7 Steps to Loving Yourself

BabyRain · Jun 23, 2007

7 Steps to Self Agape
by José Stevens, Ph.D.

Remember that the goal of this teaching is to facilitate the lessons of unconditional love and acceptance. There is no possibility of accomplishing this toward others if you have not first learned how to unconditionally accept yourself.

Here are seven steps to lead you in that direction.

· 1. Trust in your perceptivity.

· 2. Ruthless truthfulness with yourself.

· 3. Acknowledging that the world and those in it are perfect and making a commitment to be tolerant.

· 4. Allow yourself your own power and constant choice to be appropriate with it.

· 5. Erasing fear and the chief negative feature to live in gentleness and joy.

· 6. Truly experiencing surrender and therefore power and control, which leads to the true integration of personality and essence. This allows you to fully experience the physical plane as well as the truth, love, and beauty of the other planes.

· 7. Humility

1. Trust in your perceptivity.

The first step to self-agape has to do with developing your ability to perceive. Perceiving is not thinking about, nor is it figuring out or scrutinizing. Remember that perceptivity is a function of your emotional center and that perception is a feeling. This is the ability to size up the truth of a situation, experience, or person by instantly and emotionally sensing what is so about them.

You might walk into a business meeting where a number of people are present and you can instantly perceive whom you can trust and whom you should be careful about. You can instantly perceive as well whether you are going to get anywhere with this team or whether you are going to waste time and money with them.

The aphorism "Don't guess, perceive", applies to this step. This is an important way to look at perceptivity. Your society does not encourage people to follow and trust their own intuitions and perceptions. Characteristically older souls, because of their experience, have inherently good perceptivity skills. The problem tends to be that older souls lose confidence in their perceptivity when they live in a young soul society that places a low value on intuition and perception. Thus, this first step to self-agape is to trust and develop the skill of perception.

2. Ruthless truthfulness with yourself.

The second step to self-agape encourages you to be completely honest with yourself. Ruthless truthfulness means the courage to state what is so about yourself and your perceptions at any one time. This truthfulness does not have so much to do with perceiving as it does with telling the truth about what you perceived. Often you perceive accurately but then deny what you saw, or distort is so much that the truth becomes unrecognizable.

You may accurately assess that the business team gathered is a bad mix of personalities and that your endeavors will come to grief. However, if you should slide to the negative poles of your over-leaves and become, for example, ingratiating, you may deny to yourself and the others your original perception. You will act as if everything is fine and proceed foolishly into a mess.

Knowing and telling the truth, however, can be tricky. Because the truth is unique for each individual, one person's truth is another person's lie. In addition, truth is not always constant but changes as the soul matures and gains experience. The truth for a baby soul is different from the truth for a mature soul. The truth for a baby soul is that law, order, and obedience to authority are the most necessary ingredients to live a good life. The truth for a mature soul is that individual search and questioning of authority is necessary for a good life.

Ruthless truthfulness is a form of compassion and need not be seen as a way of putting oneself down or being self-deprecating. Being self-truthful is not beating yourself up but seeing in a detached way what the reality is and what must be done.

3. Acknowledging that the world and the people in it are perfect and making a commitment to be tolerant.

The third step focuses on acknowledging that people are perfect the way they are. Perfect means that each person is following his or her own path just the way that they should. In other words, every person is learning their lessons in his or her chosen ways. The important lesson one person is learning may be the important lesson that another person learned ten lifetimes ago or will learn three lifetimes from now.

Therefore perfection does not have to be a high ideal or look like your pictures of what the world is supposed to be, but in fact what is.

The concept of perfection in "what is" has always been one of the most difficult for students to understand. You may ask, how can the world be perfect if there is killing, war, famine, and disease? How can so-and-so be perfect if he lies, cheats, and steals from me? Should I do nothing, then, to correct or stop these things? The answer is paradoxical. Yes, all these things are being perfectly done and everyone is learning their lessons exactly the way they had hoped (on an essence level, of course). However, part of this perfection is that when you perceive injustice you perfectly move to correct it. Therefore physical reality is a game that everyone gets to play, the unjust and the just, and in the illusion of time one will eventually become the other, and the game continues.

4. Allow yourself your own power and the constant choice to be appropriate with it.

Personal power is the result of telling the truth. Telling the truth gives you presence, and presence is perceived as power. Being appropriate with power is a unique task for each individual.

The more powerful a person is, the simpler the message. The philosophical writings of young souls are often lengthy, complex, and difficult to read. The message of old souls tends to be far simpler. The teachings and concepts of Jesus Christ are immensely powerful and are phrased in the simplest possible terms, as in the parables and in statements such as "Love your neighbor as yourself." The Buddha taught the eightfold path based on the simple truth that to crave is to suffer. Meher Baba said, "Don't worry, be happy." What could be simpler?

5. Erase fear and your chief negative feature to live in gentleness and joy.

Attention and awareness are the chief tools for erasing fear. Fear is a by-product of the false personality and when you shift your identification away from the false personality and toward essence you automatically begin to dissolve fear.

All seven chief features -- self-destruction, greed, self-deprecation, arrogance, martyrdom, impatience, and stubbornness are based on fears. A major life task each lifetime is to erase the neutralizing effect of the chief feature so that you can reach your goal. When you are realizing your life goal, whether it is acceptance or growth, you feel the joy of essence work. The experience of joy always leads to gentleness.

6. Truly experiencing surrender and therefore power and control.

This allows you to fully experience the physical plane as well as the truth, love, and beauty of the other planes.

As you can see, step six contains a paradox, calling on you to experience surrender while at the same time experiencing personal power. You need to be able to hold this contradiction at one and the same time in order to be in control.

In one sense, surrender means no longer resisting the events and experiences of the physical plane. Surrender does not mean giving up, but embracing essence-directed lessons and opportunities. When you stop resisting being in a body and the karma that accompanies it, you begin to rapidly accelerate your spiritual growth. As you accelerate you become more powerful because you learn to fear nothing.

Spiritual growth allows you to access the higher centers -- higher intellectual, higher emotional, and higher moving. As you begin to open up to the higher centers you begin to experience the truth, love, and beauty of all the planes within the Tao.

7. Humility

This seventh step is the experience of completion after you have mastered the first six steps. The seventh step allows you to let go of attachment to that achievement and this neutrality is expressed as humility.
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This article is taken from http://www.iloveulove.com/unconditlove/loveyourself.htm

#3 and #6 are particularly interesting, as we have often heard of "No one is perfect" and "Never surrender", but these points are asking us to do otherwise. -^_^ Makes sense though.

wind2000 · Jun 23, 2007

^ I concur with you on # 3 and #6. Those 2 are really points to ponder because they differ from the general principles of life.

subaru3169 · Jun 24, 2007

i think a couple of those go together, coz they seem pretty relate.. i think many ppl just keep try to resist something when they don't have to struggle in the first place.. as in, choose your battles wisely.. don't have to keep fighting all the time

Taxloss · Jun 24, 2007

Number 6 would be hard for me; can't surrender if I know I'm not in the wrong. I can be very stubborn in that respect yeah but it's not like I let that control my whole life or something.

philostrate · Jun 24, 2007

i agree on step 5 personally and often think i'm not confident enough because i have a lot of worries and fear...fear of this and that and in the end nothing gets done..i think i'm a person who can't afford to lose and tried very hard to do something but tend to give up because i'm not intellectually motivated therefore i find myself difficult to reach step 6 lol

7 Steps to Loving Yourself

BabyRain Doppelgänger of da E.Twin

wind2000 Self Schemata

subaru3169 Well-Known Member

Taxloss Stripper Vicar

philostrate Well-Known Member