“Today’s topic is love, but not just any kind of love: Love for yourself. Self-love. A lot of people in the West struggle with the concept of self-love. Deep-rooted self-resentment torments them every day, and they think of themselves as unworthy of love from anyone—even themselves. Some might go as far as saying they hate themselves. Self-hatred doesn’t exist in the East. The concept is so uncommon that people don’t even know it. When the great Dalai Lama first learned about self-hatred, he didn’t even believe in it.

The first time someone introduced him to self-hatred, he was giving a lecture at an American university. An audience member asked him how to deal with self-hatred, to which his immediate response was: ‘Self-hatred? What is that?!’. That is how unfamiliar with the concept he was. Can you imagine?” Jammal pauses and looks around the yoga hall to make sure we’re all listening before he continues: “A faculty member explained the idea of self-hatred to the great Dalai Lama while he was still on stage, and he was baffled. ‘How could you think of yourself that way?” The Dalai Lama asked, completely taken aback by the idea of hating yourself.”

Again, Jammal looks at us with a lot of intention. His dark brown eyes gaze at each retreat member, a penetrating look with a slight sense of sorrow as if he is mourning the human condition. He wants to have an impact, and each word weighed to precision. Everything is dauntingly deep around him—it doesn’t matter whether he is explaining the path to enlightenment or how to take the trash out. It is just who he is. I wonder whether there is a term for the compulsion to make everything sound deeply meaningful.

Everything is oddly profound at here. Everyone is desperate for connections. You can’t ask someone to pass the salt without it being somewhat of a soul gazing affair. I get it; people are here to heal. I, for one, just want to learn how to do a split. All of this soul searching and existential agonising is starting to make me feel angsty.

I hear Jammal again before my thoughts trail off much further: “We’ll start with a little group exercise. The purpose of the exercise is to connect with self-love. Pair up with the person sitting to your left, and name three things that you love about yourself.”

I take a deep sigh before turning to my partner, a young woman from Massachusetts named Alixe. I hate these group exercises. In fact, I hate group exercises altogether. Something about them makes me want to fold my skin inward, crawl into myself, and disappear. The people here, on the other hand, love group exercises—anything for an opportunity to hug or huddle together in a big cuddle puddle. Everyone is constantly hugging, incessantly rubbing—as if they’re all depressed and oxytocin deprived. Before this retreat, I thought of myself as pretty woke. Now I realise that I am merely a cocaine hippie. I like to dabble in both worlds.

My partner Alixe is roughly my age. Given she’s also a millennial woman, I suspect she shares my inability to look at herself favourably. I have thought about this for a while now. I believe there’s a limit to how much you can love yourself when your environment constantly bombards you with not-so-subliminal messages about how you are not measuring up. Our self-worth is at the mercy of the media, and we have all resigned to feeling too fat, too skinny, too short, too tall, not sexy enough, too sexy. Feeling low-key unworthy is just the predicament for our generation.

Alixe and I exchange a few awkward looks and fumble through the first part of the conversation until one of us hesitantly says: “So, do you want to go first or….”

“I can go first. I just need to think for a moment,” Alixe says. Her body is motionless, and her eyes are doing all the moving. Flickering left, right, and centre, as if searching for the answer somewhere inside the meditation hall — somewhere outside of herself.

“Yeah, me too….”

A long pause follows, and we look sheepishly at one another. I feel embarrassed with how hard it is to think of three things that I love about myself—three! It feels overwhelmingly intimate.

The embarrassment transmutes into agitation. Is this what it boils down to? Self-love? Really? Surely, I didn’t need to travel across the globe to learn that self-love is at the crux of this. What a cliché-clad conclusion.

Alixe finally breaks the silence: “Alright, so… I guess I am a great member of my community: I am good at gathering and motivating people. I guess that’s it. Is that four? No, that’s three….”

Arguably they are all hybrids of the same idea, namely that Alixe is a leader, but she is too timid to own up to it. Nonetheless, I let her get away with it. This exercise is hard enough—me policing her won’t help. Besides, it is not as if I have a multitude of traits lined up, and I appreciate her taking the lead.

“So I guess I am also very thoughtful,” I hear myself say. I don’t even know what that means: full of thoughts? Certainly—but how is that something to love about myself. If anything, I wish I had fewer thoughts.

“I am good at reflecting. I am creative. And I guess I am funny too….”

I immediately notice myself saying guess a lot. I guess this exercise is a lot of guesswork.

“I am a good writer,” I hesitantly add. It still sounds hollow whenever I say it, but I suppose I’ll fake it until I make it.

“Oh yeah. What kind of writing?” Like me, Alixe seems eager for a change of subject.

“A memoir of sorts… I have dedicated this year to spiritual and sexual self-exploration, and I am documenting the journey through my writing. I have planned all sorts of experiences for the year; a masturbation workshop in New York, a 10-day silent meditation, a tantra event. It’s part of the reason why I am at this yoga retreat.”

“Interesting… Do you have a title for the book?”

“Write, Mediate, Masturbate…. It’s my new year’s resolutions,”

“I like it! It’s a bit like ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, but way better. It sounds like something I’d actually want to read. It’s about self-love, essentially.”

“I guess it is… Ironic given how hard I found this exercise. I guess it’s a good thing that I am only a few months into the resolution. Maybe by the end of this year, I will be able to do this exercise with more gravitas.” Here we go with the guessing again.

“Alright, now that we have mentioned three positives about our personality, let’s do one about our appearance,” I say. Jammal probably wouldn’t consider this kosher, as this is all about promoting inner beauty rather than pinning our worth on our looks, thereby falling prey to the unrealistic ideals presented by mass media. Meanwhile, with the world being the way it is, we all need a little vanity boost from time to time.

“I am really strong,” Alixe says.

“I have a rockin’ body.” I eagerly respond, desperate to redirect the conversation.

It is true; I do. Maybe it is all the yoga, the vegetarian diet or the fact that I haven’t had a drop of alcohol in ten days—probably the longest I have gone without alcohol for as long as I can remember. Most likely, it is a combination of all of the aforementioned coupled with the fresh air brushing up from Kep coast. Either way, I feel great for once. I could probably stay here forever had it not been for the gecko invasion of my tree hut and the impending rainy season. Sure, it’s a bit woo-woo, and some of the people here definitely drank a little too much woke Kool-Aid for my taste. Still, life is simple here. Your life is planned out for you every day; wake up, eat, meditate, do yoga, eat, sleep. You don’t need to think about when to do anything. Everything is sorted for you.

Shakti Yoga Temple, Cambodia, April 2019

—

Once you step into the wellness world, you quickly realise there’s something about self-love. You’re encouraged to love yourself; Love yourself like you love others—better yet: love yourself before you love others. And most important of all: love yourself as if your life depends on it—because it might. Self-love is all around. In fact, for many of us, self-love – or rather the lack thereof – is the reason we step into this space; something needs fixing. A gaping wound that won’t heal. A bottomless darkness growing inside of us, hollow yet heavy. A growing feeling of inadequacy with the occasional existential woes. It’s the feeling of being somehow incomplete—empty and out of alignment.

Most of us have spent years searching for something to fill the emptiness, so we can finally feel whole. Odds are we’ve tried to fill the void with food, alcohol, drugs, or drama, with one of two outcomes; either nothing fits it or nothing fills it.

I was no exception. I felt broken and in desperate need of fixing; a gnarling numbness was growing inside of me, present at all times, eroding all efforts to live a meaningful life.

The excerpt above is an early journal entry from my first yoga retreat. It wasn’t my first encounter with self-love, and it wouldn’t be the last. Meanwhile, the quest for self-love represented several paradoxes. On the one hand, my main motivation for this journey was to find self-love. I was aching to feel self-love or any love for that matter. I went far and wide, searching worldwide, from tantra temples in Kampot to churches in San Francisco, always seeking, never finding.

On the other hand, I found the whole thing fucking fruity, not to mention a gross simplification of my inner ailments. I was dealing with something more nuanced and complicated that required a more complex solution than some watered down Hallmark wisdom. If what I was dealing with could be fixed by simply loving myself, I could have just made a decision to love myself, stuck to it and been done with it. Fast and effective, no travels necessary. That was the theory. In practice, this logic didn’t stack up and, self-love remained fugitive and futile.

You derive an odd satisfaction from thinking you’re uniquely messed up. As if thousands of years of traditions and teaching does not apply to you. It gives the ego something to jerk off to. Moreover, it gives you something to hold onto, an excuse to stick around the mess you’ve made instead of doing the work and learning to love yourself.

The harsh reality was that I couldn’t let self-love in—or any love for that matter. I was constantly closed off, criticising everything and compartmentalising my emotions under the pretence of not being an emotional person. Why? Because I had zero trust in love. Love had done nothing but let me down. Love had brought nothing but disappointment, destruction, and inevitably death.

With zero incentive to trust love, I was always on the defence. Always on guard. Always on the lookout for the next threat. Of course, all of this was buried deep in my subconscious, hidden under layers of distrust and trauma. Unable to realise this, I opted for whatever coping mechanisms available to me; judging, sarcasm, negativity—anything and everything to prevent me from feeling and dealing with what was underneath; abandonment, anger, guilt, grief, and so much shame.

I share this first story because it perfectly encapsulates my relationship with self-love, and inevitably myself at the time. I used to shit all over self-love. My attitude towards self-love was part of a package deal for the persona I’d assumed. I was in finance, an industry notoriously known for its ‘don’t-be-a-cunt’ culture. Desperate to fit it, I gobbled it all up like gospel. And thus, whenever someone talked about self-love, I wrote the whole thing off as cringe, a symptom of a society being too weak and whiny.

I’ll revisit the topic again and again. For now, note that if you’re the kind of person who’s too cool for compassion, I totally get it. I had a real chip on my shoulder with self-love. It’s a journey—a journey I look forward to sharing with you.