You Can't Love Yourself!

Many people find self-love quite difficult. While this is a common notion in new-age spirituality and psychology, it remains elusive for many. In this podcast, I'm exploring why self-love is a practice bound for failure and how to access the Love that satisfies this deep longing.

Transcript

Life is precious and beautiful.

And here we are experiencing this classroom,

This journey against a supernatural backdrop that is disguised from view.

In this podcast,

I am exploring all things mystical and poetic and exploring how to live our lives in a way that is here on Earth and engaged and yet always beyond,

Transcendent.

This is in the world,

Not of it.

Today I want to share a notion that has arisen as a result of my own investigations into truth and also through the work I do with individuals with inquiry.

Many,

Many years ago,

This must have been around,

I don't know,

2007 or so,

I remember having a number of people in my life tell me that what I needed to do was to love myself.

And I think this is a very common sort of cliché phrase in spirituality is to love yourself.

But through my own investigations and through working with individuals,

I've seen that loving oneself is an impossible task,

Which may initially sound disheartening,

But is anything but.

What I found in trying to love myself was that there was a kind of intrinsic frustration about never being able to fully do it.

And I thought there was something wrong with me.

So I practiced this idea for a number of years,

Probably four or five years,

In total frustration,

In trying to love myself but not being able to.

And I thought there was something wrong with me or how I was applying that idea,

Or I just didn't have the right practice.

I had people recommend compassion practices to me,

Loving kindness practices,

Bodily postures,

All sorts of different things that people around me had suggested.

And growing up with a pretty strong super ego,

A strong inner critic,

Loving myself was not something that is a habit in my life.

It hadn't been a habit in my life.

So being hard on myself was quite a habit.

That's been a theme through much of my life,

Is being hard on myself.

So when I got this suggestion to love myself,

I thought,

Well,

Yes,

That sounds good.

That sounds right.

But in trying to apply it,

I was always frustrated.

I could never do it genuinely.

I could never pull it off.

And I think people often try many different ways.

They try affirmations.

They try,

You know,

Hugging themselves.

There's all sorts of different strategies for loving yourself.

But what I finally realized after a few years is that it's actually impossible.

And it's impossible for a couple of reasons.

One,

You cannot love yourself because to love yourself requires two parties.

There would be the one who is doing the loving and the one who is receiving it.

Now,

In some sense,

We can accomplish this because we have different parts of ourselves,

Different fragments of ourselves.

But there's never a sense of wholeness or integrity if only one part of ourself is loving another part of ourself and it's not inclusive of the wholeness of ourselves.

I think perhaps some psychological schools would argue that that would be the method to actually attaining love for yourself,

Is by loving parts of yourself.

And I think there's some legitimate cause for that idea.

But it occurred to me,

Because my orientation was around the non-dual teachings,

Was that in this attempt to love myself,

I'm creating two.

I'm creating one to love and one to be loved.

And it occurred to me that this was problematic,

That this was actually splitting myself into two and not igniting the experience of unity out of which love arises.

So it was my first clue,

My first inclination that something wasn't quite right about the suggestion to love yourself.

But what I found through experience was that it is possible for us to love our experience.

And that can be the avenue,

The way to this thing we call loving ourselves.

To love your experience is to love what is.

It's to love what's happening right now.

It's to bring your whole embrace to whatever's present.

And whatever's present can be a part of yourself.

It can be a feeling that is present,

It can be a sensation in the body.

It can be something that's happening in your life.

It's happening in the environment,

A person,

The weather,

Whatever it may be.

Because when we shed our love on what is,

What's here,

Love is activated.

And we don't need love to be some kind of boomerang that we throw out and circles back to us.

In the activation of our love,

When we experience love toward anything,

When we experience embrace toward anything,

The activation of that love is the same as self-love.

So what we can realize in our practices of self-love is that it is loving our experience.

It is loving what's in front of us that activates self-love.

It doesn't need to be something that we try to aim at ourselves.

We don't have to aim our love anywhere.

Just by opening our heart,

Our mind,

Our arms to what's in front of us,

Love is present.

So if we can realize that loving our experience is the gateway,

Is the door to loving ourself,

Then this frustrating practice of trying to love what is essentially unlovable.

Let me say a word about that for a moment.

So the ego in its core is nothing.

When we are trying to love ourselves as the ego,

We are trying to love nothing.

And so essentially the ego is unlovable because it is not a thing.

It is not an entity.

It is not somewhere living inside of us and needing love.

The ego in this way is simply a habit,

A pattern,

A familiarity.

So to try to love what is essentially unlovable is a practice that is bound for frustration.

It's bound for defeat.

But each and every one of us can find the space within ourselves to love what is,

To love our experience.

And I would say,

Put this to the test,

Practice it.

See that when you love what's in front of you,

When you love exactly what you're experiencing,

You're not trying to change it.

You're not trying to fix it.

You're not trying to make it better or different than it is.

You're embracing your experience exactly what it is,

As it is,

And even if it's painful,

Even if it's tremendously hard,

In the activation of that love and embrace,

The thing we call self-love happens.

And it happens so easily,

So naturally,

So exquisitely that the effort to love ourselves can simply fall away.

I find this a much cleaner and much deeper avenue toward that experience of love.

And then it doesn't matter whether it's the self we love or our headache that we love or the plant that I'm staring at right now or the person in front of me,

Whatever it may be.

In the activation of that love,

Our heart is full.

And that is from that point of experience,

From that fullness and that richness,

There's nothing in us that even needs to seek after self-love.

The desire for self-love simply vanishes in the warmth,

In the light,

In the brightness of that love,

Which is so much more natural,

So much more present.

So try this out.

Rather than trying to love yourself,

Try loving your experience.

Reviews

Thank you so much for this insight! Blessings!

Beautifully said.

Adi you are one of most insightful teachers I've come across on IT and I've listened to a lot of great talks by many wonderful teachers. This message from you rings so true to my heart but then so does everything you say. Thank you for your beautiful self.

I’ve lived many years of my younger life very destructively, by embracing, being grateful towards the miracoulous spirit living through this body I was able to come to a place of “self love” similar to what you describe here, thank you 🙏

That was such clean cut helpful advice - thank you. Went straight to the core of me.

So true, appreciation of the focus of awareness invites warmth. Thank you 🙏