Self-love, Narcissism and Selfishness

A duck practices genius self-love? Or a narcissist duck?

Yesterday, I had a short conversation with a friend; we talked about "self-love," and I realized that the term had been misunderstood as "narcissism" and/or "selfishness." This trendy term has been used countless times on social media, mentioned by famous people, and discussed crossed fora without clearly explaining what the word means.

The misunderstanding of the term makes "self-love" either overused or avoided when it is perceived as "narcissism" and/or "selfishness."

At the Happy Empath Space, "self-love" is neither narcissism nor selfishness. It is an approach and a set of practices and tools that aims to help one RE-explore oneself better. This RE-exploration allows a person to fully understand the nature and many facets of his/her physical body, emotions, and mind, including their needs and ways of communication so that he/she can address and live in harmony with those parts of his/her human body.

As children learn about, build up, and accelerate their knowledge of the external world through learning about their own body, self-love is the very first step that brings a human back to their childhood period when they begin to learn about the external world through their genius curiosity of and endless motivation to explore the world inside, which made of their physical body, emotion, and mind. Here, we would recall our first finger bite, our first falls, and the five-second silence moment before we decided to cry out to get our parents' words of encouragement or their hugs of warm love. 

At that very first step, without any external, unnecessary distortion or disturbance resulting from prejudice, biased belief, social norms, and polarity, when all the physical, emotional, and mental needs of the child are addressed lovingly, nurturingly, coherently, and harmoniously, the child will grow with a healthy physical body, emotion, and mind. He/she will become a happy child and a happy growing-up adult over time. A healthy, loving, coherent, harmonious growing-up adult knows best how to create the best life for themselves and others.

This is why the fundamental step to making a happy human begins with "genius self-love"!

Written by Dang Bao Nguyet.

Photo by Minh Tam.