Love Yourself To Love Others

During his arduous practice, psychiatrist Theodore Isaac Rubin forgot the adage, “Healer, heal thyself.” That led to a sense of personal failure and depression and he began to berate himself unmercifully. As a trained therapist, he knew that his distress came from an unsustainable sense of perfectionism. “Despite myself,” he writes in Compassion and selfhate: An alternative to despair, “I had no mercy for that somewhat confused child I had been and still obviously harboured within myself; and I had even less compassion for the young man Ihad become.” 

It was the compassion of Dr Rubin’s wife and his analyst that finally broke through to him and helped him overcome his selfloathing. “I decided — with all my feelings — that I would ‘leave it all be’, that I would simply let go, relax, stop berating myself, stop attempting to be in charge, to put it together — simply to let it go — to let be what would be.” Although he didn’t realise it at the time, that decision formed the beginnings of a compassionate way of life as he began to accept all the parts of his life, even the limitations and failures.

The practice of self-compassion, therefore, begins as soon as you accept all those dark places, the flaws and faults, which we often choose to ignore, deny or suppress. For, as Pema Chodron, the New Yorker ordained as a Buddhist nun, says, “Our hangups, unfortunately or fortunately, contain our wealth.” When somebody says something mean or spiteful, something visceral within you seems to tighten in response: that’s the hook or the shengpa, Chodron adds in Awakening compassion: Meditation practice for difficult times.

“You can stop it from spiralling into blame-game or anger or hurtfulness by deliberate cultivation of Maitri — what Sage Patanjali refers to as Mudita in his Yoga Sutra —which is defined as unconditional love towards yourself; that, in turn, naturally radiates out to others.”

Turning discord into accord thus entails tapping into that healing potential through techniques such as forgiveness meditation. This enables us to see the story (of our soured state of relationships), also to let it go, and to rise above disputes and to flow into harmony.

This is how the self becomes the friend of the self, says Sri Krishna in Bhagvadgita: one truly does unto others what one would like one to do unto oneself.

Vithal C Nadkarni