Learning to Love Yourself: The Most Natural (and Unnatural) Thing in the World

by  Susan Mason-Apps

Learning to love yourself could be the single most important thing you do in your life. What would you say in response to the question: “Do you love yourself?” It may seem like a strange question to ask, but, let me ask you – how can anyone love you – if you don’t? How can you live in a loving world if you aren’t able to contribute love to that world? Learning to love yourself could be the game changer that you, and the world needs – now more than ever.

What would your life look like if you truly learned to love yourself? Not the version of love that comes from external things like achievements, appearances, or the approval of others—but a deep, unwavering and unconditional acceptance of who you are at your core. 

For many people, this kind of self-love feels imaginary, impossible, or even unnecessary. Yet, without it, we can drift through life chasing validation, settling for less than we desire (or deserve), and hiding a quiet emptiness inside. We experience this type of emptiness because there is a missing ingredient in your heart – your own love. 

Learning to love yourself isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity. Self-love provides the courage and capacity to live authentically. It’s the foundation for healthy relationships. But if learning to love yourself is so essential, why is it so many of us struggle to embody it? This article explores the roots of our separation, the transformative power of self-love, and—most importantly—some practical steps to cultivate it everyday.

Why Don’t We Love Ourselves?

If it is really so important, why don’t we love ourselves? Learning to love yourself means you must be willing to unlearn not loving yourself. We come into this world as love. We don’t need to learn to love, because we still are love. 

However, we gradually learn to not love ourselves because of the people, and world, around us. Practically from the moment we are born, we receive messages from parents, teachers, friends and society that we aren’t good enough, worthy enough or deserving of love. Is it any wonder why we don’t love ourselves?

If you were raised in an environment where receiving love was based on performance, obedience, or appearance—you likely see through a lens built from the internalized belief that you must earn love. This type of love, conditional love, requires things like getting good grades, behaving ‘properly’ and wearing the ‘right’ clothes. Rather than learning to love yourself for your essence, you likely learned that you needed to earn love by meeting certain “requirements.” 

Furthermore, you likely learned that when you met said requirements you earned love, albeit conditional love, so you learned to repeat those behaviours to make life easier, more palatable. Why? Because the alternative was often ridicule, disdain, or punishment. To avoid negative repercussions, it just seems easier to conform – behave ‘properly’ and do what is expected, or demanded, of you.

In some ways life seems easier when you conform. Yet, the internal world – your heart, mind and soul, begins to suffer. When you accept that you are only loved when you meet an externally imposed standard it is easy to extend that to ‘I’m not loved if I don’t conform’ and then further, to the idea that there must be something wrong with me so I must not be lovable. (Hello West Shadow!) Once we take on the belief of “I’m not lovable” we become our own jailors.

The reasons why we don’t love ourselves don’t stop there though. As children we may have been made fun of, picked on, or attacked by our peers, and others. Those causes of our suffering can become the very thing that stops us from loving ourselves as adults. Being picked on for some aspect of ourselves – the color of our hair or skin, our size or weight, wearing glasses – can leave us condemning ourselves with those very same accusations. “Who could ever love me, I’m so fat/ugly/stupid/insert the thing you are ashamed of.”

It’s easy to see how you would be left feeling hurt, confused and wanting to earn love any way possible. Soon after, you may have closed your heart – to not feel the hurt. It is at these moments that expressing self-love stops. These early imprints become the silent programs running in the background of your life. Learning to love yourself involves rewriting those scripts so that your heart can open and heal the pain of separation from your own love.

When we don’t love ourselves, learning how to love yourself can remain a challenge when we are faced with other internal obstacles such as:

“Comparison-Itis”

Another reason we may not learn to love ourselves is that in today’s world, comparison is constant. We are told what is desirable – and undesirable. Social media is flooded with images of ‘perfection’—smiling faces and success stories. The subconscious message: You are not enough. And, if you are not enough, you are not lovable. This relentless comparison erodes self-esteem. Attempts to be enough, and therefore lovable, leaves us striving to meet standards that are both unrealistic and unattainable. Believing we don’t measure up to the image of perfection gives us yet another reason why we don’t love ourselves.

Trauma and Self-Worth Wounds

We can’t talk about learning to love ourselves without talking about past wounds. Whether emotional, physical, or spiritual, they leave their mark on us. Trauma can fracture the relationship you have with yourself, creating shame and mistrust. Instead of seeing yourself as enough, as whole, you may view yourself through the lens of your pain and perceived ‘brokenness’. Living from that perspective leaves no wonder why we don’t love ourselves. From the place of past wounds, learning to love yourself may not even feel like a real possibility for you – it may not even feel real to you at all. But through a clean lens your vision of yourself can be restored.

The Inner Critic

Perhaps the harshest voice that makes learning to love yourself challenging is the one inside your head. The inner critic thrives on judgment and fear. This voice has often been created from the voices of authority figures from your past. All the areas we have discussed above come together in the Inner Critic, an archetype, or persona, that is all too happy to let us know how unlovable we are. Why wait for someone else to put you down, or insult you, when your very own Inner Critic can do it for you! Without awareness, the Inner Critic becomes a constant companion, whispering that you’re never good enough, never lovable enough, and you should definitely never learn to love yourself!

Why It’s Important to Learn How to Love Yourself

We started out this article with a pretty strong argument – bold even – as to why it’s so important to learn to love yourself. Learning to love yourself is indeed the foundation for the rest of your life experience. Consider that as long as we don’t love ourselves, it will likely remain a challenge to love any part of your life.

Now that you have a sense of some of the ways as to how and why you don’t love yourself, let’s look at some of the reasons why it’s important to learn how to love yourself. 

Foundation for Relationships

Your primary relationship is not outside of you – it is with you!  When you don’t love yourself, you tend not to treat yourself very well. The way you treat yourself sets the tone for how others treat you. When you abandon your own needs, allow others to disrespect you, or fail to establish boundaries, you unconsciously invite others to do the same. 

Here are a few questions to ask yourself to help determine if learning how to love yourself could make a difference in your relationships… Do you put other people’s needs before your own? Do you work to exhaustion to please others? Do you tell yourself you need to settle for less than you really want in relationships? 

When we try to meet the ‘requirements’ of lovability that we learned early in life, thinking that those strategies are the answer, we often end up resenting those in our lives. Sadly, meeting the standards for conditional love will never bring us the unconditional love we seek. And, if you look closely, you may find the people who aren’t treating you well are doing to you exactly what you are doing to yourself.

Learning to love yourself means you create a deep, loving relationship with yourself, one where you unconditionally give yourself the love you deserve, and desire. That means learning how to love yourself even if you gain weight, don’t meet your own expectations or do something you wish you hadn’t. Can you imagine loving yourself even when you weren’t liking yourself? When you learn how to love yourself you can give love to yourself. When you can give love to yourself, you will have love to give to others. And, when you have love for yourself it will feel safe when others offer love to you. That is the ideal starting point for healthy relationships.

Health and Well-Being

Science confirms what spirituality has always known: your thoughts and emotions impact your body. Without learning how to love yourself we can end up in chronic self-criticism. When you are in the state of self-criticism your stress levels increase. Chronic high stress weakens the immune system, disrupts your digestion, and more. This contributes to illness. Learning how to love yourself, on the other hand, activates the body’s healing systems—regulating your nervous system, balancing hormones, stimulating regeneration and fostering vitality.

Do you recall the plant studies of elementary school? The one where a student would have 2 groups of plants – one of the group of plants would be spoken to lovingly – the other group were spoken to hatefully. One of the groups of plants thrived. One of the groups withered. If you were a plant – which group would you be putting yourself into? The imperative of learning how to love yourself is obvious here.

Alignment with True Purpose

Once you learn how to love yourself, you don’t need to live someone else’s story. The strategy of trying to earn conditional love has us sacrifice our true self in order to please others, and thereby (theoretically) earn their love. Self-love brings the joy of being in alignment with your authentic desires and gifts. You no longer feel the need to perform for approval but are able to live from a place of truth. This alignment is the key to discovering and fulfilling your life’s purpose.

When you learn how to love yourself you listen to your inner knowing and intuition. You are able to take action from that deeper, truer part of yourself. This place can only be accessed when you love yourself. The life you end up living will be yours – created from your heart, and aligned with your truth. You will find few regrets when you learn to love yourself.

Resilience and Empowerment

Life isn’t always a cake-walk. It can be challenging, and at times just plain hard. When you learn how to love yourself, you become your own cheerleader, your own best friend. That support, when it comes from inside you, is truly empowering. It lifts you up, puts wind beneath your wings and gives you the strength to meet the challenges of life. Before long, you may realize that the challenges you’ve faced, with love, are the very things that transformed you into the person you’ve dreamed of being.

Without learning to love yourself any setbacks, obstacles and failures can be seen as evidence of your inadequacy. This brings back the self-criticism, increases your stress levels and weakens you mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. It can be a vicious cycle. A cycle that can be stopped with a change of heart when you learn to love yourself.

Learning to love yourself allows you to make changes inspired by love, instead of judgment.

How to Love Yourself

We have explored the hows and why we don’t love ourselves and we’ve looked at some of the reasons why learning to love yourself is a good idea. Now we will address the key to it all…

How to love yourself.

The first thing that you must do is make the choice. Be willing to learn how to love yourself. Second, you must be willing to not be perfect at it. The choice of learning to love yourself will fuel your transformation. Learning how to love yourself doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a lifelong adventure that begins with attention, focus and commitment to yourself.

Some practical and multidimensional approaches for how to love yourself are outlined below. These practices are not isolated or linear. One practice may lead into another, and build on another, taking you into different areas of discovery. Remember, this is a journey to learn how to love yourself – and there is no more important journey than that.

• Self-Awareness and Self-Acceptance: Begin by noticing your feelings, thoughts, behaviours and patterns. Let yourself merely observe these things. No judgment. No belittling. Just awareness. Just information, data.

This may initially feel impossible and potentially ridiculous. If you can’t seem to do this, imagine that you can. What that could look like is “If I could observe my feelings, what would that be like?” Give yourself permission to feel silly, uncomfortable and possibly even resistant. It’s all okay. From there, you can continue to go deeper into how to love yourself.

For example: “Hmm, this doesn’t feel good. Interesting. I wonder why I feel this way. Wow, have I felt this way before? When I have felt this way before, have I done some things I wish I hadn’t? When I did that, was there something I was fearing, or afraid to acknowledge, or feel? Interesting. If I was not loving myself, what would I make this mean to me, or about me? If I could learn to love myself, what would I feel, what would I know, and what would I do next? Could I accept that I don’t like how I feel, and that I did things I’m not proud of, and let that be okay?”

The magic happens when you let yourself embrace everything, and anything, about yourself. It takes practice, but with regular attention to awareness and accepting what you become aware of, you will find that it gets easier over time. And it is important to note – learning how to love yourself does not mean that you can’t seek to improve in areas you desire. It does, however, give you permission to make changes inspired by love, instead of judgment. Then, surprisingly, one day you will realize that without effort you just found yourself speaking nicely to yourself. And who knows – you might even smile at yourself. You’ve learned how to love yourself.

• Rewriting Your Story: The ways you learned to not love yourself ultimately form the program, script and story that we live our lives by. The story tells us what is true, what is false, right, wrong, good, bad and allowable for us. When we live our lives without awareness we may not even know that the story exists. Once you do know it exists you have a new level of power to change it and learn how to love yourself.

This moment can be difficult. Having become aware that you have made every choice in your life based on a belief you now realize was false can be painful. Learning to love yourself means it is also a moment to practice accepting the past. If you lived your life believing you were unworthy of love you only had limited choices available to you – ones that conformed to the story. 

Once you have make the commitment to learn how to love yourself, and rewrite your story, you have new choices. A wonderful starting point in rewriting your story is self-compassion. Hold compassion for the past version of yourself, while you continue to write your new story. 

Imagine giving yourself all the love you need. Ask yourself if the story you have told to yourself, about yourself, needs to be true. Ask “what would Love say?” or, if it is aligned for you, deepen into your connection to your faith by asking what Jesus, or Budda, would say. Could you let yourself do that? This type of exploration gradually changes the story, and the truth that you tell yourself.

• Embodiment Practices: Learning how to love yourself isn’t just a mental exercise—it must be lived in the body. Practices like mindfulness, yoga, breathwork, or simply walking in nature reconnect you with your physical self. When you ground into your body, you anchor your worth in the present moment.

Try this simple exercise. Sit or stand, in a place that feels good to you. Invite your thoughts to slow down. Tell them how important they are. Ask them to be quiet for a bit, and thank them for cooperating. Now take a slow breath. Don’t force it. Let it be effortless. Notice it. Breathing is the natural way of being for your body. Feel your lungs, ribs, muscles as they respond to your breath. Now, imagine breathing in love. Notice what that feels like. If you don’t feel anything – imagine that you do, and notice that. 

Continue breathing in love for a few minutes, if you can. Imagine that the love you breathe in is carried in your blood, just like oxygen, into every cell of your body. Notice how your cells feel when they receive this love. Again, if you don’t feel it, imagine that you do. This exercise is simple yet profound. It offers a gateway into yourself and learning how to love yourself that you can do without much time or effort and at no cost. Bonus!

• Boundaries and Saying No: Every time you say yes when you mean no, you abandon yourself. Boundaries are acts of self-respect and self-love. They are foundational in learning how to love yourself. Many people don’t have a sense of what boundaries really are. Boundaries are not walls; they’re doors you choose to open or close consciously. Start with small steps: decline the invitation that feels heavy and drains you. Set limits on your time and how much of it you give away. Protect your energy in stressful or toxic environments.

Before you learn how to love yourself it is all too easy to burn out by thinking you need to please others. Setting a boundary says “I am important. I matter. I take care of myself first.” At first, it may feel awkward and foreign but when you practice setting boundaries you will become comfortable with it. Many people believe that setting boundaries and prioritizing themselves is selfish. This is far from the truth and it is part of the old story. Let that be okay, and let it go. You’ve got this. This is an important step in how to love yourself.

• Daily Self-Nurturing Rituals: Learning to love yourself grows through consistent care. What are the things that make you smile? Do those things. Is it a bath at the end of your day? A walk in the woods? Journaling, affirmations, meditation, or making yourself a nourishing meal are powerful daily reminders that you are worthy of your own attention. Rituals transform abstract love into embodied reality.

Spend a few minutes and write a list of some of the things you would like to include for your daily self-nurturing practices. You don’t need to do them all everyday, but to learn to love yourself means you will make these practices – and therefore yourself – a priority. Every time you engage with yourself in your daily practices you build the muscle of how to love yourself.

• Reparenting Yourself: Many of us carry unmet childhood needs into adulthood. Learning to love yourself brings the opportunity of becoming the parent you always needed—offering yourself compassion, encouragement, and care.

By examining your story, and identifying the beliefs and patterns that have defined you in the past, you will discover that the opportunity for deep healing exists. As you realize the child you were is still hurting, allow your adult self to create the safety and provide the support that you needed as a child. You can do this by listening, understanding, embracing, and loving your inner child. Speaking the words to yourself that you wished you’d heard as a child is a powerful act that can alchemize many wounds. When your inner child feels safe and supported you know you have learned how to love yourself.

As part of reparenting yourself you may want to explore some of the things you enjoyed as a child. Coloring books, flying kites, swinging on the swings at the park – whatever brought you joy in childhood – revisit these things in a play-date with your inner child

The benefits of reparenting grow over time. Your relationship with your adult self will flourish through time spent focusing on awareness, acceptance and rewriting your story. As your awareness grows you will encounter opportunities to be the loving advocate for yourself. You become your own safe place when you have learned to love yourself by reparenting yourself.

• Living from a Place of Self-Love: It may sound like a cliche –  and maybe it is – but, you can’t love another if you don’t love yourself. This is a cliche because it’s true. You cannot give what you do not have. Learning to love yourself means that you can meet life with love. It means you have love to share. You are courageous in caring for yourself. When you learn how to love yourself, love becomes your foundation and your life transforms.

Your decision-making shifts. You choose from love, not fear. You no longer chase validation or settle for less than what you want – you align with what is true for you and what nourishes your soul. Your relationships evolve. You attract connections rooted in respect, authenticity, and mutual care. Toxic dynamics fall away. This can only happen because you have learned how to love yourself.

Living from a place of self-love activates another profound experience – that of gratitude. When the heart is nourished with your own love you will undoubtedly be overtaken by sense that there is just so much to be grateful for. The gift of gratitude may be one of the most wonderful gifts you receive when you have learned to love yourself. And who knows, maybe one day you will count yourself among the things to be grateful for in your life!

A very special practice is starting a gratitude journal. It involves writing down 3 to 5 things everyday that you are grateful for. You could start with “I’m grateful to myself for committing to learning to love myself!”

When you learn to love yourself, you live in and from love, and you become an example for those around you. You naturally shine your love and your light into the world. The ripple effect expands and your self-love becomes a beacon. When you model what it means to love yourself, you give others permission to do the same.

Learning to love yourself is not about being perfect. It’s about unlearning the lies you’ve been told and remembering the truth of who you are. It’s about showing up for yourself in the small moments – choosing kindness over criticism, rest over exhaustion, authenticity over performance – for yourself first, then for others.

The journey to self-love is the most natural thing you can do and the most important journey you’ll ever take. Learning how to love yourself starts with one step today. Maybe speak a kind word to yourself, set one healthy boundary, or simply put your hand on your heart and tell yourself you are enough.

When you learn to love yourself, the world reflects that love back to you. When you see love shining back – you may realize – love is not something you do, it is something you are. When you live as a Soul, love is what you be.

Since 2011, courageous men and women around the world have chosen Divine Navigation and committed to the extraordinary and transformative experience of Aligning with their Soul-through their Divine Coordinates. We invite you to always explore the journey of  your Soul and its desired expression.