I love … myself? — Yoga The World
I love myself.
This is not an easy sentence to write.
First off, it is hard because I don’t know that it is entirely true. Do I really love myself? Or more to the point, do I love myself, the way I want my child to be loved: unconditionally, emphatically, joyously, limitlessly? To be fair, probably not, or at least not always.
In a more pointed way, it is also a hard sentence to write, because we don’t talk about ourselves like that. Saying “I love myself” out loud makes me feel self-conscious and ashamed. In the culture I grew up in — Denmark — self-love is seen as indulgent and gauche at best, and taboo and sinful at worst. We think of it as snootiness, a sense of hateful superiority. Don’t believe you are better than us, we say. Don’t believe you could be anything other than us. Interestingly, Scandinavian culture is also quite self-satisfied. We tend to believe we, as a collective, do things better than others, we just don’t accept anyone taking any credit for themselves.
But there is a difference between self-love and selfishness. In fact, self-love is at the root of all empathy. As any dating-advice guru will tell you: if you can’t love yourself, you can’t love anyone else. We throw around this nugget of wisdom with abandon, but few of us actually live it. Because it is hard. The truth is this: most of us don’t love ourselves enough to take care of each other and the planet.
For me, a remedy for this has been yoga.
Yoga teaches the connection between moving through the world with care and knowing ourselves so deeply that the love shines through. And because it is an embodied practice, I get to know my body — how it feels, how it moves, who it is — before I have to see the love with my mind and feel it with my soul.
In short, yoga taught me to love myself. The first time I felt fully grounded in myself, fully aligned, fully resting in love, was one sunny Saturday morning walking home from the studio. Suddenly, and without knowing where it came from, I said out loud: “I love … myself?” It came out as a question.
And that question still stays with me, as the central inquiry in my practice.
Originally published at https://www.yogatheworld.org on August 5, 2022.
