The self love path can be deeply healing and expanding.
It can be a place where we finally find our capacity to value ourselves, where we learn to honor and recognize our emotions, where we learn that we are not broken and in need of fixing, but rather that we are humans who simply need love, support and compassion.
It can be something that is deeply nourishing, and that allows us to find a healthy balance in our relationships with others - where we finally break free from our codependencies and blurry boundaries into a state of true self respect where we are able to ask for and get our needs met.
I love teaching this path because, for the most part, this path is also one that creates a situation where we start to live as human beings who are capable of making the world around us a better place as we learn to love, respect and support ourselves.
This is because when we really get onto this path, we are going to start to recognize just how connected we are to the world around us. We’re going to start to see how doing what is TRULY best for us - what is actually nourishing, healthy and supportive for our process - generally speaking is what’s going to be best for the collective as well.
We’re going to start to see that setting healthy boundaries actually DOES serve those around us. Even if it makes others upset and uncomfortable at first - we’re going to see that by demonstrating what it really looks like to honor and respect our needs, that those around us can learn to do the same for themselves.
We’re going to start to see that as we honor and respect our own limits, as we start to find our own sense of ‘enough’, and as we pull away from our culture that is constantly telling us that we need to be/do/have more - that in this we are making more room for EVERYONE to have enough as well.
We’re going to see that by honoring and respecting our own humanity, we then become the kind of people who are able to honor and respect the humanity of those around us - again making more space for more people to be free to express and get their needs met, as we make it safe for ourselves to express and get our needs met.
This path can be really beautiful and supportive for all - ourselves and everyone we interact with - and that’s part of the magic of it.
The Darkness Of Culture
All that being said, there is also a dark side to this ‘self love’ trend that I feel is really important to talk about.
I’ve been noticing a trend in the self love space that has people believing that the self love path is in alignment with our hyper-individualist culture.
Many are preaching a version of ‘self love’ that is totally divorced from the collective, is divorced from our humanity and in many ways, is totally divorced from reality - and it’s leading us to a place of causing much deeper harm than any kind of good.
You see, when we really get on this path, we are going to start to recognize and realize that a LOT of what is actually causing us our pain isn’t a lack of ‘getting for ourselves.’
It isn’t that we are not selfish enough, that we are not self focused enough or that we aren’t getting what we want or feeling how we want to feel because we are paying too much attention to other people.
Rather we are going to start to notice that it is the fact that we have been trained to divorce ourselves from our own humanity as well as the humanity of others that is really causing us our issues.
We are going to see that a HUGE part of what hurts about operating in our culture as it is today, is that we are continually being driven into a state of obsessive navel gazing - hyper-fixating on every little detail of our lives, what we eat, what we wear, what we put on our skin, the jobs we work, how much money we have, how we ‘appear’ to the world around us, while also being taught to continually compare ourselves to everyone around us as a way of measuring our worth and value.
We are taught to ignore our bodies, ignore our emotions and ignore our feelings in order to ‘fit in’ with whatever the cultural expectation of the time is, and to also ignore the feelings, bodies and emotions of everyone else.
We are simultaneously taught to care DEEPLY about what others think/feel about us as a way of finding safety/access, while also being fully dissociated from our own actual feelings, wants and needs - as a way of getting our needs met.
We are taught that the WAY to get our needs met is to invalidate ourselves, to be in a constant state of trying to fix or improve ourselves, to be constantly worried about what others think and feel about us - but at the same time to have little to no ACTUAL regard for others, their actual humanity or their true selves - it’s all a game of who can pretend to best, who can play the game the best and who can win approval by looking the part the most.
We are dissociated from our true nature, as well as from any kind of actual connection to anyone else - as we are all just trying to jump through the hoops that culture is constantly putting in front of us.
We are taught to be hyper-individualistic - to be continually concerned about ourselves and what we do or don’t have, and to see everyone else as either a way to getting what we want or an obstacle in the way of us getting what we want, and we are trained to change and mold ourselves to whatever is trending at the moment while never actually connecting with the true heart or humanity of anyone around us.
It’s a dark paradox and it leads to a lot of pain, suffering and confusion - and it’s literally the water we’re all swimming in at this point.
The Dark ‘Self Love’ Path
With all of this, many are teaching that self love is akin to being as hyper-individualistic as possible.
That a true self love path is all about getting for yourself, living ‘your truth’ no matter how this impacts others, doing whatever feels best and right for you with little to no regard for how anyone else may feel.
There is messaging that anyone who stands in the way of your expression, that anyone who holds a different view of life than you, that anyone who isn’t willing to live exactly how you want to live, to see things exactly how you see things or who may disagree with you on anything - anyone who may offer constructive feedback about the things you are doing or believing - is somehow a ‘toxic person’ that you then have the right to simply ‘kick’ out of your life.
Now again, there is ‘partial’ truth to SOME of what’s being shared here.
On a level, some of us do need to learn to set healthy boundaries.
Some of us do need to realize that there are certain individuals in our lives that we don’t ‘jive’ with, and that it’s not our job to please everyone, that it’s not our job to be ‘everything’ to everyone and that we can’t ever get to a place where we are going to be acceptable to all people at all times.
For some of us on the self love path, there is going to be a phase of realizing that we do need to take our own feelings, thoughts, wants and needs into consideration in a way that we haven’t before, and we are going to need to learn to understand that this is going to upset people sometimes, that we are going to lose people sometimes and that we aren’t going to be ‘for’ everyone.
This is totally reasonable.
This does not, however, mean that going totally scorched earth on anyone who sees life differently than we do is what health or healthy boundaries looks like.
This doesn’t mean that in real reality we have a perfect view of how reality works, and that the secret to happiness is simply doing whatever we want, whenever we want at the expense of everyone around us.
This is an imbalance in the wrong direction.
This is the flip side of the codependency coin where we suppress ourselves in order to please - this hyper fixation on the self, what we want and feel at any given time and our own experience isn’t actually what self love is about. This again, is just a wild swing to an equally imbalanced view of life and reality.
Living fully for yourself, cutting out all dissenting or disagreeing voices and believing that the way to achieve satisfaction in life is to simply go your own way at all times is taking us in a direction that is actually going to cause us more harm than good.
The Actual Balance
The truth is, for most of us on the self love path we ARE going to go through a phase of needing to be very internal with our attention, focus and energy.
Many of us are going to go through a phase of needing to ‘cancel out the noise’ so to speak so that we can start to hear our own internal voice again. We are going to have to question what we’ve been told by society is right and wrong. We are going to have to put up some walls in certain relationships and some of us may go through a phase of feeling like the only way we can find safety and the only way we can sort through what is true for us and what isn’t IS through a process of pushing people out of our lives for a period of time.
That being said, when we continue on this path, when we start to do the deep, internal work that this path calls us to do, we are going to eventually come to the realization that we are not individuals having an individual experience and that’s IT.
We are going to come to see that our lives are deeply and intimately connected to the collective - and that finding balance in our own experience requires that we find a way to interact with others in a balanced way.
We are going to come to see that other people who disagree with us, people who live differently than we do, people who hold different perspectives and have alternative points of view are not ‘wrong’ or an ‘enemy’ - but rather are people that can often ADD to our perspective and give us understanding and wisdom we never would have had without them.
We are going to come to realize that the actions we take in everyday life don’t just affect us - that we are part of a society, a collective, and in this, what we do on a day to day basis has an impact that goes beyond our own experience.
We are going to start to realize that TRUE health in relationships comes from healthy compromise. It comes from knowing what our values are and holding to those, while we understand that others are different from us - but also have wants, needs and desires that are equally important to our own.
We are going to start to see that us finding our enough, us finding what we truly value, us stepping away from the cultural expectations of constant consumption and production actually help us see where we can be more generous, where we can make space for others, where we can open to the ideas of others and where we can be a support in everyone getting their needs met - vs. being totally fixated on ourselves and our own needs at all times.
The true self love path, when walked in it’s completion, will always lead us to an understanding that we are a part of a system, and that we have the power to create a BETTER system for ALL of us, via re-adjusting our values to what matters.
Life itself.
As we start to value our own lives - for the very fact that we exist - we are going to start to be able to offer this kind of love to others.
As we start to make room for our own thoughts, feelings and opinions, we are going to realize that we aren’t our thoughts, feelings and opinions - meaning we will be more able to make ROOM for others and THEIR thoughts, feelings and opinions, and to make room for the shifting of our own, if we learn that we are wrong or limited.
Which we WILL learn, many times throughout our lives.
When we truly love ourselves, we won’t be so attached to being right, to being superior or to the idea that everyone must agree with us at all times in order for us to be safe.
The true self love path helps us develop actual empathy for those around us - and this is actually one of the most beautiful parts of the path.
It’s not all about you - and you’re going to realize that this is a very GOOD thing.
True self love isn’t one or the other - total self focus or total self abandonment.
It’s a unification of the collective and the self - and finding a way to live that supports the expansion of ALL of us.
True self love doesn’t disconnect us from the whole - it actually helps us see where we can contribute to the whole in the best way, and where the whole can contribute to us.
THIS is what self love does for us.
I hope this offers a healthier vision of what actual self love is, and an alternate perspective to the idea that true self love is hyper-individualism.
There’s so much more, and it’s so much more rewarding to expand into that ‘more.’
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