Why You Should Have Empathy For Yourself First
Before you can fully love or care for others, you need to embrace yourself as your own best friend. Your best friend, YOU, will look after your Body, Soul, and Mind.
EMPATHY
- The intellectual identification with the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
- The vicarious experiencing of those feelings, thoughts, or attitudes.
Empathy for yourself means having compassion, or understanding and forgiveness, and love for yourself. You are aware of your own thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, and you experience them, not as you, but as a friend would.
With empathy for yourself, your Spirit will be freer to flow with your intuition or Wider / Higher Self. With self-empathy, you care for yourself, as a friend would.
Why Empathy For Yourself is Critical
- We all make mistakes and nobody is perfect. Who better to learn from your experiences and move on from there, to become the best version of yourself that you can be, than YOU?
- We interact with others often, if not on a daily basis. In order to understand and relate well to others, you need to be clear of any emotional “hang-ups”. At any point of “time” you need to be okay with your values and your needs and with your state of mind, the latter of which colours your emotions. Empathy for yourself means you’re in touch with how and why you do things.
- Empathy doesn’t necessarily mean feeling sorry for yourself, but it means being kind to yourself. However, empathy can include an element of sadness, where it really is warranted. You need to honour your feelings and release and transform any feelings of sadness or remorse or regret.
If you have been through traumatic experiences, you need to get trusted support and take the advice of those who care about you.
Those who have been traumatised often struggle to manage themselves on a daily basis because they are scared, fearful, mistrustful, and unhappy.
For those who have suffered, it is critical to reveal the cause of your deep-seated feelings before you can fully apply empathy to yourself. You have to know your feelings and why you have them as part of the understanding component of self-empathy.
Once you understand what has been missing in your life or what you want, you can move onto learning from the past. Take responsibility for re-inventing yourself gently and with love.
Find the skills and resources you need to adapt to your current situation, and to grow, through support from others, and as necessary, through therapy, self-reflection, and “trial and error.”
You need to overcome fear, mistrust, despair, depression, and anger, in order to like yourself, because these feelings drain your energy and make you not like yourself.
Being in touch with your feelings, and transforming unhelpful feelings to positive feelings is the other component of self-empathy.
Being the Best Version of Yourself
It’s hard being human. We are each part of an intricate or detailed global system of humanity, with regional sub-sets, battling social expectations and rules. No person is an island, and we sometimes feel constricted or restricted, or obliged to do something or not.
Sometimes the World seems alien to us. It feels harsh and it’s hard to keep positive, so we put on a cloak of bravery and decide to help others as much as possible. We show that we care, and this is excellent and needed, but not at the cost of forgetting yourself.
As you go about your daily life, always remember that as a 3-D physical human being, you have interests, values, and needs, and that you are as worthy and valuable to humanity as the next person. You are individual, yet connected.
You are not obliged to help anyone unless you are happy and competent enough to do so, and have the energy and the time to help.
Balance is The Key
Balance or moderation of anything in Life is important. You need to be grounded in 3-D reality to interact as a human being, while being connected to your essence. You are a spark of spirit in human form.
When you care for yourself by having understanding and appreciation and forgiveness and support for all of your thoughts and feelings, and for what you do and for what you are, you are boosted by Spirit.
With self-empathy, you are satisfied with the way you are, and you have the courage to put your viewpoint across or to ask for what you want.
You are then equipped to “hold space” for someone that you want to have empathy for. Holding space means being there for someone, and helping them in the way that they want help.
Empathy requires gentleness, and allowing the processing or unfolding of others needs or your needs, and offering support from lived experience.
Remember to be gentle with yourself. Make sure that you don’t think about others without thinking about your own well-being.
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
Lao Tzu
Deeply love YOURSELF first. You are your greatest source of strength. Deeply loving yourself gives you great strength.
You need to feel good about yourself and to care enough about yourself, so that you are a clear and open channel for communicating with your intuition and spiritual self. This leads to relating well with yourself and with others.
You can honour yourself with music, poetry, creative work, self-reflection, journaling, mantras, or meditation, or with something else uplifting.
A Morning Mantra (say this aloud or in your head up to 3 times)
I am the Monad
I am the Light Divine
I am Love
I am Will
I am Fixed Design
Notes:
A monad is a spark of the creator force of pure Light. The “Light Divine” is the nature of the monad. Love is about Living One Vibrational Energy. “Will” is the first ray of the Creator, where will-power created the monads. Fixed design means all comes from the Creator force of divine Light.
You are powerful beyond measure, if you let it be.
A Day-time Mantra
Peace, Love and Light (repeat this throughout the day)
A Bed-time Mantra
Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise
Having empathy toward yourself will instil you with peace and calm, and this settling of your own “inner ecology” will bring balance.
Remember, you are your own best friend. You have to look after your physical body and your mental, emotional, and spiritual bodies. Honouring yourself requires empathy toward yourself, i.e. self-empathy.
Self-compassion is a part of this, where you accept your own actions with understanding and kindness and forgiveness toward yourself.
When you are balanced and peaceful, you can be calm under pressure, and you can relate well to others. Empathy for yourself brings about this state.
Before you can fully love or care for others, you need to embrace yourself as your own best friend. This is why you should have empathy for yourself first.
This story is in a monthly column “Spiritual Growth” in “The Innovation.” Clicking on the link below will take you to the column’s homepage.