The difficulty and the challenge is that we are learning, as our first step, to love ourselves. And most of us, come to meditation with strong forces of self-hatred, self-distrust, self-rejection. Most of us, particularly in our religious upbringing, had been told that we must be very suspicious of ourselves when we were taught to examine our conscience, even as young children. When we were taught to go to confession, our first prejudice, the prejudice with which we were trained, was that we must first look for our faults because those are the aspects of ourselves that God is most aware of, and those are the aspects of ourselves which we must be frightened of because we will be punished for them. So we were taught, even as young children, to consider ourselves as essentially suspicious, dangerous, as sinful.
(Aspects of Love 2 by Laurence Freeman OSB )
