“If you aren’t good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you’ll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren’t even giving to yourself.”
—Barbara De Angelis
 

 hesitate to use the expression “loving yourself,” because that’s such an inaccurate way to talk about the process of non-separation. Once you see how it all works, there will no longer be an absence of love.

But it is dramatic enough to grab our attention. It forces us to look directly at the self-hate that plagues us. And we need to address those voices of self-hate because they alone con us into seeing ourselves as separate from all of life – to believe externals exist and require our attention and energy at the expense of our own welfare. Then they point out how we are expending our energy on those “others” and how we now need to hoard it for ourselves. So we vacillate from doormat to foot wiper. I get nothing/I get everything.

Welcome to “narcissism:” The radical swing to the opposite side of the spectrum that is the same ego process. Self-hate disguised as self-love. Instead of “I’m the worst,” I now play on the riff of “I’m the best.” And there we go, back and forth. Separate. Still involved in the game of “something wrong/not enough.” Still on the dramatic roller-coaster ride of suffering.

To be invited to the party of living beings worthy of time and attention is our task at hand. When the cycle includes all of life, not just them OR me, satisfaction happens. The balance we crave is restored.

And it’s not that we’re now suddenly included. It’s that we realize there was never any separation in the first place.

That realization feels like home. Peace. Equanimity. Now we expend energy because we have it to go round. The energy of love.