The No.1 Relationship Is With Oneself

I know you will have heard this before but the most important relationship you have is with yourself. If you can’t have a great relationship with yourself, and aren’t your own raving fan, how on earth can you expect to have a great relationship with anyone else? You are the first person you need to fall in love with – otherwise you are expecting someone else to fulfil you, putting a massive burden on them.


So on a score of 0 – 100 where 0 means you loathe yourself, feel you are a worthless pile of junk, and 100 recognizing that you are the most magnificent being and there is still more to come, where do you rate yourself right now? This will become the benchmark from which you will see yourself unfold. Whatever it is now, by the time you have finished this article, your score will have dramatically increased.


Now take your score away from 100 - i.e. even if you score yourself at 35, your new total will be 65. The fantastic news is that there is 65% of you that you haven’t even begun to uncover yet!

In this society we are often taught to go to the lowest common denominator – to be self-critical, to weigh ourselves against others by the media, and we are always found wanting. We never deem ourselves good enough. But until we can break down the barriers to our own heart, we have insufficient love to be able to share with another.

Unfair though it may sound, you are responsible for your own happiness – nobody makes you happy or sad – it’s all about you and how you choose to respond to the circumstances around you. No doubt you will have heard stories of incredible courage and even joy of people in the depths of human misery, yet deep from within emerges their limitless spirit. That spirit is in you too.

Intimate relationships present our greatest challenge because it is here that our reactive patterns of behavior tend to be triggered by the close proximity and interaction with another person. All our insecurities, self doubts and fears come up to be addressed, our beliefs, our values, our rules, our behavior get challenged by someone else’s ideas about life and come up to conscious awareness ready to be healed if we allow them to be so. This is often our greatest opportunity to make changes in our life, and causes us to look deep inside ourselves to find out what it is we really think, feel, believe and desire.

It is also our greatest opportunity to go beyond what we know, beyond what we feel we can give and beyond how we feel we can love. It stretches our limits and gives us the chance to expand and become more. It is where our vulnerabilities are on display, where we can make the decision to let go of control and learn to trust, and be open to receiving the love of another.

So how can we learn to love ourselves first when we’ve been taught since childhood to put ourselves last, to view others as being better than ourselves? When we continually find fault with ourselves, why would anyone else not find those faults in us too? When we accept ourselves fully, we stop being needy – it doesn’t mean we don’t need someone else in our life, just that we don’t expect them to do it all for us, as we don’t base our self esteem on other peoples’ opinions.

What someone else thinks of you is none of your business – it is the way they look through their own eyes, their own conditioning and limitations and patterns of behavior. It doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with you, or for that matter anything right – it is just an interesting point of view. The trouble is we tend to base our perception of who we are according to whether we are liked or not. If you learn to do this for yourself, where you really get to admire and honor and respect who you are, (the good, the bad and the ugly) it doesn’t mean you’re big-headed but that you honor and appreciate yourself and desire to be the best you can be. If you live by everybody else’s rules and not by your essence, you will not be fulfilled – you will live at luke-warmness instead of passionately.

Understand that you are a limitless being with the whole of the history of the Universe inside you. You are unique. We are all unique. You are an amazing creation – the chances of you being born are zillions to one – and the chances of being on this planet are zillions to one. You are an extraordinary creature – a miracle of life, and when you start to see yourself and view your life as a miracle you will start to appreciate others as a miracle too, so you won’t get so caught up with the hum drum and the nastiness which is so prevalent in society these days.

When we let go of feeling inferior, we are amazing. Do you know at the deepest level you are already perfect? Your body is a phenomenal series of systems all perfectly balanced which has the equivalent of its own pharmacy inside it to heal anything wrong. It also carries within its DNA all the history of the Universe, all your ancestral energy, all the answers to all the questions, an intuitive knowingness of what to do. All this knowingness has just got covered over, polluted because of our conditioning and bad programs. What do you love about yourself? There are always things to love about yourself, even if it’s your nose or your feet, the way you tenderly care for animals, your smile, your touch, your ability to sing, your talents. Come up with at least 10 things, and preferably 100, and please write them down so you can look at them on those occasional days when things may not be going according to plan.

What is your most valuable treasure? Is it your vision? Your talents? Your love? Your sense of humor? Your ability to be flexible? Compassion, creativity?

What could you love about yourself if you let go of judgment? What would you be prepared to let go of – old limitations, old behaviors, limiting beliefs, continually telling your bad experiences to anyone who will listen...

You see, there’s part of you that you don’t know yet. To find the amazingness of you, you have to go to places you’ve not yet been. Give yourself permission to be open, trusting and allow the process to happen. Allow love to pour through you as you uncover more of who you are – love is unlimited and boundless.

What we are still searching for is that feeling of being unconditionally loved, and being held and caressed and touched. This is why it is so important that we create that feeling for ourselves first by being kind to ourselves, loving our body and treating ourselves well. Treat yourself well by understanding that who you choose to spend time with will affect your values, your language, your happiness, your health and even your earnings. Learn to love yourself by enjoying and appreciating your body – notice how you talk to yourself and what you put in your body. Do you feed yourself with nourishing foods and drinks, and do you give it the exercise it enjoys? When you learn to treat yourself the way you would treat your best friend, your body will respond beautifully. What can you do for you that makes you feel really good inside?

Magic Moments

Each night before you go to sleep, write out the magic moments of the day with an attitude of gratitude – there will always be something to be grateful for from the person who smiled at you in the supermarket, to a phone call, to finding that penny on the sidewalk. The more you do this, the more you will appreciate how amazing your life actually is.

Now write a vision of how you would like life to be as if it has already happened. When you read this every day, your unconscious mind will take it on as a new program, so the new way of enjoying your life will be installed and overwrite old unhelpful beliefs. This works, it really works!

Why do we get into relationship in the first place?

It’s to magnify our human emotions, to help us experience more of who we really are, and to experience love. Whatever we bring to a relationship will be magnified; whether it be positive or negative, it will really show up in order to help us see what it is we need to change to be our authentic self. Ideally we want our relationship to support us to be more of who we are than we could be elsewhere, or on our own, yet sadly we often twist ourselves into the shape of a pretzel to try and fit in with what we think our partner thinks we should be.

However, we can only share with others what we have inside ourselves; so if you don’t get stronger, happier, healthier within yourself, you have nothing to bring to the relationship. In other words, if you don’t know yourself well, or you are hiding behind fears, or feelings of inferiority, you may have disempowering needs, and expect the other person to fulfil them for you. That’s an enormous burden to put on anyone else.

When you are your best self, you bring that to your partner and it enhances your relationship. So that old song “All of me, why not take all of me?” No thanks, we want the best bits only!

Now having completed those exercises, score yourself again as to how you feel about yourself, and see how much you’ve grown from how you scored at the beginning of this exercise. When you continually enhance this special relationship with yourself, you will find your levels of happiness increasing more and more, and then you have more to bring to the world.


© copyright www.alovingspace.com 2008

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