Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It by Kamal Ravikant

As a wise friend likes to remind me, this is a practice.  You don't go to the gym once and consider yourself done.  Same here.  Meditation is a practice.  Working out is a practice.  Loving yourself, perhaps the most important of all, is a practice.

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Each book is like a web that connects to other books, and if you persist, one book will indirectly lead you to THE BOOK that will help you the most --Quote by Myself

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In all honesty, in the beginning, I didn't believe that I loved myself.  How many of us do?  But it didn't matter what I believed.  All that mattered was doing it and I did it the simplest way I could think, by focusing on one thought again and again and again and again until it was more on my mind than not.

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You don’t need to be the best, you just need to be better than most. -- Quote by Myself

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Window

Darkness is the absence of light.  If you remember this, it will change your life.  Changed mine.  It is this concept that the practice is based on.

Any negative thought is darkness.  How do you remove it?  Do you fight fear or worry?  Do you push or drown away sadness and pain?  Doesn't work.  

Instead, imagine you're in a dark room and it's bright outside.  Your job is to go to the window, pull out a rag, and start cleaning.  Just clean.  And soon enough, light enters naturally, taking the darkness away.

It's that simple.  Each time the mind shifts to darkness - fear, worry, pain, you name it - when you notice, clean the window.  Light will flow in.

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I once heard someone explain thoughts as this: we, as human beings, think that we're thinking.  Not true.  Most of the time, we're remembering.  We're re-living memories.  We're running familiar patterns and loops in our head.  For happiness, for procrastination, for sadness.  Fears, hopes, dreams, desires.  We have loops for everything.  

We keep replaying the loops and they in turn, trigger feelings.  It's automatic to the point where we believe that we have no choice.  But that is far from the truth.

Imagine a thought loop as this: a pathway laid down by constant use.  Like a groove in rock created by water.  Enough time, enough intensity, and you've got a river.  

If you had a thought once, it has no power over you.  Repeat it again and again, especially with emotional intensity, feeling it, and over time, you're creating the grooves, the mental river.  Then it controls you.

And that is why a focused mental loop is the solution.  Take this one thought, I love myself.  Add emotional intensity if you can - it deepens the groove faster than anything.  Feel the thought.  Run it again and again.  Feel it.  Run it.  Whether you believe it or not doesn't matter, just focus on this one thought. Make it your truth.

The goal here is to create a groove deeper than the ones laid down over the years - the ones that create disempowering feelings. They took time as well. Some we've had since childhood.

Which is why this requires a focused commitment. Why it must be a practice. Forget demolishing the grooves of the past. What you're creating is a new groove so deep, so powerful, that your thoughts will automatically flow down this one.  

It takes time, sure. Took me a month to go from misery to magic.  But you will notice changes, shifts in your feelings, beautiful happenings in your life. Expect them. There'll be more and more until one day, you'll be walking outside in the sunshine, feeling good, loving life and life loving you back, and you'll stop and realize that it's now your natural state.

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Fighting fear doesn't work. It just drags us in closer. One has to focus on what is real. On the truth. When in darkness, don't fight it. You can't win. Just find the nearest switch, turn on the light. 

James Altucher, in one of his best blog posts, talks about how he stops negative thoughts in their tracks with a simple mind trick. "Not useful," he tells himself. It's a switch, a breaker of sorts, shifts the pattern of the fear.  

When fear arises, remember that it is a hallucinated snake or that it's not useful or that it's not real. All three work. There's many more, ones we can come up with ourselves, if we wish. As long as it works, it's valid.

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This I know: the mind, left to itself, repeats the same stories, the same loops. Mostly ones that don't serve us. So what's practical, what's transformative, is to consciously choose a thought. Then practice it again and again. With emotion, with feeling, with acceptance.  

Lay down the synaptic pathways until the mind starts playing it automatically. Do this with enough intensity over time and the mind will have no choice. That's how it operates. Where do you think your original loops came from?

The goal, if there is one, is to practice until the thought you chose becomes the primary loop. Until it becomes the filter through which you view life. Then practice some more.

Sounds like work. Perhaps. But the nature of mind is thought. Choose one that transforms you, makes your life zing. The one I found, "I love myself," is the most powerful one I know. You might discover another. Regardless, please do it.

It is worth it.

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Thousands of years ago, a Roman poet wrote, “I am a human being, therefore nothing human is foreign to me.” I believe it to be true. So if this is possible for one human, it is possible for anyone. The path might be different, but the destination same.

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I once asked a monk how he found peace.

"I say 'yes,'" he'd said.  "To all that happens, I say 'yes.'"