I’ve heard it all my life: you have to love yourself. I’ve never been sure what it asks of me.
Loving other people was never my challenge. I do it every day, and sometimes it arrives for a total stranger, with no history and no reason.
I walked out of a coffee shop once and saw an old man holding his arm awkwardly. He had clearly had a stroke. I have a left side of my own, so I know something of what he has been through. I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t need to. I just felt great compassion for him, because he is me and I am him.
It happens in other places too. Someone is struggling: maybe they’re overweight, maybe they’re disabled, maybe they just have their hands full and they’ve had a bad day. They aren’t hurting anyone, and they don’t need me to judge them. So I don’t. I can feel empathy and love for them without ever knowing them, because I can remember that the struggle isn’t all they are.
Loving myself has been the mystery. I don’t dislike myself, and I’ve accepted who and what I am, flaws included. If that were all of it, I’d be finished. I’m not. Two layers are still on my list: not judging myself, and forgiving myself. Acceptance is a decision. These two are practices.
This is the third piece in a small series. In The Two Five-Year-Olds I wrote about how old wounds wake up inside adult relationships. In Quiet Love I wrote about the steady kind of love I once mistook for boring. This one turns toward the person I spend the most time with.
A definition I can stand behind
If one holds oneself dear, one should protect oneself well.
The phrase is popular, but it isn’t precise. People use it to mean confidence, self-esteem, self-care, or just not being cruel in your own head.
Two thinkers helped me sort it out. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving, argued that love of others and love of ourselves are not alternatives. He treated love as a practice more than a feeling, built from care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. The psychologist Kristin Neff gives the clearest working definition I’ve found. She calls it self-compassion and breaks it into three parts: kindness toward ourselves instead of judgment, a sense of common humanity instead of isolation, and mindfulness instead of getting swept up in our own feelings. Of the three, common humanity is the one I’d been missing. I had accepted myself, but I hadn’t always been kind to myself.
So here is the working definition I’ll use: self-love is the steady practice of treating yourself as a good friend would. That means paying attention, being honest, and being kind, especially when you’ve fallen short. It isn’t self-esteem, which depends on how things are going. It isn’t indulgence. And it isn’t narcissism, which is self-absorption without any real attention.
Sitting, uncomplicated
Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.
I’m good at sitting quietly, and I’d like to keep it simple. Some people call it meditation, but I don’t want to complicate it. I sit. I don’t try to stop thinking, because I’ve never believed that was the goal. I watch my thoughts the way you’d watch weather from a porch. Mostly I enjoy the calm. Once you get comfortable with it, it’s hard to believe how good it feels.
The five-year-old in the room
When I sit long enough, I sometimes notice I’m not alone. There’s a five-year-old in there. Call him a metaphor if you like, but he’s a useful one.
When I sit with him, I remember what he’s been through. I remember his strength and his gentle nature. And I remind myself not to forget him as I go about the business of life, work, and parenting.
I’m learning to give him what I give my boys and anyone else I care about: attention, patience, and a willingness to stay. It may be human nature that we’re the last to receive the love and compassion we’re so eager to give everyone around us. Sitting quietly lets me see the deepest parts of myself, and nothing much more needs to be done than witnessing. He doesn’t need to be judged, condemned, resented, or ignored.
What the old traditions kept saying
Commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still.
When I started wondering whether this was self-love, I went looking to see whether anyone else had arrived here. Apparently everyone had. I’m not recommending any one tradition, and I don’t think any of them holds the answer. What struck me is how many, working independently, ended up in the same room.
In fourth-century Egypt, a young monk asked the elder Abba Moses for a word of advice and was told to go sit in his cell. It wasn’t a technique. It was an instruction to stop running around and stay put. In 1658, George Fox wrote to a friend, “Be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit,” and the Quaker meeting grew from that, an hour of shared silence with nothing to perform.
The Dhammapada links self-regard to attention: if you hold yourself dear, keep watch over yourself. The Bhagavad Gita (6.5) doesn’t ask you to adore yourself. It says, “the Self alone is the friend of the self.”
Here is where the comparison stops. The phrase “self-love” is mostly modern, and these traditions rarely say “love yourself.” They say stay, watch, be still. Some, like Buddhism, are wary of the self altogether. But look at what they ask for and what a good friend does: pay attention, stay, don’t flinch.
The child in everyone else
I sometimes find it useful to imagine that there is a five-year-old somewhere in everyone else too. I don’t know his story, and the temptation is to invent one, to explain the adult in front of me by constructing the child who must have produced them.
I don’t need to do that. It is enough to remember that there is a history I can’t see. That doesn’t excuse cruelty, and it doesn’t make every wound mine to understand. It simply leaves a little room between what someone does and my judgment of who they are. I can only do this because I’ve practiced on myself. Much of what motivates me comes from the unseen five-year-old in me.
Understanding is not excusing
This is the part I most want to be clear about. Remembering the child in someone doesn’t excuse what the adult does. A person who was hurt is still responsible for what they do with that hurt. The Dhammapada says it bluntly (verse 165): by oneself is wrong done, by oneself is one purified, and no one purifies another. The Gita warns that the self can be its own enemy as well as its own friend.
What the child-lens does is inform, and what it informs is me. It lets me meet an outburst with curiosity in place of contempt. It keeps me from making their behavior about me, which I used to do. It doesn’t tell me why they did it, because I don’t know. But informing isn’t excusing, and remembering that someone is hurt doesn’t mean staying close to them. I can hold that there is a history I can’t see and still say no, still leave, still protect the people I love. I find it easier to hold a firm boundary when I’m not also holding a grudge.
The same rule applies to me. My own five-year-old explains my patterns. He doesn’t give me permission to repeat them.
Nothing soft about it
I cringe a little writing all this, because it sounds like self-help, the soft kind, with candles and affirmations. I don’t trust that kind. It sells easy answers, and I don’t believe in easy answers or magic pills.
The truth is that there’s nothing soft about it. I like to think of it as punk rock. I don’t mean the sound. I mean the stance: fierce, deliberate, and willing to refuse what we’re handed. The world tells us to be busy, useful, and productive, to keep our insides out of sight and keep moving. My own rule was simpler: keep moving, be useful, take care of what needs taking care of, and don’t make yourself the thing that needs attention. Sitting still and attending to a neglected part of yourself breaks every one of those rules. It’s a small act of defiance, and it has to be chosen again every day.
I think it’s a fight for freedom. The first fight is with forces outside: the expectations, the pace, the voices that say this is a waste of time. But the harder one, the one that lasts, is with the forces inside. The old judgments. The habit of ignoring the one person who’s always there. Those are what hold us back most.
The old traditions would recognize this. The desert monks walked away from the world on purpose. The Quakers sat in silence against the religion of their day, and their founder was arrested and jailed many times for it. None of it was soft. It was deliberate and counter-cultural, and it took nerve. The fierceness is in the deciding. The sitting itself is quiet.
Practice, and the return
Love, for others or for yourself, is a practice, and it follows the same rules as every other practice I’ve tried. It isn’t easy. It isn’t constant. It stalls, and pushing harder doesn’t fix it. And the more you do it, the faster you can come back when something throws you off.
I learned this the hard way, in a boat. For years I pushed, and for a long time pushing worked. Then it stopped. More training and harder effort stopped making me faster and started making me hurt. My body pulled me back before I would do it myself, and what it asked for was presence. I had never let myself enjoy where I was or what I had already done. I only ever aimed at the next piece.
Sitting is the part of training I skipped. There are weeks when I sit every morning and am gentle with the five-year-old, and weeks when I run right over him.
What practice gives you isn’t perfection. It’s the return. Work, parenting, and life will throw me off, and they always do. The skill is how quickly I notice I’ve gone and how gently I come back. I used to disappear from myself for days before I noticed. Now I catch it sooner, not always in the moment, but often enough to know that returning is becoming a habit too. Nobody finishes learning to love. You just get better at returning.
Why I start here
It will look different for other people. For some it’s a walk, a run, a prayer, a journal, a long ride. Mine starts by sitting quietly.
When I wrote about quiet love between two people, I kept landing on the same things: steady, present, attentive, still there tomorrow. None of it is dramatic, and all of it is attention. If that’s what love is, then sitting quietly and noticing what’s here, including the part of me that was never noticed, may be one of the most direct ways to love myself. I don’t claim it’s the only way, or the biggest. It’s a hunch, not a finding. But I do think attention comes first, because kindness and forgiveness are hard to offer to someone you haven’t noticed.
If you’ve been waiting to feel like you love yourself, try something smaller.
Sit down.
Stay a while.
And when you wander, come back.
He is me, and I am him.