When I read this week's quotation, by the 13th / 14th century German theologian and mystic, Meister Eckhart, I had a strong reaction to it. It reads, "All the love in this world is built on self-love."
No, I thought, surely the point of love is that it is self-less, concentrated on the other. Then I remembered something Brene Brown once wrote, in The Gifts of Imperfection. Part of her definition of love, gleaned from her extensive qualitative research, reads, "Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow; a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them - we can only love others as much as we love ourselves." (emphasis mine)
She admits how hard this is to hear, let alone put into practice, because most of us tend to be harder on ourselves than we are on the people we love. She says, "I know I can talk to myself in ways that I would never consider talking to another person. How many of us are quick to think, God, I'm so stupid and Man, I'm such an idiot?"
She opened the question on her blog in 2009 which, perhaps not surprisingly, sparked quite a fierce debate. And in her book, she shares one wise comment by Renae Cobb: "Certainly, the people we love inspire us to heights of love and compassion that we might never have achieved otherwise, but to really scale those heights, we often have to go to the depths of who we are, light/shadow, good/evil, loving/destructive, and figure out our own stuff in order to love them better. So I'm not sure it's an either/or but a both/and. We love others fiercely, maybe more than we think we love ourselves, but that fierce love should drive us to the depths of our selves so that we can learn to be compassionate with ourselves."
So maybe Meister Eckhart and Brene Brown are both right: self-compassion is a vital component of being able to love others well. Because when we are continually down on ourselves, even if only inside our heads, it will inevitably affect how well we are able to respond to, love, others.
