Summary

The article "Self-Love 101 — Part I" discusses the challenges and misconceptions of self-love, emphasizing the importance of unconditional acceptance as the core of true self-love.

Abstract

The concept of self-love is often met with skepticism and confusion, frequently perceived as a trite piece of advice akin to "F**k Yourself." However, the article argues that genuine self-love can significantly improve one's life, providing the resilience to handle adversity with grace. The author acknowledges the difficulty in achieving self-love, likening it to the elusive pursuit of enlightenment. Common self-help exercises are mentioned but quickly dismissed as superficial solutions. The article delves into the nature of love itself, critiquing the societal tendency to equate love with preference or the fulfillment of desires. It challenges the notion of conditional love, often contingent on external factors, and contrasts it with unconditional love, which is free from judgment and expectations. The author suggests that true self-love is rooted in the unconditional acceptance of oneself, embracing both the positive and negative aspects of one's being without reservation.

Opinions

The author implies that the common advice to "love yourself" is often misunderstood and can be perceived as offensive or nonsensical.
Self-love is portrayed as a transformative force that can ease the navigation of life's challenges, including personal and global issues.
The article suggests that the pursuit of self-love is akin to a spiritual quest for enlightenment, indicating that it is a profound and ongoing process.
It criticizes the superficial understanding of love, which is often based on transient feelings and preferences, rather than deep acceptance.
The author posits that much of what society considers love is actually a reflection of personal desires and satisfaction, rather than a pure form of acceptance.
The concept of unconditional love is presented as the only true form of love, devoid of judgment and conditions, and this applies to love for oneself as well as for others.
The article emphasizes that self-love is not about self-improvement or achieving an ideal state, but about accepting oneself fully, including flaws and imperfections.

Self-Love 101 — Part I

Why It Is So Hard and How To Make It Easier

Photo by **ROMAN ODINTSOV** from **Pexels**

When we struggle with frustrations, overwhelm, anger, anxiety, our family members or keeping our socks together in pairs, there is this one advice we hear often:

Love yourself.

(Am I the only one who sometimes feels like this sounds a lot like its naughty cousin ‘F** Yourself’?)

It is good advice! When we fully love ourselves, life becomes infinitely better. When we love ourselves every moment, we can handle economic crises, lunatic presidents, and in-house tantrums with ease and elegance.

Question is: how the heck do you do this?

It is like saying: oh, just become enlightened and things will be fine.

I have to guess that this is true because I have not been enlightened so far. But I am sure Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, and the Buddha rarely get upset about dog poo on the beach or their in-laws’ disapproval of their new curtains.

How do you do love yourself then? Never mind all the funny exercises like telling your image in the mirror how wonderful it is, writing little love notes or getting into a bubble bath, the core of the confusion remains: what does it actually mean to love yourself?

We might have to backtrack a little. What does it mean to love anyone? There is a lot of misconception out there. Is orange flavored chocolate the key? Like all intangible concepts, love is overloaded with memes, ideas, stories, myths, and expectations that cause more problems than they actually resolve. And more importantly, it take us further and further away from the truth of it.

In many instances, love is used as a term that simply describes our preference. A way of judging something as making us feel good versus making us not feel good. We love mushrooms and Johnny Depp. We hate spinach and dogs. Or we love dogs and keep five of them in our small apartment. We love sunshine and hate rain. Unless we try to grow a vegetable garden, which is when we begin to love the rain (except on Saturdays) and hate snails.

Romantic Love

Then, of course, there is what we call romantic love. Which mostly means our expectations for the object of our desire are increasing exponentially. We do not expect mushrooms to save our souls. But think of all the love songs that howl about losing oneself in the other, drowning to be saved and other expressions of helplessness and dependency.

“I can’t live if living is without you” is certainly true when we apply it to ourselves, but the idea nevertheless does not really help us grasp the meaning of love.

We attach our fears, needs and desires to people or objects and confuse the satisfaction that comes with their temporary fulfillment as love. Alternatively, if they fail to fulfill those needs, our love quickly turns into hate and despair.

We love our friends as long as they tell us what we want to hear, we love our job until the day we get a new team leader, we love our car as long as it is new. We would love our lives if only we had more money, a better husband, more successful kids, nicer neighbors, a cooler job, and the cats would not shed all that fur on the sofa.

Unconditional?

What about the one love, then, that we hold to be the purest: Mother’s unconditional love for her children. Millions of parents and children in therapy cast a certain doubt over that idea. If you have done your work, you will have noticed that the love for our children is usually tied to a set of conditions so comprehensive it makes the Encyclopedia Britannica look like a leaflet. And again, we can find a clue there.

What if, when we were children, we had received the message that while there are boundaries to be respected, other people to be considered, lessons to be learned, and there is pain in the world to be experienced, no matter what emotional response we show, in every way we are and show our true selves, we are accepted? What if, in the moments of our biggest tantrums, our deepest sadness, our silliest behavior, our parents had embraced us with the same grace, love and compassion they showed us when we were ‘good’?

As long as our perception of love and ourselves is still blurred and veiled by all the expectations of what it should do for us and all the judgment of what is good, i.e., lovable and what is bad, i.e., unworthy of love, we will find it hard to love ourselves. In fact, most of what we call love is merely our way of saying: this makes me feel good.

To Love Or Not to Love

‘Unconditional love’ in itself is a pleonasm. There is no such thing as conditional love. You either love, i.e., accept what is without any reservations, judgments, expectations, and conditions or you do not. There is nothing in between. Love does not judge. Love does not choose. Love does not differentiate between pleasure and pain. Love is pure acceptance. Love is receiving without discrimination. Full surrender. Love is unconditional. All else is not love.

For the time being, then, let us substitute the word love with acceptance. When we accept every moment and every person the way they are, we begin to see perfection and feel the love. And *that* is what we start with ourselves.

When you accept the mistake you made, you show self-love. When you accept that right now you are not as strong, as smart, as successful as you want to be and that is okay, you grow your self-love. When you accept that pimple on your face, not so that it can finally go away, but even if it stays forever, you begin to really understand what love is.

The first steps: Read more