Self Love Has Been Misunderstood, and We Should Talk About It

Self love has a bad rap that is doing everyone a disservice. It is time to set the record straight, so that we can start recognize and True Self Love.

Throughout the dominant individualistic, materialistic and consumerist western culture, we have been conditioned to believe that self love is about selfishness, narcissism, and ego. We consider that the careless accumulation of possessions and wealth — spoiling ourselves with what we crave for — is an expression of self love. This is because we haven’t yet grasped the concepts of self and of love.

For most of us, the understanding of self is extremely limited. We are still prisoners of the realm of the ego, which identifies itself with its beliefs, its status, its possessions, its power, thus we interpret self love as the selfish pursuit of those. It is a realm in which we are mainly driven by fear, in which we see ourselves as separate from the rest, one in which we have not yet acknowledged the principles of interdependence and the interconnection of everything within the universe. Because we are still prisoners of this realm, we haven’t yet grasped, in our dominant cultures, the notion of the self disidentified from the ego. Yet while the ego is a product of our primitive instinct and conditioning, the true self is the consciousness experienced from the connection with the source of life, which is in ourselves.

Love has also been misinterpreted. It is often understood as the intense desire to possess, to consume something or someone. Just as with the concept of self, love is understood from the perspective of the ego. Yet while the ego wants perpetuation through domination, control, and exploitation, the self wants realization through empowerment, freedom and acceptance. For example, loving fish is not about wanting to see them dead on your plate so that you can eat them, rather it’s about the willingness to see them thriving in their natural environment. Real love is about protecting and enhancing, not about possessing, using and abusing for self interest and pleasure.

Self love is not about selfishness, it is not about ego-tripping and ego-pleasing. It is not about loving an image based on labels and beliefs that are disconnected from reality. It is about the acceptance, understanding and knowledge of who we truly are. Self love is the result of a painful and challenging process, of dropping the masks of the ego to dissolve our limiting beliefs, to overcome our irrational fears and heal from our unresolved traumas. And only by individually and collectively going through this process will we be able to truly understand and love ourselves as well as one another.

This is why, achieving world peace and sustainability, is also about learning to accept and love ourselves as we are.