3.15 Among the blessings, deeper self-love

What’s your favorite kind of self–love?

There’s a menu of possibilities to choose from. For example, there’s self-esteem where you approve of yourself. I remember pursuing this. But there were two problems…

First, I actually loved the approval rather than myself.

And second, approving of yourself, feeling proud of yourself, is not really love.

Because when you give yourself an A+ you’re passing judgment. Which is not something we do when we’re feeling simple, direct, down-to-earth love for ourselves.

What about social-esteem? Is that the kind of love you want? Winning the approval of the society you live in can be a nice boost—unless you have to fake who you are in order to win that approval.

And if you’er an activist working for a deep transformation of society, you’re not going to win social–esteem. Quite the opposite.  Because societies don’t want to be deeply challenged. They don’t want to hear the truth about themselves and they will take offense at anyone who tells them that truth

And social-esteem, even if you did manage to win it, like self-esteem, is a judgment. Which, again, is not the same thing as love.

What about the easy-step self-love promoted by self-help gurus?

When I was younger, I got hooked on self-help books because they promised self-love fast and easy, and I wanted that. Who wouldn’t?

One day I heard about a workshop leader who promised self-love and you didn’t have to read anything, just show up. So on a Saturday morning I caught the bus across town to his daylong event where he fired off crisp imperatives in his booming voice: Just do it! Take the leap! Believe, and self-love is yours!

In the weeks that followed, I tried to use his pushy kind of willpower to love myself, but my heart was not convinced. It seemed to want something more generous and less forced.

Undaunted, I went to a training on affirmations. The idea was to barrage yourself day and night with whispered repetitions of I love you until your resistance broke and you tumbled happily into actual love. By the end of the first month, though, I felt like I’d turned myself into a fast-talking con man.

Undaunted still, I went to a Sunday afternoon gathering in a dimly lit community center led by a striking woman with greying hair who sat in a draped easy chair flanked by tall vases of crimson amaryllis. She spoke in hushed tones to her devotees sitting cross-legged on the floor at her feet while the rest of us, perched on folding chairs at a medium distance, listened in like eavesdroppers.

She said there’s a shard of the divine in each of us. Find that and love it and that’s how you love yourself. In the moment, in her presence, I considered it, but when I tried it on my own at home, I couldn’t pull it off. I guess I was set on loving my own human self, not a surrogate.

Over the years I’ve listened to many new age speakers proclaim that…

Just as you are you are enough.

You’re a child of the universe, and that, in and of itself, is all you need. Just the fact that you exist means you are worthy of self-love.

But I always have trouble with this teaching. I remember myself back in my twenties. I worked very hard to win social approval, but I didn’t warm to that guy who I was then. I didn’t really like him, didn’t like hanging out with him, didn’t really like being him, so how could self-love happen?

I did lots of good things for other people, so I got plenty of social approval from my circle of friends. But, given my Calvinist upbringing, I didn’t understand how loved worked, not in relationships, and not in relation to myself.

I remember though, that when it came to love, I had big ambitions. I wanted to learn everything I could about love. I wanted to master it. And looking back, I feel a fondness for that part of me, even though I’m not happy about the overall picture.

Now let’s take a look at another problem with that message of the gurus. What about the people who run our society and keep themselves busy day after day exploiting others? I don’t find them to be naturally lovable. And I don’t understand how, if you’re hurting others in a systematic, dedicated way, you could really love yourself.

In fact, I would hope that’s not possible…

I would hope that self-love could not be used to support exploitation.

Many of those folks, though, because they’re super successful, have high self-esteem and social-esteem both. Either that or they’re faking it really well. And so they’ll tell you that they love themselves.

Taking these things into consideration, I guess I have to admit that I don’t believe just because someone is human, just because someone exists, that they deserve to be loved, or deserve to love themselves. There are too many people who do too many bad things. Human history is filled with too much evil for me to think otherwise.

Of course, I believe that every child deserves advocacy and care. I believe every child deserves the chance to grow up to feel lovable—because she lives in a way that actually makes her lovable.

And I understand that’s a complicated thing I’m saying. But it brings me to what I believe is the key to the deepest kind of self-love, and that is…

Moral self-development.