return. When you know how good it feels to trust, honor, and enjoy yourself, you know that these same feelings, invested in someone else, can lift other people's spirits and give them a sense of their own value. In this way self-love becomes the standard not only for what we want to receive, but also for how to become a more loving person and have deeper, richer, and more meaningful relationships.
Self-love also serves another important function in our lives: it allows us to understand exactly what we have to offer to the world. As we come to recognize our specific gifts and talents, we also discover the specific purpose that we are here to accomplish.
The opposite of such life-enhancing self-regard is the haunting belief that you are somehow not enough. It generally shows up in the form of that creepy little dust-covered voice in the basement of your consciousness that keeps climbing up the stairs and telling you that you're not beautiful enough, tall enough, smart enough, educated enough, or intelligent enough to get chosen, to be loved, to succeed. You aren't a good enough parent, a sexy enough lover, a supportive enough spouse, a strong enough provider, a decisive enough leader, a submissive enough employee to get the outcome you desire. Even a chronic over-giving do-gooder type can worry about not doing enough: giving enough money, saying the right thing, bringing the right gift, choosing the best card. No matter what its specific message, one way or another the nasty little voice keeps wreaking havoc with your ongoing attempts to feel good about yourself.
Sometimes the voice makes a billboard pronouncement: “Of course he wasn't going to pick you, you idiot; you're not pretty enough.” Or “How could you possibly make the right choice; you can't even decide what to order for dinner?” At other times, it seems to have taken up fulltime residence on the couch of your consciousness and just plain laughs in your face when you try to make a concerted effort at loving yourself: “What's the point?” it says, “Good things never happen to you.”
Why are we so darn hard on ourselves? Why are we always measuring ourselves against some invisible, perfect, utterly outrageous standard? Why can't we lay off? And if we could stop for even a minute—one friend told me she realized she hadn't beat herself up for four whole hours yesterday!—how can we replace the feeling of not-good-enoughness with the kind of positive, self-honoring self-celebration that could change not only us, but ultimately, everyone around us?
The good news is that you're not stuck with how you feel about yourself right now. There is a way to permanently change your self-concept, and this book offers a template for doing just that. We'll start by looking at the not entirely surprising origins of your self-deprecating opinions. Then you'll learn the four simple but profoundly life-changing steps to recognizing the beautiful truth of who you really are. Instead of continuing to rip yourself up with self-doubt, self-judgment, and second-guessing, you'll discover how to treat yourself with more acceptance, compassion, appreciation, and respect. Finally, you'll learn how to take this newly crafted sense of yourself and apply it to fulfilling the purpose that is uniquely yours in the world. Once you've done that, you'll find that the dance card of your life is so well filled that there just isn't any room for thinking that you're not enough.
If you'd like to come to peace with yourself, you might begin by answering these two simple questions: Who better to love you than you? What better undertaking could there be than to learn how to sweetly, happily, joyfully, generously, calmly, intelligently, compassionately, and respectfully love yourself?
Come. Take my hand. Let's take the first step.
ONE
Why You Need and Deserve Your Own Love
You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.
—Buddha
There is only one of you. You are a precious, unrepeatable expression of the mind of God. It is confoundingly simple to say that there will never be another you, but there won't. There is no one else who sees the world exactly like you do, whose feelings strike the strings of their heart exactly the same way as yours. There is no one, no matter how similar or familiar, whose days and years will be exactly like yours, no one else who can perfectly nurture your dreams, who can most deeply feel each of your hopes as they fly like small butterflies into your heart or are crushed in the palm of a stranger.
Even if we all have thousands of lifetimes—and many people believe we do—the person you are in each of those lives is not this you, with this birth, these eyes and these hands and this pain to work out, these parents, these brothers and sisters, these talents, these gifts to give, this precise number of days and minutes and hours between the writing of your name on your birth certificate and its carving on your tombstone.
You're the only one who has the exceptional opportunity to truly know you and to discover your single beautiful path. Others can hold a mirror for you and show you parts of yourself that may have been obscured for a long time, but they can never give you the whole of yourself, the whole you that is yours to possess, to expend, to express, to release when your day in this life is through.
You can love others, care for them, encourage them, support them, listen to them, comfort them, joke and argue and cry with them—and I hope you do—but all the gifts of joy and consideration and nurturing that you give to others, you also deserve from yourself. You need the love that only you can give you.
Raw Beginnings, Deep Roots
Recently, at a party, I mentioned that I was writing a book on self-love. I saw a lot of heads turn. “Now, there's a topic,” said the woman standing closest to me. “Self-love—I still struggle with self-hate. That's a deep black hole I've been trying to climb up out of for years.”
There are thousands of reasons for not loving ourselves. Every person has one—or a hundred and one. We're too fat or too thin. We cry too easily, or not at all. We fear failure and success. We're foolish. We're not good enough, pretty enough, powerful enough, tall enough, brave enough, interesting enough. We convince ourselves we don't deserve the lives we desire.
Remember the proverb, “Love your neighbor as yourself”? Maybe we love our neighbors so poorly because we never learned how to love ourselves. Maybe we're trying to extract love from a love-starved self. Maybe, in order to repair our ability to love others, we need to start at square one—with ourselves.
In my own life, I always felt that I was superfluous and, in fact, a burden to my family. It wasn't because my parents didn't love me; indeed, they both showed me many beautiful expressions of love. It was because the circumstances of our life were difficult. I was the fifth child and fourth daughter in a family already struggling to make ends meet. While I was still very young, all my siblings became ill, two of them with life-threatening diseases, another with a protracted case of pneumonia. I remember watching my mother, weary beyond belief, single-handedly nurse all these ailing children. Day by day, I waited patiently on the stairs for the time when she would come to feed me. At those moments I felt sorry, apologetic almost, that after taking care of everyone and everything else, there was still another person—me—who needed her attention and care. Wouldn't things have been easier for everyone, my young subconscious asked, if only I hadn't been born?
Later this belief repeated itself when, as a young girl, I looked at my beautiful older sisters and concluded that, already, my family had enough girls. We were still having a very hard time financially, and it seemed that my being, my existence itself, was a burden to parents already stretched to the limit. I responded by trying to take up as little time, space, money, and care as possible. I practiced the art of being invisible. Trying to disappear is a long way from loving yourself.
My experience is only one of the multitudes of human experiences, many of them far more direct in their cruelty and impact, which make it difficult for us to love ourselves. We live through such experiences and come to adulthood, where we are expected to love others as ourselves but unfortunately, for many of us, the essential capacity to love ourselves is missing. This has profound implications not only for our capacity to feel