Two Types of Self-Love - (473)

An Observation

I always travel to see my friends and as I am approaching their house I usually always feel great. One day I observed that I feel great visiting them because I had the thought that because they like me and look forward to seeing me I feel great. I observed further and saw that that feeling great is me feeling good about myself, in other words me liking myself. It happened that things didn’t go so smoothly one day and my friends were not so happy with me and then the next day going to see them I felt awful. I went inside myself looking for an answer and I found to my surprise that I was feeling bad about myself because they were I thought thinking and feeling negatively towards me.

Now really to my surprise I started to counteract that, because it was a very nervous type of feeling that was very unpleasant. I thought to myself well this time round I havn’t done anything wrong, my friends just didn’t like what I did or said and so why can’t me myself feel ok about myself. So then I began to bring up reasons as to why I can feel good about myself. This actually helped me to feel better. I know it sounds pretty silly but I have to be honest and say that it helped and counteracted that strong negative emotion. It showed me that we must generate love for ourselves and not depend on others for it.

Conclusion

Recently I learnt that the opposite of these negative feelings towards oneself is the love for the Being. In a way we are the Being but just derived so there are two types of self-love.

There is the type of love for ourselves, which is relative and uses others outside of ourselves as a reference and generating point. Then there is the self-love which comes from inside of ourselves. This, the latter type of self-love is the one which is positive and is the right one, and is the one which we need to cultivate and possess.

End (473).