, forgiving your Self, coming up with viable resolutions for change, and realizing that each and every person in this world is looking for real ways to love and appreciate themselves, that you can burn a candle, take a sweet-smelling bath, and relax.

George Benson (and the old Whitney) sang that the greatest love of all was learning to love yourself. Until you can do that, not only will your life remain lonely and chaotic, you’ll keep chasing your tail trying to figure out why it’s always bruised.

Sadiqqa © 2007