Loving yourself
Jesus said we must love our neighbour as we love ourselves. But we have not often thought about the loving ourselves bit. Psychology has found that there are three types of emotion. The most dominant is the threat focused emotions, such as anger anxiety, disgust. They are all there to help us deal with things that are threatening to us. There is more of our brain dedicated to dealing with threat than anything else. This affect our daily lives for example you may have 9 good comments and 1 bad comment in a day, but we all remember the bad comment! Once we wake up and begin to understand how our brain works, we may decide that no we don’t want to go there, we want to focus on the good. We have a brain where threat is easily activated in us, but kindness to ourselves and affiliation with others will calm us down, in fact this activity releases particular hormones in our bodies that calm us down. This is hard science about how your brain regulates itself. And this is why Jesus highlighted a need to love ourselves. Invite someone to take a closer look at Christ and his church.
