“Be yourself.” “Trust yourself.” “Love yourself.”
At the heart of all such sentiments lies an unshakable belief that the quality of your relationships with others depends on the quality of your relationship with yourself. Hence the famous saying, “To love others, you must first love yourself.”
In my opinion, many in the self-help industry who parrot such advice do not really believe it. This is unintentional, of course. They do it not because they want to deceive you, but because they’re deceiving themselves. That’s why I want to remind you of an alternative to what has become nothing more than a cliché. It comes from one of my favorite books “The Power of Now”, where spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle answers the following question:
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Is it not true that you need to have a good relationship with yourself and love yourself before you can have fulfilling relationship with another person?
If you cannot be at ease with yourself when you are alone, you will seek a relationship to cover up your unease. You can be sure that the unease will then reappear in some other form within the relationship, and you will probably hold your partner responsible for it.
All you really need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at ease with yourself.
But do you need to have a relationship with yourself at all? Why can’t you just be yourself? When you have a relationship with yourself, you have split yourself into two: ‘I’ and ‘myself,’ subject and object. That mind-created duality is the root cause of all unnecessary complexity, of all problems and conflict in your life. In the state of enlightenment, you are yourself — ‘you’ and ‘yourself’ merge into one. You do not judge yourself, you do not feel sorry for yourself, you are not proud of yourself, you do not love yourself, you do not hate yourself, and so on. The split caused by self-reflective consciousness is healed, its curse removed. There is no ‘self’ that you need to protect, defend, or feed anymore. When you are enlightened, there is one relationship that you no longer have: the relationship with yourself.
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“The Power of Now” is excellent and necessary in its entirety.
I’m a freelance writer and mindfulness advocate behind this blog. I started my meditation practice in 2014, and in 2017 I launched this website to share what I learn with others. Here are the three things you can do here:
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