Book summary “How to Love Yourself”: summary

Introduction

You likely spend years searching for love externally. You try to earn affection through achievements, approval, or romantic validation, yet you still feel fundamentally incomplete. Society teaches you that love is a rare prize given only to those who fit a specific mold.

Meggan Watterson argues that true self-love is an innate state of wholeness that must be accessed within before you can authentically love anyone else. You are already made of love, and your task is simply to remove the internal barriers keeping you from recognizing this truth.

The book guides you through a profound journey of reclaiming your authentic self. You will explore how to embrace solitude, navigate dating without losing your boundaries, sustain healthy partnerships, and heal from heartbreak.

• How do you stop seeking external validation?
• Can you learn to cherish your own company?
• What does it mean to love without abandoning yourself?

1. How to Love Yourself

Many people accumulate achievements, degrees, or bend over backward trying to prove they are worthy of love. You might operate under the false belief that love must be deserved. In reality, love is an innate state and a gift of simply being alive.

Love is an intrinsic gift of existence rather than something external that must be earned through achievements.

Meggan met a single mother living with HIV from group homes who felt entirely unworthy of love because of past abuse. This encounter highlighted how universally people believe they must earn love. True self-love requires abandoning the habit of waiting to become worthy and recognizing that love is already present inside.

The Illusion of Earning Love

A spiritual koan emerged from Meggan's pilgrimage: true love means no longer waiting. You often trap yourself in purgatory by mapping out milestones you must achieve before you are finally deserving of love. Meggan spent years traveling, studying theology, and visiting sacred sites of the Black Madonna and Mary Magdalene, only to realize the love she sought was inside her all along.

Transformation happens by creating a small daily miracle. You can interrupt negative internal monologues through deliberate practice:

• Gaze into your eyes in the bathroom mirror.
• Focus on the presence of love that emerges from behind your irises.
• Leave love notes for your soul on mirrors using a red Sharpie pen.

Meggan wrote "i am divine love" with a red Sharpie on her wall altar mirror and her full-length mirror to challenge negative thoughts.

Basic Goodness

Society conditions you to feel broken and encourages buying external products or chasing achievements to fix yourself. However, the core of human nature is primordially whole, wise, and good. Lodro notes how meditation students frequently call themselves trash or broken, even when standing in front of loved ones who cherish them.

Human beings are fundamentally good and awake at their core, possessing an indestructible wakefulness that resembles a diamond buried in dust.

The path to self-discovery and authentic living involves three core steps:

• Look at yourself: use meditation, or gom, to become familiar with your breath, thoughts, emotional hooks, and habitual patterns.
• Discover your basic goodness: realize that beyond confusion and pain, you are primordially whole, wise, good, and strong.
• Develop faith in that goodness: build understanding and trust in your primordial wholesomeness to trump internal and external whispers of inadequacy.

Lodro was asked by a friend how he managed to flirt and attract a date so easily. His honest answer was simply that he was genuinely himself.

Soul-Voice Meditation

Shamatha, or calm-abiding meditation, trains your mind to stay present with the physical breath. This physical practice provides a foundation for self-discovery and self-acceptance.

• Find a comfortable, undistracted place and sit on a cushion with loosely crossed legs or on a chair with feet flat and hip-width apart.
• Elongate your spine upward like a stack of quarters while keeping a natural skeletal curvature.
• Drop your hands at your side, pick them up from the elbows, and rest them palms down on your thighs.
• Rest your head at the top of your spine and tuck your chin slightly.
• Relax your face muscles, forehead, eyes, and jaw, letting your jaw hang open and placing your tongue against the roof of your mouth.
• Keep your eyes open with a loose, unfocused gaze directed two to four feet in front of you.
• Pay full attention to the physical sensation of the out breath and in breath without altering it.
• When distracted by thoughts, silently label the distraction by saying "thinking" to yourself as a reminder to return to the breath.
• Set a timer for ten minutes and practice daily without judging your meditation sessions as good or bad.

Beginners often find their minds racing at one hundred miles per hour and must practice simply slowing down to settle with themselves. Contemplative heart-centered meditation allows you to locate where love has not yet reached.

• Sit still and clearly feel your awareness anchor down into your heart.
• Ask your soul: "Where has my love not yet reached?" and resist nothing.
• Invite hard-to-reach stories, bullies, regrets, or unworthiness back to you like dinner guests.
• Forgive yourself and love yourself by letting these stories go.
• If a memory is too convincing, recall a moment you felt utterly and completely loved to suffuse yourself with warmth.
• Let love organically morph your guilt or regret into pure forgiveness until waves of love wash over you.
• Write out all stories and excuses in your journal rather than keeping them inside you.

Meggan describes how practicing this inner inquiry initially felt like moving through stone. It eventually became light-filled, transforming guilt and regret into pure forgiveness.

2. How to Love Being Single and Dating

Solitude should be embraced as a fertile practice ground rather than avoided through compulsive distractions.

Modern individuals have habituated themselves to run from the discomfort of being alone by constantly seeking distractions through smartphones and dating applications. People use tools like text messages, social feeds, and dating apps such as Tinder or Grindr to avoid sitting quietly with their own minds and hearts, ultimately making true solitude feel foreign and uncomfortable.

Lodro went on a first date with a woman who complained extensively about having to sit alone at a mostly empty bar for 12 minutes prior to his arrival because she lacked the ability to tolerate being alone with her own thoughts.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche distinguishes between two types of freedom: "free-free," which is the liberation to enjoy one's own space, and "free-wild," which is a neurotic attempt to fill free time with distractions. While "free-free" allows a person to embrace solitude and play within the space of their life without needing external validation, "free-wild" creates a self-imposed imprisonment under the pretense of freedom by constantly seeking frantic diversions. Lodro describes himself as a serial monogamist who spent 12-plus years bouncing between long-term relationships and falling into premature romances instead of taking proper healing time to be alone.

Meditation serves as a practical tool to become familiar with one's myriad desires and habit of distraction, eventually causing the compulsive need to act out to dissipate. By regularly returning attention to the natural flow of the breath on the meditation cushion, practitioners learn to rest with reality as it is, including uncomfortable emotions like loneliness, rather than rushing out to seek temporary fixes.

Disciplined Hope

Disciplined Hope is an active spiritual practice of trusting one's life and deep desires while waiting without waiting, instead of falling into despair or passive wishing.

Rather than wishing things were different or letting the fear of never meeting a match paralyze the heart, disciplined hope combines fierce trust in one's current wholeness with active surrender, such as practicing partner dancing. Meggan practices disciplined hope through tango dancing, where active surrender and staying present in her body allow her to experience the essence of partnership and being guided. Meggan spent four years as an indie mom practicing disciplined hope.

To cultivate this posture, you can follow specific daily actions:

• Get regular massages (always by male masseurs) so that your body isn't starved for touch.
• Plan dinners with friends and weekends away when your son is with his father.
• Pay conscious attention to how much love you have in your life (in all its various forms).
• Pour yourself into your work, which is your soul purpose.
• Use those moments when the trapdoor swings open and my heart starts to plummet to actively connect to the divine source of love and truth within me.

The Adventure of Dating

Modern dating should be approached as an adventure in meeting people rather than an interview for a life partner, guided by the maxim that you find who you love while doing what you love.

Trying to force outcomes, treat dating profiles like online shopping catalogs, or enter dates with overly rigid checklists invites the "shark of fixed expectations" to ruin potential connections. Meggan received advice from her PR lady that she would meet who she loves while doing what she loves, which later proved true when she met David at a spiritual center where she was leading a retreat. Meggan spent three months in a relationship with a blind date before realizing the magic was missing.

Lodro's friend Brett went on many dates while working for the U.S. State Department, but women frequently became upset upon discovering he would soon be stationed abroad, treating him like an applicant for marriage rather than a companion for an evening.

Applying these insights transforms every romantic encounter into self-discovery:

• See dating as an adventure in meeting new people, not as an interview for your next life partner.
• Consider every date, every relationship as an opportunity to discover more of who you are and what you truly desire in a partner.
• Identify at least one friend or family member who can figuratively loop pinkies with you as you date and practice Disciplined Hope to find the person who really matches your desires and needs.
• Focus on the way you want to feel when you're with this person. And whatever it is that you want this next love to give you, give it to yourself now as much as possible.
• If you're confused about a potential partner, become aware of how your body feels.
• Don't let your head cloud your heart. Trust your heart, above all else.
• Don't put the cart before the horse. Just enjoy your time together. Relax.
• While on your date, just be present with the other person as much as possible.
• Don't censor yourself. If something comes up, trust that your date will be able to handle it.
• Have faith. You are inherently good enough, worthy enough, kind and smart enough for anyone you might want to date.

3. How to Fall in Love Without Losing Yourself

True romantic connection requires maintaining internal boundaries and the capacity to stand alone.

Falling in love feels dangerous because it threatens the protective layers of the ego, exposing our vulnerable core. You equate starting to love someone with throwing yourself off a cliff because it strips away psychological defenses and leaves you open to potential hurt.

Meggan recalls an on-again, off-again romance with a med student in her midtwentieth who repeatedly broke her heart before she finally healed and found a supportive relationship.

True love relies on four foundational qualities derived from the Buddhist tradition: loving-kindness or maitri, compassion or karuna, sympathetic joy or mudita, and equanimity or upeksha. These qualities bridge the transition between loving oneself and loving others, serving as a daily practice that helps you accept impermanence and appreciate others as they are. Deep understanding and space are essential elements of long-lasting romantic relationships. Meggan interviews a bartender named Ned and his wife, who have been together since they were teenagers, and discovers their secrets to longevity were daily sex and mutual understanding and space.

The Vesica Piscis Model

Rather than one person being subsumed by another in a relationship, true love allows two individuals to create a third entity while maintaining their own integrity. The traditional equation of one plus one equaling one requires unhealthy martyrdom. Instead, the sacred geometry symbol of the vesica piscis represents two whole individuals overlapping to create a third space without losing themselves.

The capacity to be alone is a mandatory prerequisite for the capacity to truly love. Codependence occurs when stability and wholeness are outsourced to a partner. Interdependence requires absolute freedom, where both individuals know their happiness is not dependent on the other.

Meggan describes a period in her relationship where she experienced a recurring dream of being locked in an attic by her partner, reflecting her internal codependence before she learned to maintain her own boundaries during the three-month mark.

Practices for Interdependence

A structured meditation practice helps expand loving-kindness from yourself outward to loved ones, acquaintances, difficult people, and ultimately all beings. By repeating a specific phrase for different categories of people, you learn to release resistance and embrace universal compassion.

• After engaging in five or more minutes of shamatha meditation, bring to mind a simple phrase: May I enjoy happiness and be free from suffering.
• Set a timer for two minutes and repeat that phrase silently to yourself during that time.
• After those two minutes set your timer once more, but this time turn your mind to the image or the name of someone you love dearly and insert their name into the phrase.
• Next, set your timer and turn your attention to a colleague or friend for whom you feel affection and make the same aspiration for them.
• Set your timer once more and think of someone who you don't know as well, an extra in the background of your life, and make the same aspiration.
• Bring to mind a difficult person in your life and make this same aspiration for them for two minutes without getting lost in the storyline.
• Bring to mind all five of these people together and make this aspiration to the group as a whole, then expand it to include everyone on your block, neighborhood, city, state, country, and all beings.
• Drop the words and images, look up at the horizon, and rest with whatever feelings of love have come forth.

The soul-voice meditation provides a contemplative tool for staying rooted in your own internal source of love while falling in love with someone else. Derived from the 4th century era of early Christian monastics known as the Hesychasts who practiced stillness, this practice involves dropping awareness into the heart center to connect with unconditional, limitless love so you do not rely on a partner as your primary source of love.

Meggan used the soul-voice meditation like an oxygen mask during her transition out of her marriage while caring for her one-year-old son.

• Be anywhere, seated or standing, and drop your awareness into the center of yourself, to the heart, imagining it as a chamber, dance floor, or field of wildflowers where everything is possible.
• Set the intention of connecting to the love your soul contains, or ask your soul questions such as how you can hear or feel it more clearly.
• Give gratitude for whatever information or feelings greeted you.

4. Commitment and Platonic Love

Sustaining a partnership requires remaining faithful to your soul while building a rich web of platonic soul-family.

Many relationships fail because of everyday betrayals where you forsake self-love to please your partner. Reconciling human love with divine devotion means choosing a partner with intention while keeping a sacred distance to cultivate personal integrity. Wedding statistics show a 50 percent chance that a marrying couple will stay together.

Meggan's marriage ended in divorce after her partner realized the relationship wasn't right for him, forcing her to realize she had focused too much on meeting his needs while ignoring her own.

The Cost of Self-Betrayal

True commitment to a partner requires remaining faithful to the voice of one's own soul rather than sacrificing personal needs out of fear of loss. You try out your love for yourself on others, and you cannot successfully connect with a partner if you are detached from your own authentic being. Seeking completion through another person creates an unhealthy and disempowering dependency.

• Identify the activities that allow you to feel connected to the presence of your soul, such as long walks, meditating, writing, Rollerblading, or baking, and do at least one once a week.
• Find a spiritual practice that allows you to really hear your own truth or soul-voice.
• Marry your own soul by creating a ritual to wed the highest aspect of yourself.

The Suffering of Relationships

Long-term relationships inherently involve discomfort and suffering because humans constantly crave permanence and perfection from an ever-changing partner. Lodro explains that the undercurrent of suffering in relationships stems from ignorance of reality. Instead of accepting the fluidity of life, people crave solid ground, fixed outcomes, and external validation to complete them.

Lodro reflects on his own baggage from a past engagement where his fiancée suddenly realized she no longer wanted to marry him, teaching him to release the struggle for control.

• Find specific activities that you can do together, ranging from intimate actions like reading stories to extreme sports.
• Discuss your spiritual intentions and closely held values together without shyness.
• Go away together on travels to deepen intimacy for better or worse.

Platonic Soul Mates

Soul mates are not limited to romantic partners; they include platonic soul-family members who mirror our intensity and help expand our capacity to love. Expecting a single romantic partner to act as a tantric lover, best friend, mind reader, and breadwinner places an unfair village of demands on one person. Recognizing multiple soul mates across platonic relationships creates emotional wealth and eases pressure on romantic bonds.

Platonic friendships formed through open awareness and shared experiences provide essential support systems that often surpass family bonds during personal tragedies. Lodro bonded deeply with Miranda, his late friend Alex's girlfriend, after Alex died unexpectedly of heart failure on July 13, 2012, leading them to work together on the Obama campaign and rely on each other like a married couple.

• Engage someone new in conversation, such as a neighbor or coworker, and spend five or more minutes being completely yourself without posturing.
• Buy friends small gifts or tokens when traveling to show they are on your mind.
• Call each of your friends on holidays like Thanksgiving to express gratitude.
• Always pick up the phone to offer a safe space for friends in need.
• Nurture your friends' new romantic partners by getting to know them independently.
• Tell your friends you love them explicitly rather than holding back words.
• Invest as much time as possible being with or communicating with your friends to show reverence.
• Send cards, letters, or voice memos filled with gratitude to your pen-pal friends.
• Make lady dates with girlfriends with the same intentionality, dress, and importance as a romantic date.
• Pray or consciously wish for your friends with the same fervor you use for your own life.

5. Sacred Sex and Broken Hearts

Religious traditions often create an artificial split between body and soul. This split leads to guilt over physical pleasure and reliance on dissociation. You achieve true intimacy and sacredness only when you stay present in your physical body, which never lies.

The human body and soul are entirely indivisible during this lifetime, meaning true sexual and spiritual empowerment requires staying fully present within the physical body.

As a teenager, Meggan experienced an immediate connection with a foreign exchange student named Magnus. She imagined kissing him good night while staying in her sister's room. The next morning, she discovered that Magnus had physically perceived the kiss.

You can channel sexual energy upward through breathwork and visualization to increase vitality. Tom Kenyon used meditations on the Alchemies of Horus every night before bed. You can practice this method:

• Use breath work and awareness to imagine a black snake and a gold snake crisscrossing back and forth between the chakras.
• Visualize the snakes working themselves up from the base of the spine to the center of the brain.

Approaching intimacy with presence makes the ordinary extraordinary. Real-world sex requires showing up fully and offering your heart. You can cultivate sacred intimacy using practical steps:

• Exercise transparency by being honest with yourself and honoring a 'no' as much as a 'yes'.
• Take a moment to light a candle, say a blessing, or acknowledge your soul before intimacy.
• Be present in your body during sex, using the breath to return when distracted.
• Engage in open postcoital conversations to build confidence and clarity.

Surviving a Breakup

When a relationship ends, the severe pain does not stem from the heart, which is limitless. The pain comes from the fragile and limited ego. Letting go of the ego's narratives allows you to sit directly with the physical sinking feeling of grief.

When a relationship ends, the severe pain and confusion felt do not stem from the heart, which is limitless, but from the fragile and limited ego.

Lodro was engaged to a woman named Blaire for 3.5 years before she moved to Chicago and called off the wedding. His intense grief led to a heavy reliance on alcohol. Scott Neustadter based the film 500 Days of Summer on his breakup with Jenny Beckman.

Love alone is not enough to sustain a long-term partnership. A relationship requires a shared vision and an irrational foundation of mutual integration to survive. Meggan and her ex-husband entered therapy when their son was 7 months old. She moved into a 10-month-old apartment later, and 4 years later found clarity on her marriage ending.

You can navigate heartbreak without losing yourself by following specific practices:

• Do not engage in usual escape behaviors such as partying too hard, shutting people out, or throwing yourself into work.
• Practice self-care by getting more sleep and eating at least three meals a day.
• Meditate to learn to be with your own mind and heart as it is without judgment.
• Exercise to get out of your habitual space and use your body.
• Talk to friends for sympathy rather than plotting how to get back together.
• Place your hand over your heart and say 'I will love again' three to seven times when feeling stuck.
• When strong feelings arise, do not do anything; just rest, breathe normally, and let them wash over you.
• Spend one hour on Sunday evenings during a conscious uncoupling to address personal development, co-parenting work, and three gratitudes using 'I' statements.
• Increase self-care through massages, gym visits, long walks, lady dates, and beloved activities like writing and traveling.
• Survive postdivorce holidays by re-creating traditions and redefining family as whoever and wherever you feel at home.

Conclusion

True self-love is an innate state of wholeness that must be accessed within before you can authentically love anyone else.

These ideas fit together to form a singular path back to your soul. You learn that love is not a reward for perfection, but the very essence of your being. You move from seeking external validation to cultivating a sacred relationship with your inner authority.

1. Turn your attention inward and treat solitude as a vital practice ground for wholeness.
2. Listen to the inner voice of your soul instead of conforming to cultural expectations of romance.
3. Establish firm boundaries in dating and partnerships to preserve your sense of self.
4. Honor your heartbreak as a spiritual initiation rather than a personal failure.
5. Reclaim your body as a temple of sacred energy and self-expression.

10 Key Ideas

1. True self-love is an intrinsic gift of existence rather than an external reward earned through achievements.
2. You can actively interrupt negative internal monologues and cultivate self-worth by gazing into your eyes and leaving love notes for your soul on mirrors using a red Sharpie.
3. Calm-abiding meditation trains your mind to stay present with the physical breath, serving as a practical foundation for self-discovery and basic goodness.
4. Solitude should be embraced as a fertile practice ground rather than avoided through compulsive distractions like smartphones and dating applications.
5. Disciplined hope is an active spiritual practice of trusting one's life and deep desires while waiting without waiting, instead of falling into despair.
6. The sacred geometry symbol of the vesica piscis represents two whole individuals overlapping to create a third space without losing themselves or falling into codependence.
7. Recognizing multiple soul mates across platonic relationships creates emotional wealth, provides essential support systems, and eases pressure on romantic bonds.
8. The human body and soul are entirely indivisible during this lifetime, meaning true sexual and spiritual empowerment requires staying fully present within the physical body.
9. When a relationship ends, the severe pain and confusion felt do not stem from the heart, which is limitless, but from the fragile and limited ego.
10. Sustaining a partnership requires remaining faithful to the voice of one's own soul rather than sacrificing personal needs out of fear of loss.