by John Welwood
Next, allow the feeling to be there, giving it plenty of space. Allowing doesn’t mean wallowing in the feeling or acting it out, but rather opening up space around the sensations in your body. This is like giving the feeling some breathing room so it is not confined or constricted. Experience the space around the feeling and notice how the space lets the feeling be there, just as it is, without tension or resistance. Let yourself rest in that space. As you do this, you will find that you are holding the feeling in a much softer way. You have become the larger awareness in which your woundedness is held. Then there is nothing to fight against, and the body starts to settle down.
Once you settle, you could also go a little further and see if you can open yourself to feeling the unlove directly, not maintaining any barrier against it. Be kind and understanding toward it, as you would toward your child or your dearest friend if he or she were hurting. A further, more advanced step is to enter with your awareness right into the center of the feeling, softening into it, so that you are at one with the feeling, not separate from it in the least.
When you can enter and relax into a feeling, it no longer remains something other that can torment or overwhelm you. When you can be present in the center of a feeling, you discover its nature as fluid energy. If the wound of unlove is undigested pain from childhood, then letting yourself experience it with unconditional presence is a way of digesting that old pain. Then it no longer remains something solid and frozen that clogs your system. This is a simple and direct way of starting to heal your woundedness, the fearful shutdown you became stuck in as a child.
Being present with yourself like this is an act of love that unlocks the door to your deepest resources. There is a simple principle operating here: When you show up for your experience, your being shows up for you. And when the larger being that you truly are reveals itself, you have an experience of coming home to yourself. Settling into yourself gives you access to native resources—strength, acceptance, peace, compassion—that help you meet and relate to whatever you’re going through.
Coming home to yourself and your resources, you discover what is more true than any self-judgment: that you are just fine as you are, in your basic nature. You taste the basic goodness inherent within you, which has a clear, refreshing taste like pure water. Discovering this helps you appreciate your life, even with all its difficulties. Letting yourself have your experience is the gateway to self-acceptance and self-love.
Letting Yourself Be the Being That You Are
Yet what exactly is self-love? In my experience, it is something much more subtle and profound than the pep talk pickme-ups promoted by self-help gurus who proclaim, “Believe in yourself, you’re fantastic, and doggone it, people like you!”
Self-love is something much more sacred and mysterious than that. It is an inner glow or atmosphere of warmth that gradually begins to infuse you as you learn to say yes to yourself as you are, in this very moment. This is an essential basis for spiritual growth, as Swami Prajnanpad recognized when he said, “The most important thing of all is to love yourself.”
The most loving thing you can do for yourself is to let yourself be. Be what? The being that you are, of course. This is the definition of self-love that I propose: letting yourself be the being that you are.
Are you aware of this being that you are, this being that wants to live in you, through you, as you? If you’re truthful, you may admit you barely know this deeper dimension of yourself at all. This being that you are can only be found right here in the core of your living experience in this very moment. Everything else is but a memory or mental projection.
The being that you are is not something you can wrap your mind around. It is beyond anything you can think. Though you may bristle when others impose their ideas on you or put you in some narrow conceptual box, you probably don’t notice how much you do this to yourself. Who you were yesterday, last year, or in childhood, adolescence, young adulthood—none of these is who you are; they are only memories. Holding in mind a picture or concept of who you are puts you in a soul-cage that keeps you from living freely and expansively.
Of course, if you hold beliefs that you are bad, unworthy, or deficient, then it can be a helpful first step to think of yourself as good, to see yourself in a more positive or compassionate light. For many people, this kind of positive affirmation can be a useful step on the way toward genuine self-love. But this is still a conceptual exercise that splits us in two: a separate I, the subject, appreciating a separate me, the object of that love. For self-love to truly come alive, it has to be more than just a concept, a belief, or self-talk. It has to involve a new way of inhabiting myself, of feeling and celebrating the living presence that I am, rather than just maintaining some favorable self-image.
Self-love involves a yes to myself in whatever I am going through, instead of holding on to some concept of what or how I should be. Any idea I have about who I am or who I should be is never accurate, for it always falls short of the living presence that I am, as this unfolds freshly in each new moment. Who I am is not a fixed entity but a dynamic stream of experiencing that is alive in every moment—when I let myself happen.
You can have a taste of what I’m describing here by simply dropping any notion you have of yourself right now. What happens when you let yourself just be here, right in this moment, without relying on any of the familiar images and beliefs stored on the “hard disk” of memory to tell you who you are? At first there may be a sense of disorientation. If you can simply relax into that for a moment, without recoiling in fear, there may be a moment of sensing yourself freshly as a living presence, a mysterious, unfathomable being who is open and awake and ready to respond to the changing currents of each moment.
Let yourself be that being, if only at first for a moment here and there. This will help you settle down and connect with yourself, providing a fresh and immediate taste of your inherent dignity and value. Fresh moments like these make it possible to be happy just to be alive, just to be the being that you are. The more you taste this inner connectedness, the more it gives rise to an inner glow, which is the direct, immediate experience of self-love.
Saying Yes to Yourself
Saying yes to yourself also means accepting the messy, imperfect human that you are. “It was easy to love God in all that was beautiful,” wrote Saint Francis. Yet he recognized that for love to be the real thing, it must encompass everything, including all of life’s darkness and pain. So he went on to say, “The lessons of deeper knowledge, though, instructed me to embrace God in all things.”
How to embrace God in all things within yourself? Not just in the beauty but also in the heart of the beast? As the German spiritual teacher Rudi23 (Swami Rudrananda) wrote:
The only thing that can create a oneness inside you is the ability to see more of yourself as you work every day to open deeper, and to say, “Fine, I’m short-tempered,” or “I’m aggressive,” or “I love to make money,” or “I have no feeling for anyone else.” Once you recognize that you are all of these things . . . you will finally be able to take a breath and allow these things to open. . . . Your ego and prejudices and limitations are your raw material. Out of the raw material you break down, you grow and absorb the energy. If you process and refine it all, you can open consciously. Otherwise you will never come to anything that represents yourself.
In a similar vein, a participant in one of my workshops told a story about an experience she had of discovering self-love in a most unexpected way: “I had been going through a period of intense stress about certain events in my life that triggered a great deal of pain and self-hatred. One day I was finally forced to admit, ‘The truth is, right now I am a completely fucked-up human being and cannot be anything other than that.’ I had never acknowledged anything quite like that before. My story has always been about being ‘together’—whether that meant being the best student in the class or the most spiritually realized person. So stripping away all the layers of regret or apology abou
t being so messed up was quite profound for me. And as I let myself be irredeemably fucked up and, at least for the moment, incapable of being anything other than that, doorways began opening for me. They kept opening and opening. And, having failed to live up to all of my concepts about what self-love was supposed to be based on, I had an experience of loving myself that was totally non-conceptual. I felt rooted in myself in a direct, immediate way because all my ideas about what it meant to be rooted in myself had completely dissolved. I had come home to myself in a way I could not have imagined before.”
Usually we cannot bear to face the raw, messy, wounded parts of ourselves because we fear that the critic will prosecute us for them, using them as evidence to frame us as the beastly bad self. Letting ourselves be the being that we are, however, means giving up trying to be a good self, because we recognize that all our ideas of ourselves as good self or bad self are merely concepts in the mind.
You can develop a simple practice of saying yes to yourself each day. Stop for a moment, pay attention to whatever’s going on inside you, and then acknowledge it in a neutral way: “Yes, this is what’s here.” “Yes, I’m nervous,” lightly meeting or touching the nervousness with your awareness. Don’t reject anything you are experiencing. Meet it instead in a brief moment of nonjudgmental awareness—touching it and letting it be. This is a simple way of saying yes to yourself, a shorthand form of unconditional love and presence that you can practice at any moment, wherever you are, whatever you are doing.
“Yes, there’s worry.” Touch that and let be, lightly making contact with the sense of worry in your body. “Yes, I’m acting in a stingy way,” and notice how it affects you to be aware of that, without judgment or manipulation. Yes here does not mean, “I like it,” “I approve of it,” “I think it’s good,” or “I’m glad it’s like this.” It simply means, “Yes, this is what’s here right now. I can meet this because it’s what is happening. And I can stay open to myself even though this is coming up.” When you can offer that kind of yes to yourself, it silences the critic and puts a stop to the inner trial.
If you have a hard time saying yes to something, you can also say yes to that: “Yes, I am struggling with this; I’m having a hard time letting it be.” “Yes, I’m not accepting this right now; there’s a refusal in me.” Notice and feel the resistance or refusal and let it be, with awareness. Don’t just observe it, but feel it and give it room to have its energetic play, while remaining aware of it nonjudgmentally. If you judge, then be aware of that, and again: “Yes, there is judgment.” Let the judgment simply be there in awareness, without judging the judgment. “Yes, I am here for myself even though self-judgment is arising.” See if you can be an interested, neutral witness of what happens in your mind and emotions, extending warmth and openness to whatever is there, in the spirit of “Yes, yes, this is what’s here.”
Don’t let this be a conceptual exercise. You don’t have to verbalize the “yes,” though that can often be helpful. What’s most important is to touch what’s there for a moment, let it be, and experience yourself there with it, in openness, allowing yourself to be as you are, even though you may not like what you are feeling. “Yes, I can be here with myself even though anxiety is arising . . . even though self-doubt is present . . . even though loneliness is here.”
As you open briefly to whatever state you’re in, directly experience the openness that can see and let be. Notice that this openness is much larger than any of the states you go through. Be this openness, which can hold your experience in a kind and gentle way. This puts you in touch with the larger being that you are, who is not trapped in any of these states of mind.
Above all, don’t identify with any of the states you pass through, don’t make them mean something about you. (“I’m afraid. . . . That means I’m a fearful person. . . . I’ve always been that way. . . . It’s just the way I am.”) When you acknowledge, “I’m afraid,” this doesn’t mean that fear is who you are. Instead, it’s a shorthand way of saying, “I’m aware of fear arising in my body and mind.” The “I” that can recognize the fear is not itself afraid. It is the larger being that you are, the awareness that can see and hold whatever’s there in you—all the qualities, all the feelings, all the tight spots, all the conditioned patterns.
But if you do find yourself stuck in identifying, acknowledge that in a kindly way as well: “Okay, now I’m taking this personally,” and see what it’s like to recognize that without making it wrong.
Saying yes to whatever is there in you is a way of calling forth the larger awareness that can hold all of your experience in a space of warmth and openness. Over time you will see how this lightens and frees you up. As Swami Prajnanpad sums up this core principle of self-love: “Say yes to everything. Reject nothing, least of all something in yourself.”
Kind Understanding for Yourself
Learning to accept your human experience as just what it is, imperfect as it is, brings kind understanding into the places where you’ve held grievances against yourself. For instance, what do you typically give yourself a hard time about or blame yourself for? Try to articulate this in a single sentence. If you have a number of different grievances—“I’m lazy,” “I eat too much,” “I don’t try hard enough,” “I’m selfish,” “I’ve hurt people,” or “I’m cowardly”—choose one that cuts deep.
Grievances against yourself usually contain two elements: a certain clear discernment mixed together with a harsh-critic judgment. For example, you recognize that you are selfish, but then you judge that as a sign that something’s wrong with you. Take a moment to tease these two elements apart, separating the discernment from the blame. See if you can set the blame aside. Then put what you discern about yourself in front of you and look at it as though you were an all-wise, all-loving, all-understanding parent, friend, or teacher.
For instance, if your grievance is “I’m selfish,” put aside any self-blame and see what the all-wise part of you understands about this. Maybe you see that it arises out of your childhood insecurity about being cared for—which caused you to try to meet your needs in a grasping, inconsiderate way. Addressing the selfish place directly, your understanding might say something like: “Your experience as a child was that if you didn’t look out for yourself, no one else would. No wonder you feel compelled to grab hold of whatever you can. It’s a way of trying to feel secure.”
A woman in one of my groups judged herself for not speaking up for what she wanted. Her kind understanding was: “You were never allowed to have your own ideas and feelings as a child. Whenever you expressed what you felt or believed, you were told to be quiet. No one ever supported you in having your own voice. No wonder you’re afraid to speak up.” When I asked this woman how she felt after saying this, she said, “When I first felt the self-judgment, my chest tightened up. But now I feel compassion for myself, and warmth is streaming into my limbs.”
This woman had already known that she didn’t speak up because no one had ever encouraged her as a child, so that was nothing new. What was new in this experience was feeling understanding toward herself about this, which allowed her to open her heart to herself.
So in practicing kind understanding, it’s important to feel how the understanding affects you. When you have genuine understanding for yourself, it is like a warm embrace that releases soothing energy in the body. Let yourself feel what that’s like. Though you often try to get others to understand you, the understanding that heals the most is your own. As the warmth of understanding starts to flow, it washes away your grievance against yourself, allowing self-love to take its place.
Appreciating What Is Yours
A further stage in the growth of self-love is being able to appreciate what is uniquely yours to offer. Each of us has a special contribution to make to this world, especially when we emerge as the being that we are. The uniqueness of the individual, according to Martin Buber, is the bearing of a special gift. What you bring into this world through your particular qu
ality of being—no one else can manifest this in the same way that you can. In Buber’s words:24
Every person born into this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique. It is the duty of every person . . . to know and consider . . . that there has never been anyone like him in the world, for if there had been someone like him, there would have been no need for him to be in the world. Every single person is a new thing in the world and is called upon to fulfill his particularity in this world. Every person’s foremost task is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, be it even the greatest, has already achieved.
The same idea was expressed by Rabbi Zusya when he said a short while before his death: “In the world to come I shall not be asked, ‘Why where you not Moses?’ I shall be asked, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”
What does it mean to be yourself in this sense, to “be Zusya”? It means saying yes to the being that you are. Only then is it possible for the unique offering that your existence represents to manifest fully.
The habit of comparing ourselves to others or trying to be like them is one of the greatest obstacles to self-love. This preoccupation with whether we are like others, or better or worse than them, is a way of dishonoring ourselves. As a writer, for instance, I have often felt envious of colleagues who write books quickly. One friend has written books in three to six months that have become major best sellers. My books, by contrast, have always taken a few years to complete and have not as yet flown up the best-seller charts the way his have.