Loving Yourself - Step 11

Let us review the steps so far in loving yourself .....
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1. To admit we are powerless over what others think of us.
2. To come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves loves us regardless of anything we do.
3. To make a decision to see ourselves as that higher power of unconditional love sees us.
4. To Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. To Admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the ways we limit loving ourselves.
6. To face these limits, work through our fears in order to love ourselves.
7. To humbly ask that greater power to open our hearts to the love in our lives.
8. To make a list of all the times we have harmed ourselves and forgive ourselves for them
9. To learn to identify when we feel shame and guilt for what we have done to ourselves, and change it to thoughts of what we have done well, what actions we can take to make positive changes in our lives from this point on
10. To take personal inventory and when we are self-critical, to promptly admit it and change.
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We are now on the second to last step.   Actually the step that keeps this whole process working for the future.

Step 11:  To seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand God, praying only for knowledge of God's love for us and the power to love ourselves with that love!

Step 11 is the continuous reinforcement of step 3:  " To make a decision to see ourselves as that higher power of unconditional love sees us."  For 100 people, we all have a different perception of what God is.  Hopefully, by the time we have gotten to step 11, we understand truly that there is something greater than ourselves that we need to realize that unconditional love for ourselves.   Step 11 continually reinforces the need to seek that conscious contact through prayer and meditation.   To touch that unconditional love, and realize it is again a part of our lives.


Let us break this step down again into multiple parts, to better understand them.

1.  To seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand God.

I could go into several thousand different forms of prayer and as many forms of meditation that are out there. When we seek something through prayer and meditation, at the core, this means participating in thinking, speaking, and behaving in ways that bring us to realize and connect with a greater power.  It may take a while to find exactly what that is in our lives.   We may go through several types of prayer and meditation; discarding those methods that do not work for us, and embracing those that do.

When we find these individual ways of prayer and meditation, we start making conscious contact.  This  means being aware, mindful, and awake to align ourselves with God, as we understand God. We gain a perception of the way to truth - illuminating our path to success, happiness, and peace of mind.


To have conscious contact with God is to be alert with our inner essence. We gain awareness and attentiveness to our chosen path to freedom. We gain the familiarity and knowledge to live in accordance with God's will for our lives.

2.  Praying only for knowledge of God's love for us and the power to love ourselves with that love!





When we become aware of the Light of God's love through prayer and meditation, we become at peace with ourselves, our life's direction, and of our new-found life within.  We start slowly seeing ourselves again through the eyes of that unconditional love.

With this knowledge, we feel, deep within us, the serenity that we once thought was impossible to achieve.   We start feeling this peace, because our greatest fear, that of not being worthy of being love, and not being loved, has lost it's power over us.

We realize that our Higher Power has been with us from the start. It has been guiding us thus far through the Steps, and now our Higher Power desires for us to strengthen the conscious contact necessary to continue growing in our journey.

As you can see, this entire step is realizing, reinforcing, and reviewing the unconditional love for which we are always worthy, always experiencing, always immersed.   This step maintains out spiritual connection which continually allows us to re-experience all or any of the steps we will need to review as our life, loving ourselves, continues.