This Is The Inward Path
Why Self-Love Is The Foundation For Unconditional Love
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This was inspired by a quote from Dan Krynn that Joe Krynn pointed out to me here, which I thought was really great:
When someone says âself-love is the doorway to unconditional love,â I get it. Your first thought is likely to be something like, âThat sounds incredibly self-centered.â Iâve been there and Iâve seen it that way before too.
Weâve been conditioned to think that focusing on ourselves is something that is inherently selfish, that exhibiting real love means putting everyone else first and ourselves last. But thatâs not what âself-loveâ actually means, and the confusion isnât accidental.
The whole concept of âself-loveâ has been co-opted, packaged, and sold back to us as bubble baths and affirmations and expensive retreats. The self-love âindustryâ has taken something profound and turned it into a commodity, stripping away its real power until itâs just another thing to buy or another Insta or TikTok trend to follow.
A lot of people dismiss it as âNew Age nonsenseâ because theyâve only ever encountered the watered-down, marketable version and they have a justifiable distaste for that. Most have never actually explored what it means to genuinely love yourself, not as an act of narcissism, but as a spiritual practice.
Hereâs the thing: Self-love IS the love of God. And I donât mean that in some abstract, metaphorical way. We are all literal fractal and holographic facets of God. Every single one of us. Weâre not separate from the divine. Weâre expressions of the divine. When you go inward to listen to your quiet inner voice, when you really sit with yourself in silence and truth, thatâs where you connect with God.
When you go inside, your relationship with your interior self will express itself in your experience of the exterior world. This is how manifestation works. The implicate impacts the explicate on the quantum level. What you see in your mindâs eye collapses the wave, moves the superposition of choices into a single choice, a wave to a particle, and produces the outcome that you see.
This becomes your experience. You visualize the outcome as if it has already occurred and then take action on it, and the universe brings it into being because you are co-creating your experience with God as a fractal and holographic facet of God. All things have consciousness. All things are affected by your consciousness. This is why we have the expressions âas above, so belowâ and âas within, so without.â
How you relate to yourself is how you relate to everything else. Everything functions as a mirror. If youâre at war with yourself internally, the world will feel hostile. If youâre disconnected from yourself inside, you may feel isolated from everyone around you.
But when you genuinely love yourself, when you see yourself as the sacred being you are, you start to see everyone else that way too, and your love for them and for yourself takes on a transcendent quality that cannot exist otherwise.
If we could love ourselves the way we love God, fully, without condition and without judgment, then we could love each other that same way. We could feel love for one another completely and without reservation. This is the potential we strive for.
Most of us arenât there yet. Most of us are still healing our relationship with who we really are. And thatâs okay. Thatâs what this whole journey is all about. Until we reach that place of true self-love, we will keep encountering mirrors so that we can keep learning and healing.
We will keep finding people and situations that reflect back to us all of the parts of ourselves that we havenât accepted yet, all of the wounds that we havenât healed, all of the lessons we still need to learn.
Our lessons are not punishments from the universe. Our lessons are opportunities to grow. Every difficult relationship, every painful pattern, every time we feel unloved or unseen, rejected or abandoned, lonely or wounded⌠these are all invitations for us to go deeper, to look inward, and to ask what part of ourselves weâre still rejecting. Ending self-rejection ends projection.
This is what shadow work really is. Itâs sitting with all of the parts of yourself that you rejected because you thought they made you unlovable. And you pour them a cup of tea, give them a hug, and stop rejecting them.
Imagine your five year old self sitting in front of you asking for your love and your kindness. Would you deny that little version of you your heart? Accept the traits that protected you as a kid but no longer serve you as an adult, see the upside of what they offered, thank those parts of you for keeping you safe, forgive yourself for abandoning those parts of yourself, and reintegrate the now healed parts you once pushed away out of fear.
Itâs all just a great big house of mirrors until we do the work. We keep seeing distorted reflections, confusing projections, all of the same lessons, over and over, ad nauseam, in different disguises.
We blame others, we blame circumstances, we run from relationship to relationship, job to job, place to place, always thinking the next one will be different. But the mirror follows us and the lessons repeat because we take ourselves wherever we go.
The only way out is in. We have to go inward and connect with God inside ourselves. We have to heal the fractures, reintegrate the parts weâve disowned, love the pieces weâve been taught to hate.
This is the Great Work, the sacred work it takes to heal each of the tiny parts of Source consciousness with which we have each entrusted, and then reintegrating, coming back into a state of wholeness with the All.
Once we heal, once we remember who we really are, once we love ourselves as divine beings, thatâs when everything starts to change. Thatâs when all of the mirrors become windows, and we can see ourselves and others clearly at last. Thatâs when we can finally love each other unconditionally.
Special thanks to The Brothers Krynn.
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Fascinating! There are a lot of parallels between this and classical Stoicism.
Thanks so much for this! Appreciate the shout-out and this was definitely worth the read, self-love isn't discussed nearly enough.