Loving-Kindness: The Backdoor Into Self-Love
When I was in my 20s and struggling with relationships (romantically and otherwise), occasionally someone would offer the well-intentioned advice, "You really have to love yourself first, you know..."
I hated that advice.
It felt:
a) condescending
and
b) more or less impossible.
The notion that it was possible to feel genuinely warm and fuzzy about myself made me feel even worse about how brutal I was generally being with myself.
So I was always looking for a shortcut.
I thought there had to be an easier way to get ready to enter authentically loving relationships with people than loving myself.
Because if that was the only way, I was screwed.
And just like I used to hate the idea of learning to love myself, I dismissed the Buddhist practice of loving-kindness for years.
Yogis kept telling me about how the practice had softened their hearts and created room for forgiveness where previously there'd been none. It sounded too hokey to me though.
Sitting around focusing on my heart and repeating that I wish myself and others well, and expecting it to actually change anything? Please. I felt way too far gone for that.
But its simplicity is precisely why the practice of loving-kindness is so brilliant.
It's like a backdoor into self-love.
Loving-kindness is about cultivating a basic quality of friendliness, starting with ourselves.
And treating ourselves with friendliness — wishing ourselves health and well-being — is a lot easier for most of us to stomach initially than emptily repeating "I love myself!!" right out of the gate.
Loving-kindness is like training wheels before moving onto the big girl bike of genuine affection toward ourselves.
And despite my initial resistance, the practice has been the one that — paired with self-compassion — has probably most dramatically shifted my relationship with myself, and by extension, to others and to life, over the years.
A general sense of OK-ness about and warmth toward myself have, over time, become my new default.
And simply treating yourself with basic friendliness is the starting point.
Because once you think of yourself as a friend, it becomes much harder to judge and talk the kind of trash to yourself your Inner Critic has been laying on for decades.
We just don't speak unkindly to our friends like that.
Whether you call it loving yourself or being a good friend to yourself or loving-kindness or whatever you like, one way you can get started enjoying life in earnest is by practicing treating yourself with the kind of kindness you'd wish for someone you care about.
And yes, for most of us, this takes some whole-hearted practice.
Because there tends to be a fair amount of deep conditioning and long-held beliefs that need to be unwound to free us up from, as Tara Brach calls it, the "trance of unworthiness."
If the idea of "self-love" feels like too much, no problem. Ditch it (for now or forever).
But maybe the door is open enough — and even just a tiny sliver is enough — to play with starting to be just a little friendlier to yourself?
If you'd like to see about getting a loving-kindness practice of your own going, Sharon Salzberg's book Loving-Kindness, The Revolutionary Art of Happiness is a fantastic starting point.
And if you'd like to experience a guided loving-kindness meditation firsthand, I made this for you.
Lots of Love (and friendliness),