The Importance of Self-acceptance

The Importance of Self-acceptance

“Love” is a big word in all human civilizations. For all religious disparities, love still plays an essential role in all the world’s religions. Love plays an important role in human lives and happiness, especially living in a world of aggression and depression.

To truly love someone is very difficult, if not impossible, unless you love yourself first, which is self-acceptance—accepting who and what you really are, and not who and what you wish you were (which is your ego-self). It should also be pointed out that “loving yourself” and “loving your ego-self” are not quite the same. The former is about loving yourself for who you really are despite all your imperfections; the latter is about craving to be the person you wish you were.

“Loving yourself” means you can also love others just as well because they are not very different from you in that they, too, are as imperfect as you are. On the other hand, “loving your ego-self” means it is very difficult to love others because you want to distinguish and separate yourself from others; accordingly, others must somehow satisfy your ego first before you can love them. That explains why if you have a big ego-self, you cannot easily and readily love others.

The bottom line: if you can accept yourself as who and what you are, then it may become much easier for you to accept and love others as who and what they are because you are not different or separate from others.

The greatest virtue of all is to be unaware of a separate self at all.

Awareness of a separate self makes us want to become valuable.

Not becoming valuable, we tend to hate the separate self.

Hating the separate self, how can we value anyone else?

Freedom from the ego-self, we are free to act without the desire to be valuable.

As a result, everything is done, and people all say: ‘It happened naturally.’

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 17)

The bottom line: Before you can love others, you must learn how to love yourself first.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau