How do we love ourselves? I think in reaction to this long history of negative morality and self-rejecting spirituality, we have moved today, sometimes in a conflicting, selfcontradictory way, to another extreme where we are told we’ve got to be good to ourselves: Look after yourself; be kind to yourself; give yourself a holiday; if you want to do something, do it. This is where love of self often becomes little more than self-indulgence, where to love ourselves is just to give ourselves a constant series of little treats. It may be necessary and good for us to go to the other extreme a bit. Clearly there’s a wisdom in that modern, popular psychology of being good to ourselves. But I think what the spiritual tradition, and the teaching of meditation, reminds us is that to love ourselves, is to find a middle path between self-denial and self-rejection on the one hand, and self-indulgence and narcissism on the other. Somewhere between self-rejection and self-indulgence, we find our true capacity to love ourselves.
(Aspects of Love 2 by Laurence Freeman OSB )
