Loving Your Intellectual Self: Feeding Your Mind
In the two previous lessons, we explored loving your body and emotions. Loving yourself also involves providing your brain with plenty of intellectual stimulation. Here are some effective ways to demonstrate self-love by giving your mind a workout.
1. Do something you’ve longed to do. Loved art class in high school? Always wanted to pick up that paintbrush again? Now’s the time to go for it. Exploring a new or long-loved subject might feel like a delicious indulgence. You deserve to feast your mind on subjects that are intellectually stimulating to you.
○ The internet offers an abundance of fascinating information. Dive into a search on a topic that arouses your interests.
2. Write down your life priorities. What’s important to you? Next, jot down your life goals. What do you really seek to accomplish in life? Finally, take note of how you spend most of your time. Your three lists should all be similar or closely connected.
○ For example, if you’ve always wanted to go to college, did you? Do you now spend most of your time achieving that thing you’ve desired for so long?
○ If you want more training to excel at work, do you make sure you follow through to attain it?
○ If travel is a dream of yours, do you do something every single day related to it? You’ll be intellectually stimulated if you make efforts to achieve your greatest desires.
○ When you spend your time and thoughts on working toward your goals, your mind will be at its happiest and most fit. Plus, this sort of work shows that you care enough about yourself to have your priorities in good order.
3. Foster your passions and dreams. Ask yourself, “What do I care intensely about?” Then, delve into that subject. Learn everything you can about it. Practice it. Study it. Live it. If an idea, topic, or endeavor excites you, chase after it. The same goes for your dreams. Once you know what your hearts’ desires are, do everything you can to achieve them.
○ Stay engaged on a daily basis with your life’s passions and dreams. There’s no better way to express self-love than to strive to give yourself what you truly want in life.
4. Ensure you’ve got a real-life with real people. When you love yourself, you’ll have close friends and family with whom you regularly spend time. Spend this time with your loved ones “in person” rather than with their Facebook pages.
○ Connecting with people in the physical world gives you many kinds of opportunities to keep your mind sharp. You’ll engage in interesting discussions, be exposed to what’s going on in the world, and have a forum to formulate and share your own opinions and intellectual ideas.
5. Avoid doing things just because “it’s always been this way.” Know and connect with your own consciousness. Perform behaviors deliberately and with great forethought. Living consciously shows that you use your mind to think through what you do because you care about what’s going on in your life.
○ When you live intentionally, you intellectually consider the ramifications of the choices you make. You recognize how precious time is and judiciously spend the twenty-four hours you get in a day on what’s most important to you. Now that’s real self-love.
6. Take a personal inventory of your life. Make a list of your personal characteristics. Then take a piece of paper. Draw a line down the middle. On the left side, write down what’s working. On the right side, write down what’s not working. Then, make some decisions about the things you want to change. And then work on them.
○ This exercise will help you determine what your “thinking self” requires. Figuring out what you need to be intellectually challenged and move forward in life demonstrates that you’re worth the time and effort to be happy.
7. Consider the bigger picture. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Use your mind to ponder how you want your life and the lives of others to be. Strive to behave the way that you hope others will behave. Consciously decide to make the changes that you hope other people will make. Set an excellent example to the world.
○ You may wonder how this can be considered self-love, since these actions may seem so intent on affecting other people. But how can you not feel good about yourself when you’re focused on making the planet a better place?
8. Tell yourself you’re worthy. Recognize that you deserve to be loved, not only by yourself but by those around you. Mentally prepare yourself for the love you receive from others and yourself. Know that you’re worth all the love you give to yourself. With the proper mindset, your possibilities in life are limitless.
○ Working with your belief in yourself will help pave the way to more self-acceptance and self-love in other areas. You’ll find loving yourself to be much easier when you’re confident that you’re worth the effort.
9. Find your power. When you see that you have control over your own mind, you’ll be provided with opportunities to do as you wish with your life. In other words, you’ll get to exercise the power you have in ways that enrich your existence.
○ Closely related to finding your power is infusing knowledge into your daily life. When you gain knowledge, you gain power. Accessing the power you have in your mind means you’ll experience self-confidence and feel love for yourself each day.
Loving yourself means you seek, find, and experience all types of mental stimulation. You look into topics of interest, maintain real friendships with real people, live consciously each day, consider the bigger picture, and find power within you. Express your self-love by feeding your mind with intriguing thoughts, ideas, and activities.
In the next lesson, you’ll learn techniques to help you love your spiritual self.
Here’s what you need to do today:
Consider the things you do just because “it’s always been this way.” Connect with your consciousness. Is there something you would like to do differently? Try doing it your way.