Day 758: loving yourself

a friend recently shared this self-compassion test with me:

https://self-compassion.org/self-compassion-test/

my results:

after sharing the quiz with other friends, i’ve quickly learned that my score is atypically high. my friends who have shared their results have reported scores around ~2.5 in self-kindness and overall, and it’s startling that loving yourself is the exception, not the norm

i want to write a longer piece about self-love, but here are some raw thoughts in the meantime:

the level of self-love that i experience now is drastically different from just several years ago (~2017 and before), and i credit that 100% to psychedelics and meditation. it’s so clear to me that the profound breakthroughs i’ve had in my psychedelic experiences have led directly to cultivating a gentler, more tender attitude toward myself. here’s the journal entry i wrote almost exactly a year ago after a solo LSD trip, and the longer poem about the experience i wrote the day after. and that’s just one session out of many over the years, where self-love has been an ever-present theme.
i sometimes forget that at this point, i’ve spent thousands of hours meditating and that this is very uncommon. hundreds of hours have been devoted to metta (loving-kindness) meditation in particular, where you send wishes of well-being and happiness toward yourself and all beings. that practice definitely undid a ton of negative conditioning, and the breakthroughs with that practice were as powerful as the most profound psychedelic ones
i wish it were possible to share one’s inner landscape and also experience others’ because it would show people that their lived experience could be WILDLY different, and i think this would be life-changing for many people. psychedelics did that for me, where i saw that (1) i had a ton of self-loathing and (2) it was causing immense amounts of unnecessary suffering. to be clear, i by no means think that i’m somehow “done” with my processing and letting go of all my crap, and i’m sure that if i were to swap places with those who have gone further down this path, i would be stunned at how much more freedom there could be and by how much i’m still holding onto in comparison. that said, it’s obvious to me just how much more peace and ease is present in my life now compared to before all that self-work
i feel like there’s a lot less self-talk in general compared to before, but it’s hard to tell with these things because i have no way of reliably measuring that and comparing it across time. when i recently damaged my macbook pro by accidentally shifting its weight such that it fell of my desk, my reaction was “aw shucks!!!” and then i inspected it and made plans to take it into the apple store. i can’t know for sure, but i think dk before psychedelics + meditation would have had a lot more self-judgment and self-talk in the form of “how could you be so dumb as to let it fall like that! you idiot!” not only is dropping all of that negative self-talk just more pleasant, it allows you to be more effective in the world because you’re not constantly assaulting yourself while evaluating the situation
when i do engage in self-talk, the quality feels very different from what it used to be. for example, when i “mess up” (recent examples: binging on my cut, overtraining and injuring myself), my attitude toward myself is that of a parent stifling a smile while shaking their head at their beloved child. i say to myself things like “oh you silly goose” because there’s really no one to judge — all mistakes and maladaptive behavior is caused by fear and ignorance, and the wiser part of me know that the foolish part of me is still learning and growing. i’ll sometimes say things like “dude you are SO dumb” but i’m usually laughing at myself for how idiotic i am. in the past, i think i would have admonished myself and forced myself sit in a pool of shame until i was covered in the filth of self-hatred whenever i “failed”. now, it’s just “oh well” and then i move on. also, to be clear here, it’s not that i never experience shame or embarrassment or self-judgment — it just happens much less frequently and incidents needs to be much more severe to trigger those kinds of emotions

i share this because it’s really, really hard to know what’s going on in others’ conscious experiences, and if your internal world is actively hostile toward yourself, it’s difficult to imagine just how much better things could be. for me, psychedelic sessions taken in a safe setting with a therapeutic intention as well as meditation (metta/loving-kindness in particular) have been incredibly effective at cultivating a much gentler and kind attitude toward myself, and it’s made a world of a difference.

happiness is your birthright. love is your birthright. may we all love ourselves with the fury of a thousand suns.