Real Love

1. Real Love Starts with Self-Acceptance

You are a person worthy of love. You don’t have to do anything to prove that.

Innate worthiness. The foundation of real love lies in recognizing your inherent value as a human being, irrespective of achievements or external validation. This self-acceptance is not narcissistic but rather a prerequisite for genuine connection and caring for others. Many struggle with self-love, often due to societal messages that equate worth with accomplishments.

Overcoming self-hate. A lack of self-love can be constricting and painful, hindering our ability to connect and care for others. It stems from powerful conditioning and recurring doubts about our worth. Self-love is not about narcissism or self-indulgence but about holding ourselves accountable to be the best we can be and coming into harmony with life itself.

Self-compassion as a muscle. Cultivating self-compassion involves treating ourselves with kindness, especially during difficult times. This practice strengthens our resilience and promotes emotional well-being. Self-compassion triggers the release of oxytocin, fostering feelings of trust, calm, and generosity, which is the opposite of self-criticism that triggers the fight-or-flight response.

2. Stories Shape Our Reality

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Narrative anchors. Our minds create order through cohesive narratives that define who we are, what matters most, and what we're capable of. These stories, often formed in childhood, can either limit or empower us. Recognizing the fluidity of these narratives is key to living and loving with an open heart.

Reframing perspectives. The tales we tell ourselves are central themes in our psyches. By questioning the truth of our stories in the present moment, we empower ourselves to reframe them. We can shift from being the victim to the hero, or vice versa, depending on our point of view.

Breaking free from limitations. Many of the stories we tell ourselves about love are painful and self-blaming. By challenging these negative narratives and adopting a more compassionate perspective, we can rewrite our stories and reclaim our capacity for love. This involves questioning negative storytelling and tuning out the constant chatter of our inner critic.

3. Embrace the Full Spectrum of Emotions

REAL LOVE FOR OURSELVES BY definition includes every aspect of our lives—the good, the bad, the difficult, the challenging past, the uncertain future, as well as all the shameful, upsetting experiences and encounters we’d just as soon forget.

Emotional integration. Real love encompasses all aspects of our lives, including the difficult and painful experiences we'd rather forget. Resisting any part of our emotional residue leads to a sense of being split off from ourselves. Intimacy and integration arise from holding all that we know, want, fear, and feel in a space of awareness and self-compassion.

Mindfulness as refuge. Mindfulness meditation provides a refuge for dealing with difficult thoughts and feelings. It enables us to hold these experiences with awareness, balance, and love, rather than trying to eradicate them. This approach, rather than suppression, is what heals us.

Welcoming every emotion. Welcoming every emotion with mindfulness allows us to live with our feelings as they move through us, without getting defined by them. Emodiversity, the whole spectrum of human emotions, plays a key role in our overall health and well-being. Allowing ourselves to feel all of our emotions, including those we usually consider "negative," is essential for healing and growth.

4. Challenge Your Inner Critic

The inner voices that tell us, “You aren’t good enough,” are a huge obstacle to connecting fully to ourselves and feeling fully loved.

Recognizing the critic. The inner critic, with its world of absolutes and blame, is a major obstacle to self-love. It uses words like "should," "always," and "never" to question our worth and limit our potential. Mindfulness helps us recognize this voice and loosen its hold on us.

Addictive self-criticism. Self-criticism can become an addictive cycle of flaying ourselves, reinforcing our sense of unworthiness. The inner critic may become a companion in our suffering and isolation. Mindfulness helps us see this addictive aspect and break free from it.

Managing the critic. Instead of trying to silence the inner critic, we can learn to communicate with it in a more compassionate way. This involves recognizing the critic's voice, giving it a persona, and responding with gentleness and understanding. This approach diminishes the critic's power and allows us to trust our ability to learn from our mistakes and start over.

5. Perfectionism Blocks Real Love

If you don’t love yourself, that’s just weird.

The illusion of control. Perfectionism is supported by the illusion that we can sustain a perfect life through superior self-control. However, this is impossible and generates anxiety, as we're always under threat of failure. Love for the self cannot be a refuge because it has become too conditional, too dependent on performance.

Embracing imperfection. Loving ourselves calls us to give up the illusion that we can control everything and instead focuses us on building our inner resource of resilience. When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences—good and bad alike—are opportunities to learn and grow.

Focus on what you love. By letting go of impossibly high standards and punishing ourselves for failure, we can focus on what we love. This involves identifying whose standards we're trying to meet, questioning those expectations, and aligning our actions with our innermost values. The wholesome pursuit of excellence feels quite different from perfectionism.

6. Reconnect with Your Body

In his short story “A Painful Case,” James Joyce introduces us to a Mr. Duffy, who “lived at a little distance from his body.”

Embodiment is key. Reengaging with our bodies and remembering who we are is profoundly healing. Just as we need to integrate our emotions, so too do we need to be reunited with our bodies. If we can feel and appreciate our bodies from within, we are not in bondage to the messages coming from without.

Appreciating aliveness. Every atom in our body is billions of years old, created at the big bang. Our bodies are vividly alive, and our salty blood remembers oceanic origins. Each person is utterly distinct, with unique fingerprints, toeprints, and tongueprints.

Lovingkindness for your body. Practicing lovingkindness for our bodies involves focusing on different parts of the body in sequence and repeating phrases like, "May my head be happy; may it be peaceful." This practice can transform alienation and humiliation into a sense of alliance and bring genuine peace laced with love.

7. Ethics and Self-Love Are Intertwined

If you truly loved yourself, you’d never harm another.

Ethical implications. Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices is essential for self-love. If we harm someone else, we're inevitably also hurting ourselves. Causing harm is never just a one-way street.

Guiding precepts. When we feel conflicted about a decision, we can rely on essential precepts that are remarkably similar across the world’s wisdom traditions. These precepts demand that we pay attention to what we’re feeling and what we most deeply want.

The cost of secrets. Secret-keeping can take a toll on the keeper of the secret, the person left out of the knowing, and all who are enlisted to isolate that person from knowledge of what is actually going on. The costs of keeping secrets include our growing isolation due to fear of detection and the ways we shut down inside to avoid feeling the effects of our behavior.

8. Love is a Verb, Not a Noun

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Beyond cultural baggage. Real love is fluid, a living capacity within us that is always present. It's not a fixed ideal or an object to be attained. Romantic love, with its ecstasy and torment, is not the height of love. Real love may run on a lower voltage, but it’s also more grounded and sustainable.

Recognizing real love. Real love is defined by difficult acts of human compassion and generosity. It is a state where we allow ourselves to be seen clearly by ourselves and by others, and in turn, we offer clear seeing to the world around us. It is a love that heals.

The attachment paradox. There is no conflict between loving others deeply and living mindfully. The Buddhist teachings discourage us from clinging and grasping to those we hold dear, and from trying to control the people or the relationship. What's more, we're encouraged to accept the impermanence of all things.

9. Cultivate Curiosity and Awe in Relationships

Ultimately … it’s not the stories that determine our choices, but the stories that we continue to choose.

The power of surprise. Keeping open to the idea that we have much to learn even about those we have been close to for decades is key. Families often assign us roles that shape our stories. We may not even remember how we acquired these labels or recall if we chose them for ourselves.

The judgment of friends. When we believe a wounding story, our whole world is diminished. It’s as though someone suddenly turns off all the lights, and we lose faith in our dreams, as well as in our capacity to love and be loved. If we accept it as true, that one story can plant seeds of jealousy, resentment, anxiety, and depression that we struggle with for years to come.

Letting go of fantasy. When it comes to finding a partner or even a close friend, most of us carry within us an idealized image of “the one.” We search for that perfect person, often projecting our fantasy ideal onto others. And when, inevitably, the people on the receiving end of our personal Hollywood movie don’t measure up, we’re left feeling lonely, frustrated, and pessimistic about our chances of ever finding our match.

10. Authentic Communication Fosters Connection

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

The importance of honesty. When we don’t tell those we love about what’s really going on or listen carefully to what they have to say, we tend to fill in the blanks with stories. In conscious relationships, we set the intention to investigate the old stories we tell ourselves and our habits of thinking and behavior.

Kindness as a foundation. Kindness is the key predictor of successful relationships. Practicing kindness is about getting real, but in ways that are constructive and support the growth of the relationship. It doesn't mean that we don't express our anger, but the kindness informs how we choose to express the anger.

Family dynamics. Communication among family members is often as volatile as it can be between couples. Adult siblings, children, parents, and other close relatives may harbor intense feelings like hurt and resentment—yet often these feelings become buried and then expressed in unskillful ways.

11. Forgiveness Frees the Heart

If you don’t love yourself, that’s just weird.

The power of release. Forgiveness is the way we break the grip that long-held resentments have on our hearts. It allows us to move on. Forgiveness is a personal process that doesn’t depend on us having direct contact with the people who have hurt us.

Forgiveness is a process. To forgive, we may need to open our minds to a fuller exploration of the context in which the events occurred, and feel compassion for the circumstances and everyone involved, starting with ourselves. Grief helps us to relinquish the illusion that the past could be different from what it was.

Embracing what is. We’re conditioned to believe that painful feelings are “bad” and that pleasurable ones are “good.” It’s often easier—though not healthier—for us to avoid grief and sorrow, while only embracing sensations like happiness, confidence, and love. But by accepting and learning to embrace the inevitable sorrows of life, we realize that we can experience a more enduring sense of happiness.

12. Extend Compassion to All Beings

If you don’t love yourself, that’s just weird.

Interconnectedness. We can learn to see and feel the love that is waiting to be born between ourselves and all others. Awareness of our interdependence is no longer optional. It’s critical that we widen our attention to include those we encounter as we go about our daily lives.

The power of empathy. We're wired for empathy. We literally have brain circuits focused on “feeling with” others. It’s a genetic imperative for us to care. But the neural circuits related to empathy aren’t always activated, especially when we’re feeling anxious or stressed.

From anger to love. By allowing ourselves simply to feel what we feel, we release the expectation that painful states of mind such as anger will consume us. They can arise, and we can let them go—like the tides of the ocean or the waxing and waning of the moon. It’s a practice of not holding on, of choosing not to identify.

Last updated: March 9, 2025