"You have to love yourself" is an advice you often here from people of the LoA community. For me, this concept has always been hard to grasp, especially because no one who has given that advice has ever explained what it actually means. I think for many of you it might be as fuzzy as it was for me. Lately, I came to a conclusion for myself. It's probably not the only answer to the question what self love really means, but I think it's an interesting angle to look at it and beneficial, when it comes to working with LoA, so I wanted to share it with you.

Of course, there is this very obvious part to it: it means treating yourself nicely, taking care of your body and walking away from people and situations that aren't good for you. But what most of us are almost completely oblivious to is how we feel in every moment. We do things (like what I listed before) to make us feel better and think that's self love - and it is. But it is action-oriented self love. I claim that what we need is more emotion-oriented self love. We focus on so many things every day, some of them don't feel good at all, but we still focus on them. We do it, because we think that we should, that it is necessary or just because out of habit. We talk to other people about things that we don't like and are able to almost completely overlook our guidance in that moment, because we are so used to the negative emotion.
True self love is caring more about how you feel than about anything else in every moment in time. It's about the relationship between your physcial you and your Inner Being that is always guiding you. Listening to your feelings means that you are aware that you aren't just your physical body, but that you are always connected to your higher part. It means that you trust your higher part aka Yourself and that you make the relationship between you and You - as Abe put it - the most important relationship in your life.