Elevating the Human Experience

Chapter 5Self-Love and Self-Worth

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

—Buddha

The first path to elevating the human experience is the path of the self. Ironically, it can be one that we learn to avoid taking because there is no version of the inner journey that does not include a frank reckoning with pain and our mental health—not something that makes for polite conversation in the workplace. For many, we simply don't know what to do with our pain. For me, painful emotions can feel like a river that flows through me. My struggle to feel worthy is always there. The waters are always moving. Sometimes it's a barely discernible trickle. At other times the waters run fast, and the current tugs at my tears. Sometimes, I will admit, I succumb and fall into the river. I have fallen in enough times on my journey to elevate my own personal experience to have faith in the riverbank on the other side. Sometimes even the hope of it helps when I cannot yet see it. A mentor of mine once told me that there is no way to avoid pain; the only way is through it. And so, the journey begins.

History of Self-Love

Self-love, I now know, means warm and caring feelings of love directed towards yourself unapologetically and unconditionally. This understanding of self-love seems to me an unalloyed good, something that we might all learn to foster to close off the bottomless hole inside us. You would think that we are born with an ability to love ...