The Book in A Few Sentences
Each of us can offer something no one else can: our truth. For this author that meant sharing his experience repeating the phrase “I love myself.” "Magic” is the word he began using to describe how this simple phrase changed his life.
Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It summary
This is my book summary of Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It by Kamal Ravikant. My summary includes what I believe are the key ideas, insights and lessons from the book quoted directly from the author.
Foreward
- “If I could do anything,” I said into the microphone, “I would share the secret of life with the world. And I just figured it out a few months ago.”
What is this about?
- Loving yourself, perhaps the most important of all, is a practice.
- The truth is to love yourself with the same intensity you would use to pull yourself up if you were hanging off a cliff with your fingers.
Beginning
- I started telling myself, “I love myself.”
- First in bed, then showering, then when online, then when I’d be talking to someone, inside my head, I’d be going, “I love myself, I love myself, I love myself, I love myself.”
- But the thing I never expected or imagined, life got better.
- People came into my life, opportunities arose, I found myself using the world “magic” to describe what was happening.
- And through it all, I kept repeating to myself, “I love myself, I love myself, I love myself, I love myself.”
Why love?
- What if you don’t believe that you love yourself?
- Doesn’t matter. Your role is to lay down the pathways, brick upon brick, reinforce the connections between the neurons.
- Your job is purely to love yourself. Truly and deeply. Feel it. Again and again.
- Make it your single-minded focus. The mind and body will respond automatically.
- As you love yourself, life loves you back.
- I can’t explain how this works, but I know it to be true.
Mental Loop
- Take this one thought, I love myself.
- Add emotional intensity if you can—it deepens the grove 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.
- The goal here is to create a groove deeper than the ones laid down over the years—the ones that create disempowering feelings. Some we’ve had since childhood.
One Question
- If I loved myself truly and deeply, would I let myself experience this?
- The question is deceptively simple in its power.
- It gently shifts your focus from wherever you are—whether it’s anger or pain or fear, any form of darkness—to where you want to be. And that is love.
I’m in love
- When we love ourselves, we naturally shine, we are naturally beautiful. And that draws others to us.
Coasting
- Don’t let yourself coast when things are going great.
- When you’re doing well, you need just as much vigilance.
Thought
- This I know: the mind, left to itself, repeats the same stories, the same loops. Mostly the ones that don’t serve us.
Magic
- There is a strength in this vulnerability that cannot be described, only experienced.
Surrender
- I once asked a monk how he found peace.
- “I say ‘yes,’” he’d said. “To all that happens, I say ‘yes.’”
Belief
- A side effect of loving myself fiercely was that it started to dislodge old patterns, thoughts and beliefs that I didn’t even know existed.
- …real growth comes through intense, difficult, and challenging situations.
- With each insight there is a freedom, a sense of lightness. And growth.
Oxygen
- As I started to love myself, things inside me shifted. Fear strengthens ego. Love softens it. I became more open, vulnerable.
End
- I think that instead of reading loads of self-help books, attending various seminars, listening to different preachers, we should just pick one thing. Something that feels true for us. Then practice it fiercely.
