Why is self-love so important?
Self-love is about realizing and accepting your self-worth. If you don’t care about yourself enough and believe you are worthy to attain these higher levels, you will never reach for them. You will find every excuse not to do the work and self-sabotage yourself along the way.
Moreover, only through self-love can you find harmony with your mind, work with hueristics and biases, and come to peace with and adjust the limiting beliefs that hold you back and take control of your future.
Overcoming these parts of yourself requires immense strength to face, feel, and process. And it is only once you truly accept that you are worthy, through unconditional self-love, and are ready to do the work, that it is time to go deeper into self-actualization.
Why do so many people get self-love wrong?
Let’s deal with the elephant in the room: self-love is NOT narcissism. I tend to agree with Robert Greene’s spectrum of narcissism. For a good read, check out his book The Laws of Human Nature here. If you want a brief overview of what he writes on narcissism in the book, there are some quick links with good summaries at the bottom of this article.
Now, let’s dive a little into narcissism here.
Narcissism
The truth is that we are all narcissists to some degree. We are all born with the urge to think of ourselves first and crave attention.
We feel alive when people look at us and actually see us. But the reality is that there is only so much attention to go around. And we usually crave more attention than we get.
The solution to our brilliant bodies and minds is to create an ego that validates us from the inside. Often, we think of this as our self-esteem, which begins to form early on in life, until ages 2-5.
Narcissism only reaches the troubling end of the spectrum when our sense of self fails to develop. This can happen for any number of reasons, but we won’t go down that rabbit hole here.
The result is a person who has a void inside of them. An emptiness instead of a sense of self, and it is this void that continually craves attention to feel satisfied with ourselves. We often see this play out as them developing expertise at gaining attention, appearing exciting to be around, or retreating to a fantasy life and holding on to the belief that they are superior to others. (Social media, anyone?)
Narcissism is the opposite of self-love and self-worth. Self-love is about understanding, accepting, and finding unconditional love for ourselves so we can take care of ourselves and empower our path to our greatest selves. Sound familiar? We defined that as spirituality here.
Spirituality
Spirituality is the path and choice to mindfully, with discipline, face the challenges of life and continuously grow and evolve into our best selves. Read more here.
So the path of spiritual growth is self-love, i.e., the path to doing the unnatural: finding the self-discipline to delay gratification, accepting responsibility for our lives and choices, dedicating ourselves to the truth, and finding and maintaining balance throughout the process.
Are you ready to start loving yourself?
Then, begin to take care of yourself. Don’t hit the snooze button. Find reasons to be grateful every day, eat healthy, go outside and move, meditate, and find all the reasons you are terrific, and yes, you are worthy of love.
A good article on narcissism summarizing his book is here.
A good short YouTube by Robert Greene