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 happy and satisfied in our own lives, but also in our ability to love others.
When we haven't learned how to love ourselves well, we keep getting stuck on this simple first rung of the ladder. We don't know how or how well to treat others and we have problems with what we call boundaries. We stumble through the swamps of low self-esteem and thickets of self-loathing that derail us in our efforts to “love others as ourselves.” It has been my own walk down the path to self-love that inspired me to write this book, as well as my witness of many others as they, too, took the journey.
In order to walk this path we must first understand that self-love is not narcissism. Nor is it egotism, greed, self-righteousness, self-involvement, stubbornness, or conceit, all of which have given real self-love a bad name. Rather, it is the singing spring from which each of us can become our most authentic self.
Self-love is also mysterious. For when we really learn to love ourselves, we no longer have to work at it every minute. By continually reminding ourselves how important we are, how important loving ourselves is, we eventually arrive at a place where self-compassion comes more easily, almost automatically. From the well of quiet acceptance, from the practice of a gentle unconditional care of ourselves, we can reach out to love others with exquisite generosity and bounteous open hearts.
That is because self-love is above all a spiritual matter. For it is only when we can actually see and feel ourselves as one of the threads in the vast human shawl, as deeply, indeed, unconditionally received by a passionately caring and beautifully ordered universe, that we can truly love ourselves. This true, felt sense of ourselves as a precious part of the universe is really the ultimate source from which we can love others.
While traveling in Italy recently, I met with a holistic physician who conducts workshops on self-care and spiritual practice. When I asked him what he found to be the most prevalent problem in his medical practice, he said, without an instant's hesitation, “People don't know how to love themselves.”
Whether this rampant lack of self-love takes the form of physical affliction—obesity, addiction, and the myriad ailments which have at their source an unresolved emotional issue as in the doctor's practice—or whether it expresses itself as a so-called “psychological” problem—low self-esteem, relationship difficulties, problems with money—it's clear that there is an epidemic of our inability to love ourselves.
Indeed, I once heard a highly spiritually developed person say that it was easy to meditate six hours a day and it was easy to give away all his goods and serve his spiritual master; but when his teacher asked him if he loved himself he realized that he did not. In facing his answer to his teacher's question, he encountered the limits of his capacity to love.
It doesn't matter whether your own struggle to love yourself was born of difficult life circumstances or through some excruciating emotional or spiritual assaults—the wound is great. For so many of us, loving ourselves is our greatest emotional problem.
I have written many books about love: how to love well in a relationship, how to live through the end of one, how to inform your love and relationships with a spiritual dimension, how both women and men can learn to love and understand men better, how we can love people with personalities different from our own, and how all our loves are infused with that one great Love which is the light of being itself.
All of these instructions about love, however, are based on the notion that we already know how to love—to appreciate, apprehend, delight in, honor, value, esteem, praise, care for, empathize with, and even cherish—ourselves. If you're like me and a great many other people, you're probably still not an expert at this, your greatest life's work of love. And so I invite you to join me in this process of discovery.
This book is a journey to you, a discovery of how you lost yourself—and therefore lost your ability to love yourself. It is also a map to the beauty, the grace, and the strength that is you. It is le beau chemin, the beautiful route you will need to travel in order to reclaim them.
Loving yourself—truly receiving and cherishing your own being—is ultimately the task of a lifetime. Although the process can seem complex, at heart it's not very complicated. It's a matter of taking the four simple steps on the journey to loving yourself: speaking out, acting out, clearing out, and setting out. I describe these fours steps in part 2.
The brief stories I relate in the coming chapters illustrate by example the steps that others have taken on their path to self-compassion. They may not be precisely the steps that you need to take, but they can certainly point you in the right direction. I hope they will inspire you, and I encourage you to hold them up to yourself, take the parts that apply to you, and then use them to catapult you into action.
Change requires courage. Acting with courage, that is, behaving in ways that are unfamiliar and even scary to you, is what creates actual change. Once you have stepped—in thought, word, action or practice—across your own inner limits, you will actually start to function in new and different ways. This changed behavior will deeply affect the way you feel about yourself. Instead of discouragement or self-criticism, you will start to feel self-love.
With this in mind and with my encouragement and love, I urge you to take these four powerful steps on your own path to self-compassion.
May you enjoy the journey. And when you are finished, may your heart be full of You!
TWO
How Don't I Love Me? Let Me Count the Ways
I can't believe how cruel I am to myself.
—Woman, 36, recovering from a suicide attempt
Difficulty loving ourselves is a universal problem. And far from being the best-kept secret of our individual selves, it's a creeping general malaise, something which, given a chance, we're all grateful to confess: “Oh, you have trouble loving yourself too; I thought I was the only one.”
If it's true that so many of us struggle to love ourselves— if I nod with both recognition and shock when the Italian doctor states the problem, if the party people
