Can You Love Others Without Loving Yourself First?
This post was inspired by a subscriber’s question. If you have a question that you’d like me to answer or a topic that you would like me to cover about yoga on or off the mat, feel free to reach out! I’ll do my best to answer you. This essay is a bit rambling, but I hope gives some food for thought.
The question was whether or not we have to love ourselves first before we are capable of loving other people. I love this question as it’s very nuanced and not at all straightforward. My favorite type of discussion. This is my insight, and I only have it in retrospect from looking back on my life and practices.
What is love?
The question of “what is love?” seems like a useful place to start. There are many types of love: familial, romantic, friendship, and love for humanity. There is also love for self. I firmly believe every being is capable of love, both giving and receiving, but the depth of that love will vary according to inner beliefs about oneself.
Love is a feeling in your heart. It is a warmth and fullness that fills your chest and being. Love feels safe and scary at the same time. Love is expansive, infinite, and universal. Love is something you feel, and there is no metric to measure it accurately. I only know what I know through my own experience.
As I wrote in “The Mind is a Liar. Only the Gut Tells You the Truth,” the heart feels all the emotions. The heart is capable of (but not limited to) feeling anger, frustration, grief, sadness, fear, worry, joy, and of course, love. While each of these feelings are chemical washes that your brain gives you due to different stimuli, from a more spiritual perspective, I like to think of the heart having its own wisdom and experience.
Feeling love is your birthright
If you are alive, you deserve to feel love. However, certain life circumstances might make you believe that you don’t deserve it. Messages like you are “too much” or “not enough” might leave you feeling undeserving. These beliefs come from how other people treat you when you are young (parents, teachers, friends), but are not actually true. Until you unlearn these beliefs, and learn that you are deserving of love, both from others and yourself, your ability to love others will be limited.
Love is infinite, but your ability to access it is limited by your beliefs. I view love like flowing water: it can flow outward, inward, and all around, but can be defined by the structure containing it. Your negative beliefs about yourself put up little dams and walls, stopping the water from flowing; removing those beliefs will help the water flow freely and openly. If you hold beliefs that you are '“too much” or “not enough,” it’s as if your mind is throwing little obstacles in the way of the water flowing toward you. The stronger the belief, the stronger the obstacle.
When you have an open heart that is not limited by your mind, love can flow easily, both in and out. I did not always have this understanding, it’s something I’ve learned over time.
Receiving love is difficult when you don’t love yourself; you feel like you don’t deserve it. As a teen and young adult, I loved some of my boyfriends, my husband, my family, and my friends, and it felt big and important. But the love I am capable of feeling today is deeper, fuller, and stronger than any love I was capable of back then. As my capacity to love myself expanded, and I let go of limiting beliefs about my worthiness, my capacity to love others also grew.
You don’t know what you don’t know until you know.
You can’t love another fully if your heart is shut down and protected. When you’ve been hurt, as many of us have, you might wall off your heart to prevent yourself from further heartbreak. Unfortunately, unless you are open to heartbreak, you won’t be open to love. Staying protected keeps you from being fully seen; if you aren’t fully seen, you can’t be fully loved as yourself.
Vulnerability is the secret to love, and you can’t be vulnerable without having a solid foundation in loving yourself. Opening your heart willy-nilly and being vulnerable with anyone is a recipe for disaster. Not everyone deserves your heart, time, and attention. You are just torturing yourself and leaving yourself open to unnecessary pain and suffering. Those that do, however, require that you be vulnerable to create the heart to heart connection that love requires. Vulnerable, but with proper boundaries.
How much love can flow from one person to another depends on their own ability to love themselves. During a meditation practice many years ago, I received the message from my future self that I am Love. I didn’t believe it or really understand it at the time, but I do now. I know that you are Love too, but you may not believe me yet. That’s okay. These mindset shifts take time.
For many people (including myself) it feels easier to give than receive. You can be loving toward other people, and horrible in your own self-talk. But behaving in a loving way and holding love that flows is different. Everyone can be kind to another person, even if you are not kind to yourself.
If the only amount of love you have for yourself is enough for survival, that is something. That tiny drop of self-love will give you the capacity to love others. However, how much love you can give is contingent on how much you can open and love yourself.
The more you live your life with a closed heart, the harder it is to love another fully. You can feel love for them, but your capacity is much smaller, as there are many blocks in the way. It may be the most you can possibly love at that moment.
The more you do heart opening work, like yoga, meditation, gratitude, etc, the more capacity you have to love yourself and then love others. First work on yourself, then your love can flow freely to the people in your life that deserve your love.
Heart Opening Practices
Two of my favorite heart opening practices are Gratitude and Metta Meditation.
Gratitude
As I have written before, Gratitude is a heart opening practice where you focus on things for which you are grateful. You can simply say these things to yourself, or write them down in a journal. I find that writing them down is helpful, then you can explore why you are grateful through your writing.
Saying what you are grateful for is good, as long as you also feel it. Saying it without feeling it doesn’t work. As someone who has tried to avoid feeling for much of my life, it can be easy to bypass the feeling and just go through the motion of doing the exercise. It doesn’t work that way.
Try writing down 3 things that you are grateful for like this:
I am grateful for my cup of tea in the morning. I look forward to its warmth as I hold it in my hands. I enjoy the aroma as the steam wafts into my nose, and the comfort it gives me as I drink it.
I am grateful for this beautiful Fall day. I love seeing the blue sky contrasted against the changing colors of the leaves. We’ve had so many gray days recently, I am grateful to see the sun again.
I am grateful for the heartfelt conversation with my love. I felt seen, heard, and valued. I am grateful to be able to share difficult things with him and not be judged. I am grateful that I have him in my life.
Each day, do this again, but with 3 different things. There’s no one right way to practice Gratitude, this is just a suggestion. You may notice that as you practice, your mind shifts toward optimism, because what you focus on grows.
Metta Meditation
Metta means LovingKindness, and is a Buddhist meditation practice that is traditionally practiced by sending LovingKindness toward yourself, your loved ones, and then the world. If you have trouble being loving toward yourself, you might find it useful to send Metta to someone you love first, then to yourself, so you can cultivate that feeling in your heart first. I have also practiced sending it to someone you love, then someone you struggle with in your life, then yourself. This breeds compassion and understanding for our common humanity. There are many ways to practice and one is not better than another.
How to Practice LovingKindness:
Sit quietly and comfortably, in a chair, on a cushion, or on the floor. Sit with your hips higher than your knees, with your knees supported. Have a long, straight spine, but hold it upright with ease. Close your eyes and visualize the person to whom you are sending LovingKindness, and repeat these phrases:
May you be happy.
May you be safe.
May you have shelter and enough food to eat.
May you know and receive love.
May you know peace.
Visualize yourself, a loved one, and the world, or whatever variety of people you wish to work with in your mind and heart as you repeat these phrases in you head. Notice how you feel afterward.
How do you feel about this idea that you can only love someone else to the extent that you can love yourself? Do you struggle with self love? Feel free to share your ideas about this concept in the comments below.
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Your metaphor of flowing water as an image for love really resonated with me and feels true to my own experience. Most of the time when I've felt cut off from love, it's been because I've pushed it away from me by separating myself from others, being afraid to approach them as myself. It's something I still do, in large part because in the family I grew up in it almost never felt like a safe place to practice vulnerability. In fact, being vulnerable was often punished with ridicule. This is why I'm convinced of the importance of a community or sangha. I think it's very hard to convince yourself on your own that you are worthy of love *and* that others can and will find you lovable. When your early experiences of life are in a setting where others don't treat you as lovable, you need a communal experience to convince you that this first experience was wrong. At least that's what I believe. Thank you for this piece, and I don't think it meandered at all.
Hi Janine! What a wonderful and truly insightful piece 👏 I LOVE this! ❤️