 Hi, this is George Cao and in this video, I invite you to an inquiry and the question is what is self-love and is it important? What do you think about it? I invite you to comment below if you'd like to share your thoughts about it and your experience with that and I also like to share my opinion about it. I've seen the idea of self-love come up more and more over the over the past few years among my audience and in social media and I think it seems to me it's in response to the feelings of self-judgment that a lot of people have of themselves. The self-judgment of I'm not good enough, look at me, I'm a failure, I failed again and again or what have I failed? I'm not worthy enough for success etc and I can understand that that is not a good mindset to keep wallowing in. It leads to erosion of creativity because creativity requires lack of self-judgment in fact. Creativity requires being open to whatever could happen. Lots of failures happen along the road to creativity and productivity. So I think the self-love is in reaction to self-judgment and I can understand that but I want to suggest an alternate route to dissolving self-judgment which is the alternate route is to know that you are profoundly loved. You are profoundly loved and how does that experience happen? Well you need to find I think a philosophical or spiritual path that you can believe in, that you can really adhere to, that can give you that kind of experience of either you are profoundly loved or that life is so precious and valuable that all you need to do is just to make the best use of it. So let me give you two traditions. One is of course Christianity and I have some experience with that. I used to identify as a Christian and during that time when I was in that school of thought I did experience sometimes profound sense of being loved by a being of the universe, the captain of the universe so that there was forever security and forever love and so I wish that for you if that is the right path for you because then it allows us to then always make every day the best as we can to be more and more worthy of that love knowing that we are perfect in God's eyes and we are perfectly loved right and then another tradition is Buddhism and in Buddhism interestingly there's the thought that there is no self and so there is no such thing as self-love if anything that that could suggest that you love the ego and the ego could take over and make you become too prideful and self-serving etc etc and I should also mention in Christianity that because we are so loved we are called to love others as God loves us and so there's this profound sense of being loved and therefore emitting that love and giving that love to others as well and I think that's beautiful and in Buddhism because there is no self what all there is is the sense of profound gratitude that we are alive and in some schools of thought in Buddhism it's this there's also this idea that wow you know so many beings so many spiritual beings want to be incarnated on this earth in order to have the opportunity to develop our behavior and our mindset even though there's no self so develop a better behavior and more service to others so that we can eventually not have to reincarnate back on earth right this is one one idea from some schools of Buddhism and so when we realize how valuable and precious life is so instead of self-love it's the love of life and the preciousness of this life and therefore there's this urgency to make the best of every day and to serve others as best as we can because that serving of others creates more creates more benefit to everyone which is wonderful we love seeing the benefit that everyone has other people get as a result of what we can do and it also grows us spiritually so they eventually we might no longer need to incarnate back on this earth and experience all of its sufferings so I encourage you to choose a path of spirituality or philosophy that you believe in that can allow you to overcome your self-judgment and the debilitating nature of that and so that you can increase your ability to be creative and to be productive in a calm and joyful way so until the next video I wish you love and I wish you a profound um overwhelming of gratitude that leads to service to others