One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself is to commit - solemnly and sincerely - to *always* loving yourself. At all times and under all circumstances. To treat that commitment like a wedding vow, with the same seriousness you’d give to an important promise you’ve made to a lover. To love yourself when you’re lazy, when you’re weak, and when you fall pray to your most frustrating vices and compulsions. To love yourself when you are envious, when you are scared, and when you feel like a failure. To make this promise doesn’t mean that you will never falter or flail in fulfilling it. This is the paradox of self-love: to be utterly committed to loving yourself and utterly committed to forgiving yourself when you fail to do so. But just making that commitment in itself is powerful. Not just to hope to love yourself, or to believe that loving yourself would be a good thing or to love yourself when you behave in ways you deem lovable. But to commit, to promise, to vow to love yourself, unconditionally at your worst and weakest and most ugly. I think many people worry that if they give themselves unconditional love, then they will lose the motivation to grow or address behaviours that don’t align with their highest values. But I don’t find this to be the case at all. I believe most of our unaligned behaviours are grounded in shame and self-hatred, not love. Love is an energizing, illuminating and healing force. My experience is that all our apparent flaws actually contain deep seeds of wisdom in them; this wisdom simply gets lost in the darkness of self-rejection. In the light of love, these lost parts can see where they’re going again and naturally grow towards that light. We sometimes think that we have to wait until we feel lovable to love ourselves. But the truth is that when we love ourselves - truly and unconditionally - our heart reveals its infinitely lovable nature: here, now, already.