Self love and self care

Self love and self care is commonly being understood as focusing on making oneself more happy or less unhappy by doing what will make oneself feel good and happy, or avoiding what will make oneself feel bad and unhappy, as well as pampering oneself in all kinds of pleasurable material and sensual enjoyments, or gratifying all one's desires of craving and aversion, empowering selfishness, ignorance, egoism, impurities, and restlessness.

Self love and self care in the teachings and practice of yoga, is not about that, but it's about being able to have the self-initiation and self-effort to be looking after the over-all physical and mental well-being of oneself while still having certain degrees of basic essential awareness and sanity, by working diligently to be freeing one's mind from ignorance, egoism, impurities, and restlessness, to annihilate the idea of 'I', attachment, identification, desires of craving and aversion, expectation, greed, pride, selfishness, possessiveness, separateness, discrimination, fear, anger, and hatred, to be attaining mental and emotional independence, where the selfless perceptive cognitive intellectual emotional thinking mind is no longer being determined by the mind perception towards all kinds of selfless and impermanent names and forms, experiences, ties and connections, relationships, interactions, activities, affairs, events, conditions, or situations, that are pleasant or unpleasant, agreeable or disagreeable, desirable or undesirable, and enjoyable or non-enjoyable, transcending duality, or the sense of goodness and badness, righteousness and wrongfulness, happiness and unhappiness, joyfulness and joylessness, meaningfulness and meaninglessness, positiveness and negativeness, success and failure, pride and shame, deserving and undeserving, pleasurable enjoyment and painful suffering, and etc.

One needs to be able to be kind towards oneself unconditionally (stops hurting oneself/the body and the mind) before one can truly be kind towards all and everyone unconditionally, without discrimination, attachment, or expectation (stops hurting all and everyone out of a disturbed/peaceless/fearful/defensive/violent/confused/ignorant/discontented/ambitious impure restless state of mind).

To be kind towards oneself, is about the selfless mind is being able to accept itself as it is unconditionally, or accepting the condition of the physical body and the state of the modification of the mind, that are selfless and impermanent, as they are, unconditionally.

Only when the mind can accept itself as it is unconditionally, or respecting all the selfless impermanent changes in the body and mind as it is, or accepting the perceived reality in the present moment now as they are, then only it can accept all and everyone as they are, and respecting the world as it is, unconditionally.

Only when the mind is able to look after itself, or is able to be resting in unconditional peace, then only it can have the ability to look after some others.

Inquire the truth of everything.