I Love Me.

As I was looking at my last post it reminded me of a story about "I love myself" that I wanted to share with you. 

When my daughter was four years old and I was putting her to bed one night, she was reciting who she all loved.  I love Mommy, I love Daddy, I love Granny, I love my brother. . . and I love myself. Wow was I ever struck by that statement. I was caught a little off guard, but my instinctive response (although it felt a little clumsy) to her was "that's really good sweetie because you need to spend a lot of time with yourself so its really important that you love yourself"(I didn't fully understand the impact of this statement until later when I realized just how true this is and how difficult). She looked at me and said "do you love yourself Momma?" again I was struck at how difficult it was for me to say yes.  This stirred my interest in the human condition and I wondered, when in life we moved from loving ourselves to having so much difficulty even hearing it let alone saying it ourselves.  I started to ask people close to me if they could say it, and found most adults had extreme difficulty saying it (with any meaning), even my teenage nieces and nephews struggled.  When my daughter was in Grade One her teacher called me aside one day to tell me that she had said it in school.  I couldn't believe how the simple statement "I love myself" struck a cord with so many people, including myself. While I have always said I learn so much from my children, this was a big one!  I really feel like we are doing something wrong in society, in our parenting and educating when the vast majority of us have so much difficulty with this. I consider it my personal responsibility in this lifetime to ensure that I am always able to say "I love myself", for the betterment of my life and the lives of all around me.  Only when we truly love ourselves are we able to shine that light of love out into the world! Give it a try . . . look in the mirror today and see if you can say to your reflection "I love you".