Vacha@TVachaW
Many parents subtly motivate their children via the offering and withholding of love.
This mechanism then gets transferred into how many people motivate themselves.
Their mind / heart withholds love from itself until certain conditions are met.
It says: until I am like this, or I have that, or the world is like this, then I will not give myself love.
Learning how to give yourself unconditional love is one of the biggest free gifts you can offer yourself.
It is possible to live in a state where your default baseline stance towards yourself is love.
You love yourself when you fail, when you are lazy, when you act poorly, even when you are unhappy.
Counterintuitively, this unconditional positive self-regard has a beneficial side effect of making laziness, bad behaviour and unhappiness less common too (perhaps not failure, as to succeed at most worthwhile endeavours usually requires constant failure along the way).
Feeling love for ourselves even when feeling unhappy is a particularly interesting phenomena as it reveals how little suffering there actually is in temporary states of unhappiness when they are held with love.
Also, when we are no longer tensing up against the possibility of having to withdraw love from ourselves, it is a lot easier to act effectively and lots of energy is freed up.
We also start to become motivated by what we actually value in our lives rather than pleasing some inner judge of worthiness.
Of course, cultivating unconditional love for ourselves also makes it a lot easier to give and receive love from others.
Unconditional self-love is one of the closest cousins to unconditional happiness and much more within reach for most.
Cultivating it is a fertile ground for beginning any spiritual journey.
