The other day I was writing another article and I did a search stock images of self love. What I found fascinating was that almost all of the images of self-love were of women. I found only one stock image that was free that had a man in it and even then that picture wasn’t showing the man expressing some form of self love and appreciation to himself but rather expressing love to someone else.
One of the tools of the sacred masculine is the tool of self love. On my own journey into men’s work I found that this tool was essential for helping me heal and embrace myself. I used to loath myself for being a man, because of how masculinity had been modeled to me by my dad, as well as the opinions expressed about it by the women in my life. I only started to really heal this wound when I started to love myself. I recognized I needed to change my attitude and perspective toward myself and discover what healthy masculinity looked like.
Men, and people in general, need to embrace self love. But men may find the idea of loving themselves particularly hard to adopt because we’re taught that men don’t feel. The truth is that men do feel, but they’ve been taught to bury their emotions. Burying your emotions just cuts you off from yourself as well as other people. Self love counteracts that numbness and teaches you how to connect with full intimacy and awareness of yourself and other people. It’s not a cure-all but when you start loving yourself you also start recognizing how much of yourself you’ve given away to other people and you start reclaiming it and creating healthy boundaries for yourself and others.
Self love is also a potent antidote to the heartache of breakups. Breakups are hard in general, but for men they can be particularly hard because of how much men wrap their identity up in the relationship. In my upcoming class Beyond the Breakup we explore how self-love can help you heal from the pain of your breakup and all the other relationships that didn’t work out. When men learn to love themselves it changes how they approach relationship, because they aren’t coming at it from a place of needy insecurity. They’re coming at relationship from a place of awareness and love for themselves, which enables them to hold better boundaries with other people.
A man who loves himself has a better sense of who he is, what he wants and what his mission and purpose is. He also knows he doesn’t need to go through life alone and through self love he starts reaching out and connecting with other men to create a brotherly bond where each man supports the other men. Men need to have healthy relationships with other men because it teaches them that they aren’t alone and that other men can relate to the challenges and struggles they are going through.
If we’re going to change how we show up in the world then we need to start by learning how to love yourselves. One way to model that is to show images of men expressing love for themselves in a way that’s affirms the importance of validating themselves. Men need to know it is healthy to value and love themselves. We haven’t been taught that, but more than ever we need to learn it.
