Learn to Love Yourself Series: Pay Attention to Your Emotions

When you love yourself, you pay attention to how you feel.  Your emotions are your greatest tools of self-awareness.  They are a remarkable guidance system. A compass that can allow you to pivot in real time to the path you prefer. There are at least three good reasons to pay attention to your emotions.

The first reason is that emotions always follow beliefs.  They are like breadcrumbs. If you’re trying to understand why you respond in certain ways, like why you got angry or sad or excited your emotions can be an investigative tool to help you explore and reveal your thoughts on a deeper level than you were aware of before.

It is the same if you are trying to change a behavior.  Long-held beliefs create habits.  Your emotions give clues to what you’re thinking so you can find the source of the belief.  Once you’ve identified the belief you have the opportunity to let it go which disengages the habit.

The second reason to pay attention to your emotions is that they protect you from harm.  It’s just like your hand on the hot stove.  Our bodies, thankfully have pain receptors in the skin to warn us when there’s a problem.  Your emotions do the same things.  If something feels scary, sad, hopeless, disempowering, or makes you angry, pay attention.  It may be the equivalent of the hot stove.

Our body responds automatically to pain stimuli, but our minds don’t always respond to emotions as quickly.  Our minds often explain things away or redefine the situation to keep us safe or avoid conflicts.  Pay attention to negative feelings and learn to take action as soon as you notice them.  Loving yourself means protecting yourself.  Just as aggressively as you would protect a small child. At some level, you are the small child. And the language of your inner child, the way it communicates, is emotion. Listen lovingly.

The third reason is that positive emotions give you direction as to which way to go for your best life.  Your Higher Self, God, Source, guides you through positive emotions.  Divine guidance feels positive.  Good feelings indicate you are moving in the direction of your calling, of the path that leads to your most fulfilled life.  When you feel happy, light, excited, joyful, curious, loving, inspired, interested, you can be assured you are heading in the right direction.  Negative emotions indicate you are moving away from the things you want.

Every day reach for the best feeling thought that you are able to access.  You will, of course, experience both negative and positive emotions throughout the day.  The secret is to keep redirecting your thoughts towards the positive as much as you are able.  As you practice this, you will open up to more and more positive experiences and in turn more good feeling emotions.  You may not have all the answers, but moving in the direction of something that feels good or even just better, is always the right next step even if you don’t know the whole path.

There is a famous Rumi quote, “Whatever lifts the corners of your mouth, trust that.”  Make your smile your life's compass.

Loving yourself means you care about how you feel.  You honor your emotions. ALL of them. Both the positive and negative. With practice, they can become your closest companions on the road of life.