When I say self-love, or someone tells you that you need to love yourself, what comes to mind?
Probably some idea of warm, sweet, affectionate feelings of love and appreciation toward yourself.
Maybe that's something you strive for. Maybe it's something that makes you want to roll your eyes.
Either way, I think this common idea of self-love can actually keep us from experiencing a kind of love that's far more meaningful and healing.
Here's why.
This version of self-love exists within a binary way of thinking. Positive and negative. Like and dislike. Love and hate.
And when we think of self-love as warm, positive affection, we're essentially staying on one side of that divide.
But what happens to the other side?
What happens to the parts of ourselves we don't like? The feelings we wish we didn't have? The aspects of our experience we believe are holding us back?
Those parts tend to get rejected.
And the irony is that rejecting the parts of ourselves we don't want may actually be keeping us from experiencing more of what we do want — happiness, confidence, connection, and even that warm feeling of love we're trying so hard to cultivate.
If you'd prefer to watch the YouTube video on this same topic, you can find it here.
I'd like to offer a different understanding of self-love — one that moves beyond this binary — and explore how practicing it might help us feel more at home within ourselves and more connected and open to life.
What If Self-Love Looked More Like Empathy?
Let's start with something familiar.
Imagine a close friend calls you, upset about something that happened at work. They're angry, and as they tell you what happened, you can really understand why.
You listen. You acknowledge what they're feeling. Maybe you reflect back that, given what happened, their anger makes a lot of sense.
You're offering them empathy.
Now, this isn't that binary kind of love. You're not thinking, Yes! I'm so glad they're having this experience!
In fact, it's probably more on the dislike side. You wouldn't wish it on them.
But you're also not rejecting it.
You're able to stay with what's happening and offer them your presence, understanding, and support.
A lot of us, though, find it much harder to offer ourselves that same kind of presence and understanding when we're having experiences we don't like.
And I think there are a couple of reasons for that.
First, we don't necessarily want to be having the experience.
Anger, jealousy, fear, shame — these can be deeply uncomfortable feelings. We want to get away from them or get rid of them as quickly as possible.
And second, we often judge ourselves for having them.
I shouldn't be this angry. I shouldn't be jealous. I should be more compassionate or grateful.
So now we're not only dealing with the discomfort of the original feeling. We're also dealing with our resistance to it, and what we think having that feeling means about us.
And this is where I want us to shift our understanding of self-love.
Instead of thinking that self-love means feeling positively toward ourselves and our experience all the time, what if it meant relating to ourselves and our experience the way we would relate to someone we love?
We show up and listen.
We stay present and curious.
We make room for what we're experiencing.
If empathy is our ability to understand what it feels like to stand in someone else's shoes, what I'm proposing as self-love is taking some time to really recognize what it's like to stand in our own shoes, right now.
I'm not talking about how we want to feel, or think we should feel. But how we actually do feel.
And we don't have to like what we find. We don't have to agree with every thought that comes with it or act on every impulse.
We can dislike something, acknowledge that it's uncomfortable, and still allow ourselves to experience it.
And even more than that, we can support ourselves within the experience.
This is a different kind of love. It's not about feeling warm or affectionate. It's about our willingness to stay present with ourselves, allowing our hearts to hold what's here.
Why Pushing Away Difficult Emotions Can Keep Us Stuck
Now, if you're thinking, Well, that doesn't actually sound that fun. I'd much rather keep working toward a version of myself that doesn't have those negative feelings…
I get it.
But here's the problem. The very things we're doing to avoid uncomfortable feelings may actually be keeping us stuck in them — and getting in the way of some of the things we most want to experience in life.
There are a couple of things I think we tend to overlook when we treat uncomfortable emotions as problems to get rid of.
The first is that our emotions often have something to tell us. They're indicators.
Anger might be signaling that a boundary has been crossed. Jealousy might help us recognize more of what we want for ourselves. Fear might be alerting us to something that needs our attention.
And I'm not saying that every emotion is giving us an accurate picture of what's happening, or that we should act on every feeling we have.
But when our first response is to reject an emotion because we don't like how it feels, or we don't think we should be feeling it, we may miss the opportunity to understand what it's telling us.
And if we're longing for things like more self-trust, a stronger connection to our intuition, and greater clarity about what we want and need, learning to listen to these feelings — rather than automatically rejecting them — can actually help us develop those qualities.
The second thing has to do with what happens when we try to get rid of those feelings.
Usually, we're doing it because we don't want to get stuck in them.
We don't want to spend the whole day feeling angry. We don't want jealousy or insecurity taking over our experience. We want to feel peaceful, happy, inspired, or confident.
But our efforts to push those feelings away can actually keep us stuck in them, while also making it harder to experience more of what we want to feel.
Think about how we experience emotions.
They're not just ideas in our minds. They're physical experiences, too. There's sensation, activation, movement of energy. We might feel a heaviness in our chest, tightening in our belly, or a wave of heat moving through us.
Emotions are these fuller experiences that rise, intensify, change, and eventually settle.
But when we decide we shouldn't be feeling something, we often respond by tightening against it.
We brace. We try to suppress the feeling, distract ourselves, or think our way out of it.
So instead of allowing the experience of the emotion to move through us, we're struggling against it.
It's a little like putting a kink in a garden hose. We stop the flow, but to do so we have to create a restriction.
And here's why that matters.
We don't have one system for experiencing anger, fear, and sadness, and a completely separate system for experiencing joy, excitement, passion, and pleasure.
It's all happening within the same living, feeling body, mind, and heart.
So when we develop habitual patterns of tightening, suppressing, or disconnecting from emotions we don't like, those patterns don't magically switch off when a more positive emotion comes along.
The system is still restricted.
And the ways we've learned to brace against uncomfortable feelings can end up making it harder to fully experience the positive emotions we're wanting more of.
The excitement. The ease. The joy.
So really, my point is that as we learn to make room for more of our experience, rather than dividing it into a binary and continually contracting against the parts we don't like, we're developing a greater capacity to let life move through us.
And that leaves us feeling more fully alive.
Acceptance Is More Than an Idea
At this point, you might be thinking, All right, that makes sense. From now on I'll just be accepting of all my feelings.
But acceptance isn't just something we can understand and then decide to do. It's a capacity we have to develop throughout our whole system.
We can tell ourselves, It's okay that I'm angry. I accept my anger.
But our chest is still tight. Our jaw is still clenched. Our stomach is still in knots. And our thoughts are still spinning with stories about how we were wronged.
That's because our systems have learned certain ways of responding to uncomfortable experiences, and those patterns don't necessarily change just because we've decided they should.
And that's why insight and understanding can only take us so far.
Learning to Practice a Different Way of Relating to Ourselves
If we want to change these habitual responses, we have to include our whole system in the process.
So what does that look like?
Rather than trying to convince ourselves that we should feel differently, we begin learning how to turn toward the experiences we're actually having.
We develop skills for noticing what's happening in our bodies and welcoming the sensations, thoughts, emotions, and images moving through our awareness.
And we learn when and how to give ourselves a little more support.
This is something we practice. It's not something we just decide to do.
And I think it's worth practicing — not just for ourselves, but for the world around us.
Because when we learn to relate to the parts of ourselves we don't like with greater empathy, we're also developing a capacity that can help us relate differently to other people.
And that feels particularly important right now.
We live in a world that seems increasingly polarized. When we disagree with someone about something, it can become difficult to see beyond that one thing.
But as we learn to make room for more aspects of our own experience, we can learn to do the same with others, without reducing them to one side of a binary.
We can understand why someone feels the way they do without agreeing with their conclusions.
We can empathize with their experience without abandoning our own perspective.
To me, that's a much richer understanding of love than expecting that we should always feel positively toward ourselves or the people around us.
And I think that's the distinction worth remembering.
Self-love isn't necessarily about feeling warm and affectionate toward every aspect of ourselves or our experience. It's about learning how to relate to ourselves as someone we love, no matter what we're experiencing.
Explore Withness
This is what I teach through a practice called Withness — an embodied, relational practice that helps us develop a more supportive and connected way of relating to ourselves.
If you'd like to see what that looks like, you can watch a partnered Withness practice here.
You can also learn more about Withness and how to begin practicing.