Be Your Own Best Friend

Your attitude toward yourself directly affects the quality of your daily life. You have the power to become either your best friend or worst enemy. You have complete freedom in how you decide to see and treat yourself; no one can force you to adopt or amend your attitude toward yourself. Personal power and autonomy begin right here.

If you want to be your best friend, which you really need to be, then you must do the things which are good for you. If you want to get and stay well, Dr. Bernie Siegel developed a list of ten things to do. Here is his list, with some added supportive commentary:

1. Do what brings you joy, purpose and fulfillment, what validates your worth. Life is what you make it, and what you make it is what you are. Accept your freedom to choose how you will see your life—and determine to see the good, the positive first and foremost.

2. Pay close attention to yourself; and in a caring manner, tune into your needs and state of being. Take good care of yourself; nourish, support and encourage yourself as you would an intimate friend, as one who knows you not only well, but best of all.

3. Release negative emotions as they present themselves. Do not give resentment, fear, anger, envy, remorse, guilt and the like a place to stay in you. Learn to express your feelings early and appropriately, without holding on to or harboring them. Forgive yourself. Give yourself fresh chances, new beginnings.

4. Hold on to positive images and goals, pictures of what you desire in your life. When negative, fearful images arise, re-focus on those images which evoke feelings of joy and peace. What you worry about almost never happens; worry only debilitates you. Serenity comes as a gift to those able to see through a storm with the eyes of faith, to an assured good yet to be theirs.

5. Love yourself, and seek to love others as much as yourself. Make loving your primary purpose, the overriding process of your daily life. You cannot create self-love; it is already in you as an innate gift. You just need to access and accept it.

6. Establish honest, loving, fun relationships; permit the expression and satisfaction of your needs for intimacy and security. Strive to heal the wounds from past relationships, such as with your family of origin, old friends and former loves.

7. Make positive contributions to your community, through whatever form of work or service you find meaningful and enjoyable. Nothing is a greater anti-depressant than a deed of self-giving love. Being kind to others makes it easier to be kind to yourself.

8. Commit yourself to your health and well-being. Gain faith in the possibility of total health. Develop your own program for health and healing, drawing on the advice and support of experts, yet without becoming enslaved to them.

9. Accept yourself and everything in your life as opportunities for growth and learning. Practice being grateful; if you work on being grateful for what you have, what you don’t have will not seem so important. When you make a mistake, take responsibility, then let it go and give yourself another chance, learning what you can from it.

10. Develop a keen sense of humor. Look for the humor in all things. Humor like pollen is everywhere, just waiting to be inhaled, to cleanse and germinate the soul. A soul alive to humor is never barren or bleak.