Heart of Compassion: Self Love in Troubled Times
Heather Hirschi
To love is to see yourself as you actually are.
~Thich Nat Hanh
[Loving connected presence] allows us to be with difficulty without being toppled by it. We open our heart so big, it can hold all this pain.
~Kristin Neff
February. A short month given to a huge concept: love. One word for a complexity of emotions; one word for affection toward our parents, our partners, and our favorite pasta. Ancient Greeks knew love to be multifaceted. In fact, they identified six varieties. Eros names the kind of love most commonly associated with February14, Valentine’s Day. Eros connotes falling in love, erotic passion and longing. Pop culture tends to emblemize eros, and idealizes losing ourselves in our lovers.
Valentine’s Day was established as a holiday in the 14th Century to celebrate romantic love. Courtly love was first a medieval fiction, a literary concept that touted chivalry. Think knights questing for a lady’s affection. This “Noble Love” married ideas of erotic, sometimes forbidden passion with notions of honor and “earning” a lady’s esteem.
Prior to its christianization as St. Valentine’s Day in the 5th Century, mid-February marked the Roman celebration of Lupercalia. Lupercalia was a bizarre fertility rite that involved slaughtering a goat and a dog, eating their meat, and making whips from their skins. The men would then rampage about, whipping any woman they encountered with the fresh hides. Apparently, the slap of the whip enabled fertility.
Christians renamed Lupercalia for St. Valentine, who was probably two saints rolled into one. Several legends explain Valentine’s sainthood. In one, the roman emperor, Claudius II beheads Valentine for secretly performing marriages for young lovers. The emperor had outlawed marriage, believing young men to be better soldiers if single. In many tellings of this story, Claudius’ homosexuality is blamed for his attitude toward marriage and his execution of Valentine.
Courtly romance brought St. Valentine’s Day to vogue in the 14th Century to celebrate romantic love. The myth favored in that era focuses on St. Valentine as liberator of Christian prisoners, resulting in his own imprisonment. He falls in love with his jailer’s daughter and sends her a love note he signs, Your Valentine, inaugurating the custom. Both legends lend themselves to the heteronormalized version of love the holiday institutes.
Valentine’s Day was established as a commercial U.S. holiday in 1840, expanding the celebration to include love between friends and family, not just lovers. This expansion of love’s parameters created a new holiday market. Suddenly, “valentines” signified objects of exchange as well as desire. As commodities, valentines are exchanged between school children and coworkers, creating the first retail event of the new year. Arguably, our contemporary Valentine’s Day, with its indulgences of confections and consumption, lubricates the economy as much as it celebrates love.
While the holiday ostensibly celebrates all kinds of love, the most salient concept of VD is Eros. The Greeks were wary of Eros because lustful passion took one out of one’s mind, into an obsession with one’s object of desire. Most would agree that erotic love is grand fun, yet we recognize the difference between obsessive desire and abiding love. The Greeks’ many concepts of love identify feeling between all kinds of beings at different resonances.
Clearly, the magnitude of this thing called love is a lot to hold for one day. So we tend to start early with the celebration (this year Safeway displayed Valentine candy alongside Christmas sweets). February’s primary media focuses on the marketing of romance. Sometimes, for people who are not coupled, whether by choice or circumstance, the pressure of February can seem depressing. Or nauseating. Especially in these strangely isolated times.
A year into COVID, in rainy February, VD’s focus on romance emphasizes what’s lonely. Whether one is single or attached, monogamous or not, loneliness is a reality of modern human life. Living in a pandemic has heightened isolation and helped us remember the sheer exhilaration of human connection. At the same time we recognize this profound loss, many have begun to reassess our relationships to ourselves. When we unplug long enough, when we cultivate some attention to the present, we realize an important difference between feeling lonely and simply being alone. There is a profundity in solitude that cultivates a deep compassion for ourselves.
Dr. Kristin Neff has pioneered thinking about the Buddhist concept of self-compassion as central to well-being. She says that self-compassion, as distinguished from self-esteem, is a practice of empowerment. Long touted as a sign of mental health, self-esteem “refers to the degree to which we evaluate ourselves positively. It represents how much we like or value ourselves.” The problem with positive evaluation is that self-esteem tends to be “based on comparisons with others.” Self-compassion, on the other hand, is a deepening of self-awareness, rather than self-judgement. Self-compassion is love for one’s whole being, including failures, doubt and grief. According to Neff, “self-compassion is not based on positive judgments or evaluations, it is a way of relating to ourselves.”
Compassion as a word has both Greek and Latin roots. Simply, passion is suffering, as in the passion of Christ. The prefix com means with. Neff suggests self compassion is a practice of being gentle with ourselves in the acknowledgement of our own suffering. Rather than repress suffering, we experience our grief, treating ourselves with the gentleness we would treat a friend. Through this practice of “gentle” love, we open to our own suffering, which allows us to move through it. By extension, the practice of self-compassion opens our hearts to the suffering of others. Neff points out that love works in a yin/yang relationship. The yang to this yin of gentle love is “fierce” love. Loving yourself fiercely requires action: To protect and nurture yourself , draw strong boundaries, and rebut threats.
Similar to self-compassion, the Greek word for self-love is philautia. Not to be confused with narcissism, philautia most closely mirrors Buddhist concepts like Maitri, or unconditional friendship with oneself. According to Buddhist nun and teacher, Pema Chodron, self-compassion is “feeling at home with your own mind and your own body.”
Sounds simple but our lack of ease in our own bodies and minds is the crux of modern unhappiness. Even in our quests to befriend ourselves, commodification of the process dilutes self-acceptance. Buzzterms like body positivity and self-care are popular these days but their subtext is lack. Not good enough, rich enough, smart, skilled, pretty enough. Friendship with self, like the best friendships, is not dependent on physical attributes or accomplishments. Self-compassion goes beyond boss babes and beauty routines. Self-compassion requires nothing outside of self. Nothing has to change. No need to lose (or gain) weight. No need to shave or inject anything. No need to make a lot of money or get busy. No need for a valentine.
In a sense, the Buddhist concept of mindful self-compassion encompasses all six Greek words for love. Obviously, philautia signifies treating oneself with care. Self-compassion also implies kinship--storge, friendship--philia, and hospitality--xenia, metaphors for treating oneself as honored guest, dear friend, and beloved child. The Greek word agape refers to divine love, and by extension, love of the human family. Certainly, self-compassion is the recognition of the sacred within self.
Finally, we return to eros. Sex physically makes love. The hormones sex releases create feelings of well-being and comfort. The bible celebrates sex as making love in the Song of Songs: where the beloved and the lover belong to each other through their sexual union. Perhaps the mind loss the Greeks feared from sexual passion is part of what we want to celebrate about love. Maybe the lover’s union with the beloved is the moment of ego-dissolution that opens us to connection. What if we bring this idea home to ourselves, know ourselves as both lover and beloved?
February is brief. Fall in love with yourself.
