CHAPTER 1

Why You Need and Deserve Your Own Love

You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love andaffection.

—Buddha

There is only one of you. You are a precious, unrepeatable expression of themind of God. It is confoundingly simple to say that there will never be anotheryou, but there won't. There is no one else who sees the world exactly like youdo, whose feelings strike the strings of their heart exactly the same way asyours. There is no one, no matter how similar or familiar, whose days and yearswill 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 butterfliesinto 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—theperson you are in each of those lives is not this you, with this birth, theseeyes and these hands and this pain to work out, these parents, these brothersand sisters, these talents, these gifts to give, this precise number of days andminutes and hours between the writing of your name on your birth certificate andits carving on your tombstone.

You're the only one who has the exceptional opportunity to truly know you and todiscover your single beautiful path. Others can hold a mirror for you and showyou parts of yourself that may have been obscured for a long time, but they cannever give you the whole of yourself, the whole you that is yours to possess, toexpend, to express, to release when your day in this life is through.

You can love others, care for them, encourage them, support them, listen tothem, comfort them, joke and argue and cry with them—and I hope you do—but allthe gifts of joy and consideration and nurturing that you give to others, youalso 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 sawa lot of heads turn. "Now, there's a topic," said the woman standing closest tome. "Self-love—I still struggle with self-hate. That's a deep black hole I'vebeen trying to climb up out of for years."

There are thousands of reasons for not loving ourselves. Every person has one—ora 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, prettyenough, powerful enough, tall enough, brave enough, interesting enough. Weconvince ourselves we don't deserve the lives we desire.

Remember the proverb, "Love your neighbor as yourself"? Maybe we love ourneighbors so poorly because we never learned how to love ourselves. Maybe we'retrying to extract love from a love-starved self. Maybe, in order to repair ourability 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 tomy family. It wasn't because my parents didn't love me; indeed, they both showedme many beautiful expressions of love. It was because the circumstances of ourlife were difficult. I was the fifth child and fourth daughter in a familyalready struggling to make ends meet. While I was still very young, all mysiblings became ill, two of them with life-threatening diseases, another with aprotracted case of pneumonia. I remember watching my mother, weary beyondbelief, single-handedly nurse all these ailing children. Day by day, I waitedpatiently on the stairs for the time when she would come to feed me. At thosemoments I felt sorry, apologetic almost, that after taking care of everyone andeverything else, there was still another person—me—who needed her attention andcare. Wouldn't things have been easier for everyone, my young subconsciousasked, if only I hadn't been born?

Later this belief repeated itself when, as a young girl, I looked at mybeautiful 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. Iresponded by trying to take up as little time, space, money, and care aspossible. I practiced the art of being invisible. Trying to disappear is a longway from loving yourself.

My experience is only one of the multitudes of human experiences, many of themfar more direct in their cruelty and impact, which make it difficult for us tolove ourselves. We live through such experiences and come to adulthood, where weare expected to love others as ourselves but unfortunately, for many of us, theessential capacity to love ourselves is missing. This has profound implicationsnot only for our capacity to feel happy and satisfied in our own lives, but alsoin our ability to love others.

When we haven't learned how to love ourselves well, we keep getting stuck onthis simple first rung of the ladder. We don't know how or how well to treatothers and we have problems with what we call boundaries. We stumble through theswamps of low self-esteem and thickets of self-loathing that derail us in ourefforts to "love others as ourselves." It has been my own walk down the path toself-love that inspired me to write this book, as well as my witness of manyothers as they, too, took the journey.

In order to walk this path we must first understand that self-love is notnarcissism. 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 mostauthentic self.

Self-love is also mysterious. For when we really learn to love ourselves, we nolonger have to work at it every minute. By continually reminding ourselves howimportant we are, how important loving ourselves is, we eventually arrive at aplace where self-compassion comes more easily, almost automatically. From thewell of quiet acceptance, from the practice of a gentle unconditional care ofourselves, we can reach out to love others with exquisite generosity andbounteous open hearts.

That is because self-love is above all a spiritual matter. For it is only whenwe can actually see and feel ourselves as one of the threads in the vast humanshawl, as deeply, indeed, unconditionally received by a passionately caring andbeautifully ordered universe, that we can truly love ourselves. This true, feltsense of ourselves as a precious part of the universe is really the ultimatesource from which we can love others.

While...