Here is bell hooks, author of All About Love, the book we are exploring in this year’s year-long sermon series. 

Love is our focus all year long. Different aspects of love. Today, we look at the aspect known as self-love. And as bell hooks, says, “When I talked with friends and acquaintances about self-love, I was surprised to see how many of us feel troubled by the notion….” 

Does the notion of “self-care” trouble you? 

One of my favorite TV shows is RuPaul’s Drag Race, and RuPaul concludes every show by saying, “If you can’t love yourself, how the heck are you going to love somebody else?” And then she says, “Can I get an AMEN up in here??” It makes me smile, but it also unnerves me. It’s meant to be inspiring but it only reminds me that I can do the self-love thing in a fumbling way, and the reminder sends me into a sense of shame. How is it that this very basic self-care action can be so hard to understand and to practice? 

Can you relate? 

What is “loving yourself” all about, really? 

Reading bell hooks’ book and writing this sermon have helped me to better understand why it can be so confusing. After all, the definitions of love we repeatedly encounter in American culture are bad. Definitions serve to shape the imagination which, in turn, determine how we see and what we see. Bad definitions send us off on wild goose chases to seek for things that don’t really exist; bad definitions also prevent us from noticing and naming the things that do exist and might actually be right in front of us, waving furiously to get our attention.   

Take one of these bad definitions: that love is feelings of tender, passionate affection. This is the very popular definition of love as romance. If this is the definition at play, then when talk about self-love comes up, intellectual and emotional gears probably seize up. Loving myself means feeling romantic affection for myself? But how is that going to happen? It happens with other people, not myself. Furthermore, I live with myself. All. The. Time. All the time, I see things in myself that are unattractive, anxiety-producing, boring, frustrating, gross–not sexy, in short. Whenever such things arise in my romantic relationships with others, the romance loses steam. So how can I ever expect to feel romance towards myself??

Loving myself? Whaaaat? That’s just nonsense!

Or, consider another bad definition of love: that love is overindulgence. bell hooks points to some patterns of childrearing for the origin of this definition. Children who are overindulged, she says, grow up thinking that “love is not about what they have to give, love is mostly something given to them.” So, if this is the definition at play when talk of self-love comes up, the response is typically, So, you’re saying I ought to be more selfish? You’re saying that narcissism and an “it’s-all-about-me” mentality is ok? 

But that’s not ok!

Intuitively, we know that our personal well-being depends on an absence of self-contempt and self-withering shame; intuitively, we know that we won’t have much to give to others if “this little light of mine” is flickering and about to go out. “If you can’t love yourself, how the heck are you going to love somebody else?” There must be love for one’s self. But the self-love of romantic feelings or of unrestrained narcissism can’t be it. 

So what is it then? What is this self-love thing? 

bell hooks draws from psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s classic self-help book The Road Less Traveled for her basic answer. She quotes directly from Peck: “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will–namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” Love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” 

Everything follows from that. That’s the definition that will transform all talk about self-love. That’s the definition she runs with when articulating key aspects of how to do it.  

Chapter four in her book All About Love is where this mainly happens. There, we read that self-love is essentially an act of will in pursuit of building self-esteem. You choose to do this, even when your feelings about yourself might be meh or worse. 

So let’s get self-love back on track. Here we go. 

Self-love starts with the choice–however awkward, however scary–to stand up for yourself. “Since many of us,” says bell hooks, “were shamed in childhood either in our families of origin or in school settings, a learned pattern of going along with the program and not making a fuss is the course of action we most frequently choose as a way to avoid conflict.” 

I am standing up for myself right now, so to speak, by sitting down. The voice in my head says that preachers gotta stand when they preach. 20 years of ministry and I’ve never not delivered the sermon while standing up. But I’m recovering from hip surgery and this is just where things are right now. So I sit–to stand up for myself. I dare to disrupt the old “anything-but-make-a-fuss” survival strategy…..

Last year, when I was leading my Mandala Meditation Class here at West Shore, I had an opportunity to go deeper into the self-minimizing survival strategy. The class’s focus had been mindfulness meditation and the teachings of Pema Chodron, who says that the “essence of meditation is training … to stay with ourselves no matter what is happening, without putting labels of good and bad, right and wrong, pure and impure, on top of our experience.” She says, “[T]he willingness to sit there for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour, an hour, however long you sit there–this is a compassionate gesture of developing loyalty or steadfastness to yourself.” “[It is] the ability to become awake to our lives, to each and every moment, just as it is. […] And we have a lot of resistance to just being here!” These were the Pema Chodron teachings we were collectively absorbing, in the Mandala Meditation Class, and after one of these classes I found myself wondering about the incredible resistance to just being here–about the terrible lack of loyalty to oneself that this implies. 

I didn’t have to wonder for too long. I remembered how, growing up, I learned very quickly to be disloyal to myself as a condition of being acceptable to my primary caregivers. I learned I must not pay attention to my full experience because I may think things or feel things that lead me to cause a scene or shatter the peace or make me an inconvenience. I learned I must not pay attention to my full experience because I may think things or feel things that lead to the intolerable conclusion that these people who are supposed to love me are abusers and that this place which is supposed to be my home is a prison. I learned I must not pay attention to my full experience because I may think things or feel things that I can’t control and will overwhelm me, like quicksand. I learned I must not pay attention to my full experience because I may think things or feel things that essentially result in being cut off from those I depend on for my very life. 

The memories all came tumbling out of me, one after the other. Meditation–the choice to re-develop loyalty to oneself–turns out to be nothing simple at all. To risk paying attention scares the death out of the part in each of us that is, somehow, still a child and is still experiencing the traumas of the past as if they were on an infinite loop and never-endingly present-tense. 

Of course there’s going to be resistance! Of course!

The wounds are deep. But self-love is the courageous choice to re-learn how to pay attention to your experience, to honor it, and to stop the old survival strategy of gaslighting one’s own self. 

From this critical self-love choice, more self-love follows. This includes the love of self that is about living more consciously. Self-love is, secondly, being able to step back from the swirl of one’s immediate experience and get some perspective, to change up one’s point of view. Move from a worm’s eye view to a bird’s eye view. 

Do you get that image? Worm’s eye vs. bird’s eye? The view from right there in the dirt, and the grasses loom above you like redwoods? Vs. the view from above, and you see the entire shape of the landscape, you see the larger context? 

One of the most conscious mindsets I have ever encountered about what it means to be human comes from a Muslim. He is the Sufi mystic Rumi, who lived in the 13th century in what is today called Turkey. 

He once said, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” 

There it is. Wow. [Gesture of brain exploding]

But why were the internal barriers built up against what Rumi calls “love” but I will interpret it to mean a sense of deep, abiding spiritual Peace? What happened to us, so that the Peace within us seems paradoxically beyond reach? 

Let us dare to find out. Let’s rise up and look at ourselves from a bird’s eye view. 

Consider, then, how you and I were born into a social world that ruthlessly sorts us according to whichever identities are ours, based on a value agenda that is all its own. You and I were born, and our tiny bodies bore a certain skin color, and we’re judged about that. We were born, and our tiny bodies came with certain sex organs, and we were judged about that. Born, we possessed congenital disorders, or we didn’t, and even more judgment came our way.   

Good or bad. Better or worse. Worthy or unworthy. 

Besides racial and gender and ability identities, consider how we are born into certain groups. We are born into families that are rich or middle-class or poor, and we are judged accordingly. We are born into single-parent families or two-parent families, and we are judged. We are born into families that are Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Unitarian Universalist, and we are judged. 

All these identities trigger social judgment, as better or as worse. Judgments conflict too, depending on which social perspectives they’re coming from. 

And then we grow older. Interests and talents emerge, and they become identities that also trigger judgments of bad or good. So does sexual orientation, and society definitely gives a person feedback about that. We are temporarily-abled until in some way we are not, and then we feel the sting of ableism. Our bodies grow into their adult shapes and we are revealed as tall or short, as skinny or middling or fat, as ugly or beautiful—and every identity word I am using here just oozes with judgmentalism.

Good or bad. Better or worse. Worthy or unworthy. 

Judgmentalism, I am saying, as a fundamental condition of being human, comes into focus when, through the power of self-love, we start to think critically about our lives and move from a worm’s eye perspective to a bird’s eye perspective. Judgmentalism, we also come to realize, fundamentally limits us. There is, in fact, so much emphasis on the judged identities that make us up, that it can seem we are nothing but our social identities, and therefore we are nothing but beings who are judged. Our entire being is encompassed by judgment. Spiritual teachers proclaim that people are more than their social identities–that deeper ad realer than them all is a fundamental spiritual identity of inherent worth and dignity shared equally among all people–but the judgmentalism is so pervasive that what these spiritual teachers proclaim can fall on deaf ears, can inspire disdain and disbelief. 

Part of this is an inside job. Because we inevitably internalize the judgmentalism. Meditation proves the point. Through meditation, you come to know intimately the irrepressible labeler within, labeling everything good or bad. Call it the Judger. The Judger is like a crazed monkey with a baseball bat in a tiny room full of delicate and beautiful glass sculptures, smashing every which way.  

Good! Bad! Better! Worse! Worthy! Unworthy!

And that’s how the internal barriers to the Peace that is also within us come to be. 

That is how we can feel we are spiritually starving even as Peace is always already within us. 

That is why our Ralph Waldo Emerson–our own Unitarian Universalist spiritual prophet–could say, writing in the 19th century, that people act so very strangely. They act like a king who suffers from amnesia and thinks that in order to gain territories they must buy them up inch by inch. But the king is king! None of this buying-up-territories-inch-by-inch insanity. You are the king, you already own all the land, it is insane to think that you must buy anything inch-by-inch….. 

But people have fallen under the spell of amnesia. They have forgotten who they are. 

And we know why. Judgmentalism. But love for self calls us to rise up, achieve the bird’s eye view, face the whole truth. Which, in turns, paves the way to compassion. It paves the way to honoring the real hero’s journey each of us is on. And to seek a better, saner way to live. 

From here, the path of self-love moves into taking responsibility for the next chapters of one’s life. Given all the judgmentalism, given all the cards we have been dealt, what can we do to play the strongest hand possible? Self-love is most decidedly not giving up. It is not fatalism and it is not cynicism; it’s not a victim mentality and an active collection of grievances–that’s just more judgmentalism. Judgmentalism strangles but self-love makes a person able to breathe. “Taking responsibility,” says bell hooks, “means that in the face of barriers we still have the capacity to invent our lives, to shape our destinies in ways that maximize our well-being. Every day we practice this shape shifting to cope with realities we cannot easily change.” 

Love is as love does. Love is an act of will. 

There just gets to be a point in life when you say, ENOUGH. I can’t live like this anymore. I need to stand up for myself. I need to honor my experience. Even if it means having to sit down…..

There gets to be a point in life when the worm’s eye view feels like it’s strangling you, and you have to fly up and see your world from a bird’s eye view. 

There gets to be a point in life when it’s not enough anymore to be caught up in all the judgmentalism, but you must find a way to be creative and positive despite all, you must take responsibility, you must accept the hand of cards you’ve been dealt and play them as best as you know how. 

There gets to be a point. 

And at that point, that’s when we come to know what self-love really is. 

None of this love-as-romance, love-as-indulgence stuff. 

Self-love breaks down the judgmental barriers that have been built inside ourselves, walling ourselves off from the Great Peace that is always already inside us all. 

Through self love, yes, we will be able to truly love others. 

And, through self-love, we will know the Great Peace that is our spiritual birthright, finally.