Me, A Love Story: How Being OK With Yourself Makes You Better at Everything | Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg, meditation pioneer and author, discusses self-love (self-compassion) as a trainable skill with practical benefits, exploring its distinction from empathy and why many resist it, emphasizing its role in personal growth and connection.
Deep Dive Analysis
11 Topic Outline
Introduction to Self-Love and Self-Compassion
The Dalai Lama's Puzzlement with Self-Hatred
Cultural Differences in Self-Criticism and Potential
Self-Compassion as a Path to Sustained Change
Distinction Between Empathy and Compassion
Connection Between Self-Love and Loving Others
Applying Loving Kindness to Difficult People and Situations
Redefining Love as an Ability and Responsibility
Loving Kindness as an Antidote to Fear
Generosity and Helping Others Fosters Self-Worth
Reflections on Aging, Practice, and Life's Purpose
7 Key Concepts
Self-Compassion
A scientific term for self-love, defined as love looking at suffering. It involves tenderness, admission of vulnerability, and the understanding that one is not alone in their struggles, leading to sustained effort and change rather than brief performance spikes followed by crashes.
Love (Dan Harris's Definition)
An evolutionarily wired human capacity to care about oneself and others, encompassing various positive qualities like civility, kindness, generosity, gratitude, compassion, and empathy. It is considered a skill that can be trained, not an unalterable factory setting.
Empathy
The resonance or felt sense of what someone else is going through, especially when they are suffering. While important, excessive empathy without wisdom can lead to burnout, particularly for caregivers.
Compassion (Buddhist Psychology)
A two-part state involving both empathy (the trembling of the heart in response to suffering) and a movement of the heart toward the suffering to offer help. It requires balance, wisdom, understanding limits, and the ability to receive as well as give.
Basic Okayness / Capacity
Sharon Salzberg's preferred term over 'Buddha nature' or 'basic goodness,' suggesting that underneath all our flaws and habits, every human being possesses an inherent potential to grow, change, become wiser, and more loving, which serves as the basis for meditation practice.
Love as an Ability
The idea that love is not merely a feeling or a commodity dependent on others, but an inherent capacity within oneself. This perspective implies that love is internal and can be cultivated, rather than something given or taken away by external circumstances.
Love as a Responsibility
Building on the idea of love as an ability, this concept posits that if one desires love to be present in a conversation or environment, they have a responsibility to bring it forth themselves. It encourages active engagement in fostering connection and care.
9 Questions Answered
Self-love or self-compassion can make you more effective in reaching your goals and lead to better relationships with everyone around you. It fosters sustained effort and change, unlike harsh self-criticism which only provides brief performance spikes followed by crashes.
While self-criticism might be universal, self-hatred, defined as incessant, merciless, harsh self-criticism leading to hopelessness, appears to be more predominant in the West due to cultural beliefs about inherent self-worth.
According to Sharon Salzberg, there isn't a fundamental difference; compassion is simply love that is directed towards suffering. Dan Harris views self-compassion as an aspect of self-love, which he defines broadly as caring about oneself.
Many people resist it due to fears of becoming selfish, lazy, or losing their edge and ambition, believing that harsh self-criticism is necessary for motivation and achievement.
Empathy is the felt sense of what someone is going through, while compassion, in Buddhist psychology, adds a 'movement of the heart toward' the suffering to help, incorporating wisdom and an understanding of limits to prevent burnout.
Yes, it is possible to love others even if you don't perfectly love yourself, as many people demonstrate. However, a vast imbalance where one completely neglects self-care or is self-loathing is not ultimately helpful for fostering wholesome, lasting love for others.
Practicing loving kindness in such situations doesn't mean acquiescence, but rather a deeper understanding of connection and a reduction of fear. The Buddha taught loving kindness as an antidote to fear, suggesting that less fear can enhance one's approach to difficult relationships.
Engaging in acts of generosity and helping others can remind individuals of their own worthiness and capacity to give, bringing them back to a sense of wholeness. This demonstrates a 'double helix' connection where loving others can reinforce self-love.
'Basic okayness' (or 'capacity') is a term preferred by Sharon Salzberg over 'basic goodness' or 'Buddha nature' to describe the inherent potential within every human being to grow, change, and become wiser and more loving, regardless of their current actions or flaws.
24 Actionable Insights
1. Practice Self-Compassion
Engage in self-compassion, which scientists define as self-love, to become more effective in reaching your goals and foster better relationships with others.
2. Embrace Self-Compassion for Change
Instead of merciless, incessant self-criticism, which leads to brief performance spikes and crashes, cultivate self-compassion as the most efficient and effective way to achieve sustained effort, stick to goals, and make lasting change.
3. Train Love as a Skill
Understand that love, including self-love and love for others, is not a fixed trait but a trainable skill, and actively work to develop this family of skills.
4. Apply Self-Compassion During Mistakes
When you make mistakes or face difficulties, practice self-compassion by treating yourself with tenderness and care, acknowledging your vulnerability, and remembering that imperfection is a universal human experience, which helps you recover and become more resilient.
5. Cultivate Love as an Ability
Reframe your understanding of love as an internal ability rather than just a feeling or a commodity dependent on others, recognizing that it resides within you and is yours to cultivate.
6. Bring Love as a Responsibility
If you desire love or positive consideration in a conversation or environment, take personal responsibility to be the one who brings it, as it is an ability you possess.
7. Practice Loving Kindness for Fear
Engage in loving kindness meditation, which the Buddha taught as the primary antidote to fear, to energetically counter withdrawal and foster openness.
8. Help Others to Reduce Anxiety
When feeling anxious or overwhelmed, engage in acts of helping others, as this form of love can shift your focus away from internal worries and provide relief.
9. Practice Generosity for Wholeness
Engage in acts of generosity, as even fleeting acts can bring a sense of wholeness and connection, leaving you feeling enriched rather than diminished.
10. Accept Difficult Emotions with Warmth
Practice loving kindness meditation to suffuse your mind with warmth, allowing you to see difficult emotions like anger or acquisitiveness as ancient protective programs, which can lead to greater self-acceptance and less judgment of others.
11. Acknowledge Pain Without Condemnation
Allow yourself to admit and be present with pain or difficult feelings without making them worse by adding self-hatred, shame, or guilt.
12. Reduce Fear with Loving Kindness
Apply loving kindness as an antidote to fear in your relationships, considering if less fear would enhance your interactions, especially with those who challenge you.
13. Develop Inner Okayness
While it’s not true that you must perfectly love yourself before loving others, cultivating an inner sense of ‘okayness’ about yourself is helpful and can make you even better at loving other people.
14. Intentionally Seek Goodness
Cultivate intentionality, rather than force or coercion, to actively notice and appreciate what is good in your environment and what you have to be grateful for.
15. Strive for Profound Kindness
Recognize the breathtaking potential for kindness, intelligence, connection, and caring within human beings and strive to live a life that embodies these qualities beyond mere mediocrity.
16. Frame Behavior as Healthy/Unhealthy
When observing consistently antisocial or unhelpful behavior, reframe your perspective from ‘good and evil’ to ‘healthy or unhealthy’ to better understand the actions without condemning the person.
17. Trust Inherent Growth Potential
Recognize and trust your inherent potential for growth, change, wisdom, and love, understanding that this unrealized capacity is a birthright that exists within you regardless of your current state.
18. Practice Clear Seeing and Listening
Cultivate love by engaging in clear seeing and listening, letting go of assumptions about others, and being fully present to discover their surprising reality, which fosters a profound sense of connection.
19. Broaden “Love” Definition
Actively work to reclaim and broaden your understanding of the word ’love’ beyond its common, sometimes superficial, associations to encompass a wider range of positive human capacities and connections.
20. Remember Shared Human Frailty
When experiencing self-judgment or embarrassment, remember that you are not alone in your human frailties and mistakes, as this understanding is a meaningful aspect of self-compassion.
21. Assume Others Do Their Best
Adopt the perspective that everyone, including yourself, is doing the best they can given their current level of knowledge and understanding, as this can foster compassion and reduce judgment.
22. Breathe for Calm
To calm your nervous system and reduce anxiety, intentionally make your out-breath longer than your in-breath, a technique that can lower blood pressure and ease panic.
23. Practice “Who Cares?”
Apply the ‘who cares?’ mindset in a healthy, non-nihilistic way to detach from conventional standards and external validation, focusing instead on whether you honored your inner compulsion and were truly present.
24. Evaluate Work by Inner Growth
When creating or evaluating work, consider its beauty not just by external standards, but by whether the process fostered greater enlightenment, wisdom, or compassion in the creator.
6 Key Quotes
There is an enormous amount of evidence that self-love, or as scientists call it, self-compassion, can make you more effective in reaching your goals, and it can lead to better relationships with everybody around you.
Dan Harris
Compassion is love that's looking at suffering.
Barbara Fredrickson (quoted by Sharon Salzberg)
If it's true for me that those actions and that speech comes out of a place of pain, I would think it's very likely true for these other people as well.
Sharon Salzberg
I believe in horrible behavior, but not evil or horrible people.
Father Gregory Boyle (quoted by Dan Harris)
Love is not a feeling, it's an ability.
Peter Hedges (quoted by Sharon Salzberg)
When you know better, you do better.
Maya Angelou (quoted by Sharon Salzberg)