Loving my neighbor as myself is gaining a whole new meaning; Do you love yourself?

For most of my life I have read and heard Jesus words emphasizing an Old Covenant commandment enjoining all of us to each love our neighbor as we love ourselves. What I am beginning to realize is that I have never really felt that I should love myself. I think that over the years I may have been self loathing. Furthermore, I think this may be a common phenomena. This is especially true of those of us who were raised in fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity. I think that we were never really taught the difference between selfishness and self-love. I think that we were often taught that self-love was prideful, and for heaven sake we should not be proud.

As I reflect, I think that I have often loved my neighbor more than I have loved myself. In fact, if I did not love my neighbor more than I loved myself I would not have been very loving at all. So how did I arrive at this conclusion? Well, that's a great question. I have for most of my life been somewhat of a mystic. Mysticism has played a large roll in my walk with Jesus. The truth is that as a young man, I strayed from my faith in Jesus. As a child I loved Jesus. I loved the Jesus that inspired a person to write the song Jesus loves me this I know. But as I grew older, I began to dislike the Jesus that I saw portrayed Sunday after Sunday.

In leaving my faith in Jesus, I could not shake my faith in a benevolent creator God. In searching I explored Taoism, and Buddhism and with that I experienced spiritual practices among them being meditation. I experienced a lot of spiritual phenomena that I could not and would not dismiss. Eventually, I was drawn back to Jesus, but not the Jesus of the Sunday sermons. It was the Jesus who reached out to me and gave me a peace that I had not had before. It was a Jesus that assured me that he loved me more than I could imagine. It was a Jesus who revealed to me a different way of reading the scripture that showed exactly how loving He was and how big a factor grace played in my transformation.

In coming back to Jesus, as a middle-aged man, I continued to meditate and continued with mystical practices that included Him and his Holy Spirit. One such practice was to meditate to a specific type of music/sound that causes meditative states in the brain. It is called Binaural Beats. It actually helps change ones frequency. One of the meditations that I have in my computer's music library and my iPhone as well is a self-love meditation. I am confident that the Spirit of the living Christ Jesus has encouraged me to explore this meditation. I am finding that it is changing my view of myself. I am seeing that I am uniquely created to be an "I AM person and the person that I AM.

I think now that I can begin to take more seriously, the instruction to love my neighbor as myself as I am beginning to love myself. Who knows? Perhaps I will learn to love my enemy as myself as well!