Everyone says it. Love yourself first. Fill your own cup. And for years, I said nothing. But I’ve been thinking about this since Valentine’s Day — and I think it’s time to say the thing I’ve been sitting on for twenty years.
There is a problem with “love yourself first”.
It started with a book.
Around 2002, I was leaving my corporate career. Uncertain. Looking for answers. I was at Sydney Airport, heading back to London, looking for something easy to read on the flight. I picked up a Barbara De Angelis book from the airport bookshop — the kind of impulse purchase that lands in your life at exactly the right moment and plants a seed you don’t know what to do with.
The seed it planted: do you love yourself?
I genuinely didn’t know. I asked my partner at the time. He said yes immediately. I envied the certainty.
I couldn’t answer the question. And the not-being-able-to-answer troubled me more than the question itself.
Then came Turkey.
A yoga retreat in a place called Kabak — a valley on the Turkish coast you could only reach by walking down from the road or arriving by boat. No cars. Tree houses. The sea.
On the first day, a headache started. Not a dull ache — a pounding. Like a hammer knocking inside my skull. Relentless.
It didn’t leave. For the entire retreat — the yoga, the meditation, the walks, the massages — the headache stayed. My body wouldn’t soften. Nothing was shifting. I felt forlorn.
The night before I was due to leave, I couldn’t sleep. Again. This had been happening for several nights now — tossing, turning, exhaustion without rest. Frustration had turned to something heavier.
I remember the specific moment I stopped trying.
I just need to let go.
Not of the need for the retreat to work. Just — let go of trying to sleep. Let go of the whole thing.
I drifted off.
The next morning was different.
It took me a while to notice. But the colours were brighter. Sounds were clearer. There was a strange stillness in the air. There was also a stillness inside that hadn’t been there before — not the forced stillness of trying to meditate, but something that had arrived on its own terms.
Walking down to the beach, talking to the yoga teacher — my mind wasn’t processing and analysing the way it always had. Things came in and were simply received. No commentary. No agenda.
And underneath all of it: a feeling.
Not happiness exactly. Not the result of anything. Just — love. Quiet, directionless, encompassing. Not aimed at myself. Not aimed at anything. Just present, the way the light was present, the way the sea was present.
I went to sleep. I woke up. And it was there.
I didn’t have language for it then. I still find it difficult now.
But what I can say now is that it had nothing to do with loving myself first.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand.
“Love yourself first” assumes love is a resource. Something you possess. Something you can run low on and need to replenish before you share it.
But in my experience that’s not what love is.
Sadhguru puts it plainly: “Love is not what you do. Love is what you are.”
He goes further. “Love yourself” requires two entities — a self that loves and a self that is loved. But you are one thing, not two. The moment you split yourself into lover and beloved, you’ve left love entirely. You’re in self-improvement.
The yogic sages — and my own morning in Turkey — point somewhere different.
Not love as something you direct. Love as the ground state. You don’t generate it. You don’t earn it. You don’t need to love yourself first to qualify for giving it.
You just stop blocking it.
What actually happened in Kabak wasn’t that I learned to love myself.
It was that my mind stopped its incessant chatter and love revealed itself.
And in my experience — both that morning and in the years since — it tends to surface when the mind becomes quiet. When you’re away from the normal hustle. When you slow down enough, stop enough, for something underneath to become available.
I’ve felt it in India. On a summer’s day in London, walking up a hill, out of nowhere. Spirit likes me to walk, I thought.
It’s not something you do. It’s what remains when you stop doing.
So how do we create space for this in a world that won’t stop moving?
You can’t manufacture it. But you can stop blocking it.
This is why yoga, meditation, breathwork, dance — all the practices that bring us into the present moment — matter. Not because they create love. But because they quiet the mind long enough for what’s underneath to surface.
The practices aren’t the point. The stillness is the point. The stopping is the point.
As Sri Aurobindo wrote: “My love is not a hunger of the heart, my love is not a craving of the flesh; it came to me from God, to God returns.”
It’s always there. We just keep covering it with noise.
I still don’t have better words for what that actually feels like. Quiet. Expansive. Whole. Nothing missing. But the words always fall short.
Which is maybe why we don’t talk about it in the busy world. You can’t describe it. You can only know it.
The surrender. The letting go. The stopping.
Not loving yourself first.
Just — stopping the mental war.
If this landed somewhere in you, I’d love to know. Reply and tell me what it brought up.