Who's Doing the Loving?
The mindset piece missing from your self-love practice
If you move within the realm of personal growth and wellbeing, then you might feel the way I do about “self-love.”
Illustration from the book, “The tale of Lohengrin” by T. W. Rolleston, 1914. Found on Pinterest.
As a phrase, self-love feels empty.
It’s become just another iteration of the “self” + hyphenate + (insert just about anything) formula that has become pervasive in the personal growth industry. Overuse has watered these words down to point where my mind glosses right over when I read them.
How did this phrase, which is a coupling of two of the most powerful words in the world, come to lose all it’s power and meaning?
I believe the reason is that comes down to this: the composition of the phrase “self-love” is at odds with the truth of who and what we are.
This is why despite doing ALL the practices - the rituals, the journaling, the mindset shifts, the coaching, the healing, the list goes on - we continue to fall short of our desired level of embodiment. This is how the voice of self-criticism stays strong, even with all our mindfulness, and we can’t quite shake our old patterns of unworthiness, despite our intellectually knowing that we are, indeed, whole.
YOU are not doing anything wrong.
We need to have a paradigm shift around what self-love is, and that starts with looking at the words themselves, their coupling, and why it’s incompetent.
Let’s rewind for a second and ask a very obvious, if ignored, question.
Who is the external source performing this act of loving on the self?
The phrase “self-love” implies that there are two entities involved.
This goes beyond the words themselves and connects to how we use them.
When we think about what is involved in the act of self-loving, it does tend to entail a higher, more enlightened, part of ourselves loving the a lower, more flawed, part of us. I think this is true, in a sense. Let me explain.
You can think of it like this: you’re a human - being.
The word human represents the earthly you. Your body, your ego, your personality, your sensations and emotions, your flaws, your life’s history, your dreams for your experience here. It’s tied to earth, to this experience, it’s fleeting, it’s material.
The word being represents the Divine you. Your soul, your higher self, your consciousness, the God or God-like part of you, however you want to conceptualize it. It’s eternal, unseen, utterly connected, and inherently sacred.
When we practice self-love, the higher, Divine, eternal being-ness within us is loving our earthly, human, fleeting, flawed self.
If you’ve done work in this realm (which all of you reading undoubtedly have), then you know that it very much feels just like there are two selves within you. There’s the inner voice of criticism and doubt, the sense of unworthiness, the memories and inner narratives propping up these personal stories. This work, like all personal growth, starts with recognizing that voice. Once you can hear that voice, those thoughts, you see the truth: I am not that.
Usually we skip right to nurturing that inner voice with love and compassion by writing new stories of our inherent value. This work is THE work, it is profoundly essential, and I can say it’s changed my life.
What I’m advocating for here, though, is that we pause and really start to think about this: if I’m not that inner voice, what am I?
Some call that inner voice the ego, the personality, the false self. I call it our humanness. You are a human - and a being. The being is your God-ness, your good-ness, the love that you are.
What if you didn’t need to love - your - self? What if the separation inherent in those words was a lie?
What if all it took was that you remembered to BE the love that you are?
Can you breathe into it? Can you feel it?
It’s so simple. It’s already there. There is no doing involved. No action, just surrendering, breathing, feeling, and remembering.
This mindset shift around what it means to LOVE your self is the piece that’s missing from your deep desire to love all of who you are.
When your being-ness is performing the action of loving your humanness, beautiful changes can occur. But when you go even further, and realize that beingness IS Love with a capital L, that it is the Divine Love that is one in the same with God, then you realize that there is no action to perform. You can take a deep breath, you can relax, you can sink - finally - into the feeling of love that you have been searching for.
It was in you all along (and always is).
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P.P.S. - I’d love to your know your thoughts & reflections on this, please leave a comment below!