The importance of knowing and loving ‘I’
Forget non-attachment, forget letting go the ego, forget relationships to others. If you don’t know how to love yourself, you cannot truly, deeply, do any of the aforementioned things.
Loving yourself is the foundation for being able to love others—romantically, platonically, in work, in random encounters, in all of life. Exuding love starts with self-love.
Think about the “Golden Rule” or Bible passage: “Love thy neighbor as thyself” … it assumes you already love yourself!
“Why the double standard, the generosity toward our neighbor and the miserliness where we ourselves are concerned? And so I propose that we add a new rule, which we can call the Platinum Rule, to our moral code: ‘Do not do unto yourself what you would not do unto others.’” -Tal Ben-Shahar from The Pursuit of Perfect (h/t Brian Johnson)
If a friend or lover looked bad in a picture, would you stress over it and assume they are ugly and unloveable? NO! You would laugh, know that the camera caught a bad angle, and move the heck on. So why do we treat ourselves much more harshly? Why do we analyze our mistakes and flaws and play them over and over again when we’d never let a friend do the same to themselves?
Ayn Rand wrote in The Fountainhead: “To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I’.”
If you are doubting yourself, others will doubt you. If you don’t love yourself and trust yourself, others simply can’t either.
Make today a step toward truly, openly, loving yourself!