Dr. Gay Hendricks has served for more than 30 years as one of the major contributors to the fields of relationship transformation and body-mind therapies. Along with his wife, Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks, Gay is the author of many bestsellers, including Conscious Loving, At the Speed of Life, and Five Wishes.
Gay received his PhD in counseling psychology from Stanford University in 1974. After a 21-year career as a professor at the University of Colorado, he founded The Hendricks Institute, which offers seminars in North America, Asia, and Europe. He is also the founder of a new virtual learning center for transformation, Gaia Illumination University.
Throughout his career, Gay has done executive coaching with more than 800 executives, including the top management at such firms as Dell Computer, Hewlett Packard, Motorola, and KLM. His book, The Corporate Mystic, is used widely to train management in combining business skills and personal development tools.
In recent years he has also been active in creating new forms of conscious entertainment. In 2003, along with movie producer Stephen Simon, Gay founded the Spiritual Cinema Circle, which distributes inspirational movies to subscribers in more than 70 countries around the world. He was the executive producer of the feature film Conversations with God, and he has appeared on more than 500 radio and television shows, including Oprah, CNN, CNBC, 48 Hours, and others
As far as self-help books go I really enjoyed this.
The strategies incorporate mindfulness and somatics which has been the most helpful type of therapy for me so it all gels with my own path, so to speak.
"Love yourself" has a cheesy ring to it but the actuality of it is so important. Many of us beat ourselves up over every little perceived imperfection or numb ourselves out to experiences because of past trauma. This book does truly act as a "how to" guide to be kinder and loving towards ourselves in every aspect of our lives, even when faced with our built-in defense mechanisms.
Thankfully, the book is not froufrou or too high in the clouds. It's practical.
The message and strategies are pretty basic but often challenging to do in practice. In the words of the Indigo Girls, "The hardest to learn was the least complicated." And so this book is important.
I thought the author did a good job of giving plenty of examples on how to put the strategies he lays out into action and how to do so in regard to different elements of ourselves: our feelings, our insecurities, our guilt, hate towards others, anger towards parents, our bodies, our sexuality, old defense mechanisms, etc.
The only ding I give it is a section where it talks of depression. I think the author was referring to the transitory, minor bouts of depression that hit us sometimes vs clinical depression but that wasn't clear. I'd hate to think someone with a major depressive disorder reading this and either thinking this was the cure all or worse, that this strategy doesn't "fix" them. There's a big difference between chemical imbalance or mental illness that requires medication and extra care vs feeling down in the dumps.
Other than that quibble, the book is well-written, helpful, and easy to digest.
I was surprised to see this is also a Kindle Unlimited book. It's definitely worth the read and one to refer to many times over.
I got this book under the premise that I keep ending up in relationships where I can't get enough love from the other person, so I must need to learn to get enough love from myself instead. Why else would I keep repeating this pattern? So, I need to learn to love myself, but how? Poof! Here's a book with that exact title, by the author who changed my life with The Big Leap. I'll take it!
One big idea here is that resistance is the source of most of our problems. If we can stop fighting our feelings and just feel them in our bodies, everything stops being so constricted and starts to work. This seems to be true, based on my experiences.
On top of being afraid of our feelings, we learned somewhere along the way (probably many places along the way) that we're unlovable. Instead,
"I have learned to see the world the way it isn't. I have done this for my survival. I am now interested in much more than survival. I can see it the way it is. There is nothing outside myself that can save me. I have everything I need inside me. All the love I have been searching for is here within me. I demand it from others because I am unwilling to give it to myself. I can give it to myself. My very nature is love, so there is no need to search for it, no need to work at it. Love is the only thing I need to change. I am now willing to love myself." (p. 13)
p. 18 "Love whatever you can from wherever you are." For example, he was beating himself up about being sick. He had to love himself for hating himself for being sick before he could love himself for being sick. In fact, all it takes is being willing to love yourself for whatever you're doing in the moment. You don't have to try, just acknowledge your reality and be willing to experience loving yourself in it.
p. 39 We get scared to create, love or be our biggest, selfiest selves, because we got burned in the past and overgeneralized those situations to mean we should avoid our passion all the time.
p. 40 "On the good days we hum with creativity. Things work, we feel good. On the bad days we bump along, one foot on the brakes, in thrall to old pain and the expectation of disapproval. I imagine this explains why writers and artists are notoriously difficult to live with. they are riding the edge of the energy, working the territory where the wave meets the rock. It is rough country there, and their lives are a testimony to its roughness." Yes!!! That's why my work feels so hard.
p. 44 Why do we resist our feelings? "We think, If I let myself feel my fear, I would never stop trembling. There seems something bottomless about it." ... "If I ever let myself really feel my sadness, I'd never stop crying." Afraid it will swallow us up, but if we just stopped resisting and felt it, it would pass through and be gone soon. Yes! The summer I rotted in Edinboro, I spent the whole summer terrified of my fear. When I finally let it out, it took maybe half an hour and was way less horrible than all the fighting.
p. 57 "Adult life is a process of becoming a guardian angel to ourselves."
p. 63 "Be careful not to use reasons to tell yourself why you're lovable. It is never satisfying, because you are using reason to fight reason… The alternative is to go right past reason and love yourself for being the way you are. Simply love yourself, regardless of reason. Love yourself for hating yourself, for not being able to love yourself. Love yourself for all the crazy reasons you don't love yourself."
p. 82 "Relationships work when each person is willing ot see that each is an equal creator of all aspects of the relationship. Relationships don't work when anybody takes less than one-hundred-percent responsibility. Learning to love yourself in a relationship is seeing that you will create the very situations you need that allow you to experience the parts of yourself you cannot love. By doing that you will eventually have the opportunity to love all of yourself. Then, as if by magic, you will find yourself completely loved by others."
best book i ever read in my entire life, changed my life.
i happen to bump into this book in one of the state's library. it was published in 1982, and the pages already torn. i borrowed it anyway because i'm self-help lover. i used to like reading stuff about 'loving yourself'.
before i bump into this book, i am ardent follower of the idea promoted by paul.m. let me not explain her full name because her knowledge contributed to my life as well. however, paul. m stressed the idea that:
"to love ourself is to feel compassion for ourselves and others. To be unloving to ourself means, we are unloving to others as well.When you are unable to love, means you are in your wounded self. Judging yourself for your performance is unloving. instead, you should value your beautiful soul and essence"
so for two years i hold on to her idea. it did help me, however, i kind of find it difficult the more life challenges got me. its kind of difficult for me, at times, when i feel bad bout myself and 'learning' to love my 'beautiful essence' was so hard. whenever i feel bad, i guess,"okay, i cant love myself now, i'm in a wounded self, does that mean i will harm others?"
Then i bump into gay hendricks work, "learning to love yourself". hendricks, in one statement, changed the way i relate to myself and to other: for good. and for the better. he state:
"to love yourself is not 'deciding' to love yourself or 'rationalising' why you are lovable. loving yourself to love yourself for not being able to love yourself, and even for judging yourself. loving yourself is to love you for hating a particular person"
when i tried hendricks idea, to my surprise, my life transformed in seconds. not to say it got better or got happier. but i become more relaxed even at down times.i became more accepting of myself and others. i became more compassionate naturally. i dont have to feel bad if i cant feel compassionate. i can love the unloving part of myself, and when i do that, i tend to be forgiving of myself and others.
Life changing. Taught me to stop beating myself up for making mistakes, having lapses in judgement, feeling angry, disappointed or jealous etc. It was much easier to stuff these feelings and pretend that I was such a good person that I never had these experiences than it was to accept and love them. After reading this book along with Pema Chodron's "The Wisdom of No Escape" as part of my daily spiritual practice I now love myself for every thought, feeling, emotion, reaction I have. I live more conciously every day and am more clearly present in the NOW.
This is the original modern self-help book, that literally launched the genre as we know it today. I’ve read so so many self-help books, a cringey, embarrassing amount if I am honest and maybe I could’ve saved all that time and money if I had gone to the original source. This is a classic for a reason. I wasn’t expecting it to lead to personal breakthroughs, because this is the type of messaging we see everywhere (although in its regurgitated form), but it certainly has.
Maybe it’s the daddy issues but I think we all would have turned out differently had we been parented by someone of his worldview. The book itself isn’t too groundbreaking, but the author’s genuine love of life and love of being saturate every page, and for that reason alone the book is worth a read; there are several passages that are very helpful, and exercises and insights that are themselves unique and original.
In order to love someone we must first love ourselves, how many times have I heard that and it was not until I read this book that I learned HOW to do this.
A nice reminder that can bring you to tears or other emotions needed to be released by giving you a fresh point of view on self love and compassion for being just perfectly okay with the way we are :)
Well, this was a short book that should not have taken six months to read... nevertheless, my own self, not wanting to love himself, postponed reading this, in order not to learn.
The book itself is simple, and has an explanation about love that I can now begin to entertain, although not fully accept (lovely resistance).
If you can get your mind to accept reading a book like this, it is worth it. I liked it, at least.
I have read so many self-help books. When I realized that my severe self hatred was a veery big part of my dysfunction, I went looking for a book that might help me change this behavior. I read it once and liked it. I picked it up about a month ago to read again and it clicked. simple and straightforward. Now I get it. highly recommend this book.
I like this author and have gotten a lot out of a few of his books in the last 5 years (getting the love you want, conscious living, and the big leap). This book was short and sweet with a few very useful reminders. One of those is that loving ourselves FOR the things we don’t love about ourselves (I love myself for getting annoyed with my colleague) frees up space to accept the really and change for the better. My usual approach to resisting/denying that being the case or trying to force it into something positive is completely ineffective and usually makes me more annoyed/stuck in that annoyance. Another reminder (similar) is that what we resist persists, so the more accepting we can be of all situations/emotions/thoughts/judgements/realities, the less power they have over us. I felt a shift inside myself because of these reminders. I could experience them viscerally. This is true of a lot of insights in his books-he guides the reader to experience rather than just telling/explaining which is super effective for me.
However, his books also have a strong privilege lens on them which is a bit distracting. As a successful, educated, able bodied, white, via gendered, straight, American man, his insights are missing any sort of analysis of power dynamics, historical context, or justice/oppression and how all of those bring nuance to his insights in the way different people experience them. While I get a lot from his work, I would get MUCH more and be more excited to share with others if he pierced through the lens of privilege that assumes his particular dominant group perspective is normal/universal.
Basic how to in giving yourself the kind of love you hope to get from other people. Incorporates some mindfulness techniques that have proven very helpful for me (learning how to sit with unwanted or uncomfortable feelings, for one). I quite liked the exercises it had me do at the end; they gave me tools to chip away at my own self-loathing. And gave me an interesting glimpse at the scope of it.
I am lifting this observation from another review, but I agree that Hendricks doesn’t really give clinical depression its due in this book. Acknowledging your own self loathing and taking responsibility for it and doing the hard work to reverse it can work wonders...but Hendricks makes it sound like you can cure your own depression overnight.
Very short read, almost too short, but the simplicity of it makes it easy to remember and put into practice.
The main things I'm taking away from this book are: 1. To stop fighting my feelings! It's crazy how we're taught to deny our own experiences and repress our feelings from an early age (ie. "don't cry" "don't be angry" "calm down" etc). Actually accepting my emotions and feeling them stops me from being at war with myself, and also greatly lessens the power those feelings have over me. 2. Love myself where I'm at now. Love myself for feeling the way I'm feeling.
Also interesting insights into why we learn that we are unlovable and how western culture was built upon a negative view of the self.
This book helps you uncover the hidden obstacles to loving yourself, which then opens the door wide to loving others, loving your life, loving your health, and loving the beauty of everyday existence. I call it the foundation because if deep down inside you don’t think you’re lovable you can’t love others and you can’t openly display your love for others.
Give this book a try. You may discover a world of love that’s been denied to you for decades. Love yourself more today so you can love others. You’ll make the world a better place.
I had the experience of loving myself two weeks before picking up this book. What he described in the first few pages were almost an exact mirroring of my experience. From there this book challenged and changed my perspective on what it means to really love ourselves!!! For just pick this book up if you want to read it. Prepare yourself and be ready to be blown away.
Moved from thinking to feeling love. Initially gave it a 3 star because the concepts shared are very ‘basic’ and I felt uncomfortable with the very personal and enthusiastic tone of the book. Half an hour later I find myself utilizing a ‘simple’ skill so many times - had to do the book justice and edited review.
In my stack of “what to do with these books” was this scant little self-help published in 1987. It took barely one cup of coffee to get through and can be easily summed up:
Accept and love yourself. Forgive yourself. Feel your feelings. Quit seeking love, be your own source for love and approval.
A few takeaways, we were born to love and childhood narratives and culture conditioning cut us off from loving ourselves. Way back is ultimate self acceptance and love. Loving our bodies, emotions, sexuality, and recognizing when we hit upper limits of energy. Welcome and love the aversion to continue rising in consciousness. Life assist us to become more aware.
This book was recommended to me by my therapist and I did not enjoy it at all. It is repetitive and contains too many confusing analogies. It is hard to keep up with and most of it doesn't make much sense. The book is centered around the authors own experiences in loving himself which does not really benefit the reader.
Interesting look at the experience of acceptance, of forgiveness and of loving oneself. Practical meditation and other exercises to guide you. Food for thoughtful chewing
This book is a quick and insightful read of ways to change yourself and the world around you by simply loving yourself, even if that means you love yourself for hating yourself...which eventually turns around to true love.
I cannot stress enough how utterly ridiculous this book is. I love books, and can generally get a little something from everything I read. There are no redeeming qualities in this book. I couldn't even bring myself to donate it; in the garbage it went.
This (to me) is an amazing book. This book really teaches you to love yourself!!! This book offers excellent advice and steps on your journey of loving yourself!
It's been said before that we're limited in our love for others, God, and the universe based on how much we're able to love ourselves. Hendricks makes a strong argument to affirm this statement with practical steps and ways to begin loving ourselves well.
I think that anyone who struggles with accepting all parts of themselves (psst, I think that's all of us) needs to read this book. It's short but packed with some very potent material. It really helped me to see acceptance of myself in a different manner.