How can anyone love you if you don’t love yourself? I ask him.

To be in deep turmoil at middle age is child’s play, I joke with sincerity and something that you ideally should have grown out of by thirty. But no one ever told you that you could go work on yourself, right? Or that it was ok to be selfish, that it was ok to go deeper than the surface, in search of meaning. 

Ok, maybe at least by thirty-five, the self hatred needs to be dissolved and if not dissolved then at least made peace with and accepted, so that you can move into self love.

Hatred of the self and being embodied in a loving world cannot co-exist. You cannot love another person wholly and hate yourself at the same time. That in itself is contradictory. Because in essence, everytime you look into the eyes of someone, you see a reflection of yourself back. So look with inner love first. 

If you look with anger, while in search of love, it will be tainted and out of presence. If you look with hate, while in search of love, expect a reflection of yourself back at you. 

Believe me, I can resonate. I never searched for love because I had no love for myself; love wasn’t even in the equation. But what I did search for, for a long time was an acceptance from others. This was due to my lack of self love and it was and can be the most debilitating search of all. That someone elses validation should determine the way one walks in the world seems bizarre to me now. 

I do still have moments of egotistical waves that tumble me up in the white wash in the form of – the not good enough syndrome. This only occurs when I’m low on self love and self belief. When I am not looking after myself; tiredness causes anxiety and anxiety causes anger and anger causes hate and hate causes misalignment. 

Self love has nothing to do with “glory” or “I am great”. You can practice self love and remain humble and modest and accepting of judgement and criticism. The shamans in societies never boasted about their healing powers because they knew that by doing so would affect their ability to be authentic and true. Self love is married with a quiet confidence and an energy that exudes peace and acceptance of all beings with compassion and curiosity.

Of course it would be inhuman to think that someone who practices self love is never angry. No one who practices self belief is immune to turbulent emotions. They just respond to them in a way that is more self serving and gentle, using humour, perspective and curiosity as a tool to help overcome obstacles that every human goes through.

They could also use the analogy that in order to see light there must be some element of darkness. No one will ever live a perfect life, because this doesn’t exist. But what helps is by being in tune with yourself and with who you are, not in relation to society’s values or people’s judgement but through knowing what you want out of this life. By going deeper than surface stuff and discarding the masks that conditioning might make you wear; self love can be brought up from the core. Because believe me, we all have it. We are born in it and of it. So let’s not forget that. It is inherent.