We cannot step into self-love until we learn to honour our emotions and feelings. Emotions are our response to life and other people in our lives, they are the means we experience the richness of life. We define our experience of life through our feelings and emotions. We say 'I am happy you did this for me', 'I am sad I lost this in life’ or 'I feel loved’ or 'I feel angry'. By denying our true feelings we deny experience of life itself. And by making our feelings wrong, we make ourselves wrong and move further away from self-love.

Most of us grow up with a false notion that some emotions are 'bad' or 'negative’. Emotions like anger or sadness are unpleasant and hence we do our best to control them, suppress them or manage them. But emotions by themselves are not wrong or bad, they are the means through which we experience the richness of life. As we do not allow a free flow of emotions, or not allow ourselves to honestly feel what there is to feel, we build up a density of unresolved emotional baggage. This is what makes us react to situations in life rather than responding to it. In stead of making ourselves wrong for having wrong emotions, we need to resolve the suppressed emotional density. No amount of self-work or practicing of self-love will get us to a place of true self-love unless we learn to honour our feelings and emotions. Emotions are God’s gift to human beings, they can be used as excellent tools for self-awareness. No other beings on earth have the richness and variety of emotional response to life as we do.  

So how can emotions moves us into greater self-love? Simple, by making a commitment to honour each and every feeling and emotion that surfaces in us during our daily lives. Honouring includes acknowledging honestly what you feel and allowing yourself to feel it without judgement. Just by observing what is coming up and honestly acknowledging what we feel, we honour the emotion and honour our experience of life itself.

If you have a beloved child, would you make the child wrong for each act, every minute of the day and still expect it to feel loved? No. How can we expect to feel self-love all the while making ourselves wrong for each and every emotion? "I will love myself more if only I can control my anger". "I love most of me except the part of me that is jealous". We can never reach to a place of self-love as long as we judge a part of us as wrong or bad.

Commit to love and honour yourself NOW! Give your full attention to the emotion of anger or sadness or envy or any other emotion that comes up in any situation. Honestly acknowledge how you feel without judging yourself wrong for having that feeling. Once you feel through it, give yourself time to reflect what prompted this emotion - is it some unresolved hurt or pain from the past? The more you treat yourself with love and acceptance, the unresolved hurt from the past, that is prompting strong emotional reactions in each situation, will start melting away. You will enjoy using the emotion to gain greater awareness about your unresolved issues. And the more you resolve your past hurt, the more you will flow with each emotion without feeling bad about it but in complete awareness that it too will pass away once it served its purpose. The more you will start loving and honouring yourself.

-Ramakrishna Maguluri