Understanding Self Love.

A lot of people go their whole lives making their self-worth conditional in order to act better: they take damage–dislike or judge themselves–whenever they act imperfectly or realise they are imperfect or don’t achieve the things they want to. In a world as unfair and uncontrollable as this one, I think taking so much damage is often not that functional. Moreover, I claim that you can care deeply while feeling worthwhile and suffused with compassion and affection and joy.

It is hard to do the most good when depressed, burned out, or feeling worthless. Even if this is not you, I think self-love might be worth aiming for–especially if you want to do something as difficult as saving the world.

I was on a plane to Malta when I realised I had lost something precious. I was struggling to meditate. I knew there was some disposition that made meditation easier for me in the past, something to do with internal harmony and compassion and affection. Alas, these handles failed to impact me. On a whim, I decided to read and meditate on some of my notes. 3h later, I had recovered the precious thing. It was one of the most special experiences of my life. I felt massive relief, but I was also a little scared–I knew that this state would likely pass. I made a promise to myself to not forget what I felt like, then, and to live from that place more. This post is, in part, an attempt to honour that promise. I spent most of my holiday in Malta reading about and meditating on the precious thing, and I now feel like I’m in a place where I can share something useful.

This post is about self-love. Until recently, I didn’t know that self-love was something I could aim for; that it was something worth aiming for. My guess is that I thought of self-love as something vaguely Good, a bit boring, a bit of a chore, a bit projection-loaded (I’m lovable; I love me so you can love me too), and lumped together with self-care (e.g. taking a bath). Then I found Nick Cammarata on Twitter and was blown away by the experiences he was describing. Nick tweeted about self-love from Sep 2020 to May 2021, and then moved on to other things. His is the main body of work related to self-love that I’m aware of, and I don’t want it to be lost to time. My main intention with this post is to summarise Nick’s work and build on it with my experiences; I want to get the word out on self-love, so that you can figure out whether it’s something you want to aim for. But I’m also going to talk a little about how to cultivate it and the potential risks to doing that. One caveat to get out of the way is that I’m a beginner–I’ve been doing this stuff for under a year, for way less than 1h/day. Another is that I expect that my positive experiences with self-love are strongly linked to me being moderately depressed before I started.

What is self-love?

Self-love is related to a lot of things and I’m not sure which are central. But I can point to some experiences that I have when I’m in high self-love states. While my baseline for well-being and self-love is significantly higher than it used to be, and I can mostly access self-love states when I want to, most of the time I am not in very high self-love states, because my attention is elsewhere. Some of the following experiences point to the core of what self-love feels like, some are actions or tendencies that self-love spins up out of, and some are consequences of self-love. It is hard to untangle these categories so I don’t try to.

• Take a second to imagine the love you might feel towards a newborn child or a cute animal. They probably haven’t done anything to ‘earn’ your love; they might even be acting unskillfully (admittedly, I don’t know what a skilful baby looks like). But you might love them anyway. Self-love feels quite like that for me: unconditional, newborn love.
• I feel bad about myself a lot less: I’ll notice a character defect or a way I acted unskillfully, and won’t feel bad about myself–similarly to how I would feel about a close friend messing up. It doesn’t follow from this that I don’t feel bad (I think traditionally ‘negative’ emotions can be functional), don’t want to change, or act differently in the future. More on this later. A consequence of this is that it is easier to see my imperfections, and to see the world, as opposed to flinching away from them. When states of the world directly impact your perceived self-worth, it can be really scary to see the world as it is. Some examples: a kid who wants to be a writer and cannot admit that she made a spelling mistake; my aversion to studying AI safety because doing that puts me in contact with the fact that I don’t know that much and hence that I’m worthless.
• Affection: I’ll drop and smash a plate, and where previously there might have been some frustration or self-judgement, the mental motion might be “Oh, silly Charlie, I still love you”. Or when I toned down a claim in this post just now I was like “Oh thank you for protecting me”. Importantly, I’m not saying empty words–I’m translating my feelings into words. The examples of affection above closely resemble how I’d feel towards a small child, but the affection can also feel more friend or partner-like. For example, I got drunk for the first time in a while last weekend, and found drunk Charlie really adorable.
• Compassionate awareness: I’ll define “compassion” as seeing suffering and being moved by it, where “being moved” might connote warmth and caring and non-judgement and desire to help. I’m often including my experience (emotions, thoughts, sensations) in my moment-to-moment awareness, greeting and feeling what’s happening to me. Sometimes I’ll notice that I’m conflicted or struggling or suffering, and will dive deeper. I find it useful to view myself as having many parts, who have different feelings and goals and functions. So I’ll often be talking to my parts and figuring out what they want and why, how they’re feeling, what they think of each other–and holding compassionate space for all of that to happen in. I find the parts model pretty useful for compassion and affection, in part because it’s easier for me to feel/send love when there’s some distance between the lover and the loved.
• Nick Cammarata says that a heuristic for self-love is that you feel like you’re walking around with someone you have a crush on (here is a thread from him about this, and here is one where he discusses the controversy that thread caused). It feels like that for me: romantic. But read “romantic” more as beautiful and exciting than including desire or projection, if those are part of your dating experience. There’s curiosity–wanting to know more about my experience–and awe and affection, and joy, at being able to share these moments with myself.
• Relatedly, I feel like I’m “with myself”, as opposed to “by myself”. This is how Nick describes feeling too: “My body feels different. Being in my body used to feel a bit like being in a neutrally-charged hollow shell interacting with the world, now it feels a bit like a stable and warm castle with a cozy quality. I feel like I am “with myself” inside of it. Others are outside, and I can open the castle and feel close to them, but staying inside with myself is the default.”
• Loving action: For example, attending to my experiences; paying attention to what I want and acting to make that happen; prioritising resolving internal conflict; not ignoring or shutting parts of me down; noticing a flicker of not-ok-ness while watching TV and pausing the TV to figure out what’s wrong and whether it’s ok to continue watching.
• I feel substantially safer, like I have a blanket wrapped around me. I don’t fully understand this, but I think it’s because I’m clinging less to external conditions being satisfied in order to feel worthwhile. I feel like I’m more capable of taking whatever the world throws at me. I still care about the external things, like whether a partner loves me, but I don’t cling to them in the same way.
• Worthiness/self-esteem: I used to have a strongly bad filter on my self-perception. Now I can more easily remember (to some extent) my inherent goodness and preciousness and beauty. I can also more clearly see all of the amazing things about me.
• Spending time with myself used to be unbearable–I would sink into awareness-collapsing distractions. In these states, spending time with myself is really fun, often more fun than spending time with friends. Time alone is nourishing and special.
• Happiness: In my experience, it is a lot easier to do anything when I have surplus happiness, and it is extremely difficult to do anything when depressed. Self-love makes me very happy so I’m able to do the things that matter to me. This is a tweet thread where Nick writes that raising happiness baselines is possible and incredibly important.
• Energy: Part of this is fighting myself less, which includes less suffering-based motivation and internal conflict. Freeing up those resources has been astonishingly powerful for me. Part is not needing to invest emotional resources into trying and needing to feel loved, because I have a wellspring within.
• More love for others and the world.

Like Our Story ? Donate to Support Us, Click Here

You want to share a story with us? Do you want to advertise with us? Do you need publicity/live coverage for product, service, or event? Contact us on WhatsApp +16477721660 or email Adebaconnector@gmail.com