10 Simple Ways to Practice Self Love

[Guest guest]

It’s almost Valentine’s Day! We take this time to show others that we love them. How about including ourselves? I received this from a counselor whom I deeply respect and admire. We could learn a lot here. 10 Simple Ways to Practice Self-Love1. Say loving, positive words to yourself in the mirror every day. A good phrase to use is, "I love you, just the way you are." You can also compliment yourself sincerely on anything you do well that day.2. Love your inner child. Take a few minutes to relax and imagine yourself as a child and say the kind, loving words to that little person that he or she always wanted to hear, for example, "You're beautiful and special and important to me!"3. Find ways to express your honest feelings and needs. Expressing your honest feelings and needs helps you to know who you really are. If there's no-one you trust, start by writing in a journal. In time, you'll learn to express your feelings to others as well.4. Write a list of everything you value or appreciate about yourself. Start with simple things like your honesty, your caring or your sense of humor. Then let your list naturally grow to include other positive qualities you often overlook in yourself.5. List of all of your successes. Start with the challenges you survived in your life and then move on to all the ways you've learned and grown through the years.6. Make time in your life to do the things you love to do. Notice what excites you or fascinates you and make time to do those things more regularly.7. Become the person you want to be. Practice in small ways being more kind, more loving, more generous and more successful. Then watch what happens over time.8. Set clear boundaries about what you will and will not tolerate in your life! For example, I'm very happy to listen to your feelings if you use I-messages, but I will absolutely not tolerate being criticized and put down!9. Imagine having the life of your dreams! Write in your journal about what your dream life would be. Then read it daily and imagine it to be already true until it manifests!10. Find ways to laugh and have fun regularly! Your inner child loves to laugh and play. No matter how challenging life is, there's always something to laugh about!Healthy self-love will literally change your life from the inside out. It will definitely take work and effort, but you'll never be sorry for the time you spent learning to love yourself. And whatever you do, don't forget to have fun in the process! How to prevent your address and your friends’ addresses from being “harvested” on the internet:1. Clean your emails before you forward them. To do this, hit Forward. Then with your cursor, highlight everything on the email that you want to delete—all the names and addresses and everything except just the message itself. Hit Backspace and it will erase it. If you erase too much, Go to the Edit tab at the top of the email and click on UnDo Clear and it will put everything back so you can try again. 2. Then, instead of using the To or the Cc bars to type in addresses, use the Bcc bar to address your emails. This hides all the names and addresses from public view. To find the Bcc bar, double click on either of the To or the Cc at the top of the email. This will bring up your address book, so you can select emails from it. Click on the Bcc bar after each name you select. If you use To or Cc bars for addresses, they display all the names and addresses to whoever sees this email. Using Bcc prevents anyone from seeing who you’ve sent this email to. Now no one can harvest your name or your friends names. It can save you and your friends a lot of hassle, especially in preventing spammers from harvesting them…and even from getting viruses which some nasty people send just for fun! 3. Be suspicious of any attractive email that says forward to 10 friends or whatever number. Many of those have an invisible program built in, which you can’t see, that also sends a copy of your email back to the original sender, so they can harvest the email addresses you are sending to. They want 10 or whatever number they are asking for, rather than just a few at a time. They then add those illegally harvested emails to their lists and sell them to other spammers.4. If you really like what is in the email and want to forward it, but you are suspicious, just copy and paste the information from that email into a new email, and discard the original. If you can’t copy and paste the information from the email, DON”T send it. That is very likely infected. Following these practices will help clean up the internet and keep your computer safer, as well as your friends' computers and you know they'll thank you for that.