Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It

James Altucher, writing about Kamal Ravikant:

A few weeks later he told me he had been sick. “I was so sick, most days I couldn’t move.”

“What happened? How did you get better?”

He said, “I’ll tell you but it might not sound real. One day I could barely move. I was sick. I thought this is it. There’s noting to live for. I could barely get out of bed. But I crawled up to the mirror in my bathroom and I said to myself, ‘I love you.’

“And I kept repeating it. And repeating it. And the next day I did the same. And the next day.

“And I realized all the ways I hadn’t been loving myself. And I realized how important it was to say it out loud.

“How important it was to mean it. How I had to rewire my brain to love myself.

“And every day I got better. And better. And then even better than I was before I started this. I made a complete recovery.

“I was better.”

And:

“Think about it,” he said to me months later when we met in NYC, “when someone is in love, they almost magically look better. I needed to be in love with myself to feel better. So much of what had happened had weighed on me until I collapsed. Now I needed to love myself. It became a mantra for me.”

As someone explained to me the other day, the word “mantra” has two parts (in Sanskrit): “man” – thoughtfulness with zeal, and “tra” – to protect. So by saying “I love myself” over and over Kamal was protecting the thought, nourishing it, and the love was nourishing the rest of his body, his emotions, his mind, his spirit.

And:

If a painful memory arises, don’t fight it or try to push it away – you’re in quicksand. Struggle reinforces pain. Instead, go to love. Love for yourself. Feel it. If you have to fake it, fine. It’ll become real eventually. Feel the love for yourself as the memory ebbs and flows. That will take the power away.

And even more importantly, it will shift the wiring of the memory. Do it again and again. Love. Re-wire. Love. Re-wire. It’s your mind. You can do whatever you want. […] The results are worth it. I wish that for you.

You can read the full blog post here.

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