I wanted to share a few great ideas and big learning on loving yourself and becoming your best. I found the following in a great book by Jo Ann Larsen

“If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself, too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all” -Erich Fromm

“If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.”  -Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“Fully loving ourselves also entails recognizing that we, as ever-differentiating human beings, have a right, and a responsibility, to nurture ourselves and to perpetuate our growth.”  -Jo Ann Larsen

“We are all in the endless quest of becoming—of creating, with our own chisel, our own masterpiece—that of ourselves.”     “We’re all given an assignment in life to discover the ways in which we’re exceptional, and then to live a joyful life.”       “God gave us all certain gifts, but it is up to us to decide how to use them in such a way that even the Being who gave them to us will look down one day in admiration and say, ‘Hmmm, I never thought of that way before.”  -Bernie Siegel. 

“If you have anything valuable to contribute to the world, it will come through the expression of your own personality–that single spark of divinity that sets you off and makes you different from any other living creature.”  -Bruce Barton

When we view ourselves as “masters” chipping away each day at our own masterpieces, others—as well as ourselves—are beneficiaries, for we can give back amply to the world and to add to its goodness. 

Perhaps life’s greatest challenge is to continually refine ourselves so finally at last we do know how to fully live. Speaking of the concerted effort involved in such refining, Harry Emerson Fosdick says, “No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas ever drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is channeled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.”

As human beings, we are unique and unrepeatable events in the universe. Refining thus becomes a challenge of accepting ourselves as the treasures we are. We may not—in the world’s eyes or our own—come into life supposedly as adorned as others. Nor must we. To be ourselves, to fully develop our own attributes, and to give all that we might, is to stand unadorned—in and of ourselves–as perfect products of nature ever in the process of becoming.

Have a beautiful day. Peace to You. -H