The patriarchal mentality that permeates our civilization began long ago. About 10.000 years ago (between 10,000 and 16,000 years ago), our ancestors went through great difficulties: scarcity of resources made them migrate to distant places. Life was characterized by the constant moving from one region to another (nomadism) in search of places where food was available and the environment more favorable to survival.

For this reason, they had to become more aggressive, predatory, barbaric, and violent. In inhospitable places, they fought against other tribes, animals, droughts, and all kinds of inclement weather.

The era of the masculine over the feminine begins. It was necessary to silence the voice of welcome, of love, to give place to power, dominion, in favor of the physical life.

In ancient religions, masculine "councils" were formed which established sacredness through rituals of sacrifice, that is, of violence. The offering of human and animal lives is found in the records of all ancient religions, which taught that killing was an act connected to the sacred.

Children should be killed to appease the fury of the deities. The goat was killed to atone for the sins of men, hens to purify women in their menstrual period... and so on.

This paradigm eventually formed what we call the imperialism of the masculine, with its cultural echoes, which led to the age of reason, subjecting female impulses to the second plane.

In this context, although with the important advances of the areas related to the intellect, we perceive a gap, an emptying of meaning, with real dangers to Humanity.
After all, this hegemonic, conquering, insensitive mentality no longer fits us - it has no more reason to exist. More than that: if it is not balanced with the presence of love, it can destroy us.

Of our three brains we prioritize only one – The psychiatrist and scholar of psyche, Claudio Naranjo - one of the nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 - states that one of the causes for this civilizing impasse lies in the fact that to date we have prioritized one of our "three brains" to the detriment of the other two, also very important: The normative, intellectual, masculine brain - the one that makes us Homo Sapiens, has dominated our way of being and existing. However, the maternal brain (which is in all mammals and has to do with relationships, with empathy, with sensibility) and the animal brain, or reptilian (instinctive, which has to do with our childish side, with our internal child), are also essential, since they bring the power of love, creativity, surrender and lightness to the world, generating a necessary balance. In this mental triad we have the Father, the Mother and the Child as the three parts of the same Being. And when we deny one or two of these parts in civilizational practices, the imbalance becomes evident.

It is true that we have sought to bring the theme of love to the forefront by discussing and thinking about it, although the emphasis on discourse still seems to us to be more for the sake of creating rules of coexistence based on discipline than on genuine understanding – the one that observes all aspects of a subject, with a deeper look at the nature of the human being himself, with socio-historical, cultural, and other influences, and so on.

We create prisons to separate and punish those who commit crimes, but we do not change the obsolete pedagogy, which teaches competition among members of the same species.
We talk about ethics (with others) but we do not talk about the issue of self-love...

And it is precisely at this point that we skim the understanding of what emerges as the primeval cause of all evils of the present.

If I were asked where we should begin this fruitful and necessary dialogue about love, my answer would be: "Let us begin with the basic lesson highlighted by Christ, who told us: 'Love your neighbor as yourself..."

It was no wonder that Jesus put this law as the summary of all universal wisdom. Only when we love ourselves can we love other people.

The "as yourself" implies first to love us so that afterwards love can flow naturally, spontaneously, smoothly, towards the world.

Many mistake “self-love” with narcissism - The point is that we want to love others, but we are not really aware of how much we lack this love for ourselves.
In fact, we should point out that the word "self-love" has been misunderstood and wrongly experienced. It was the same Claudio Naranjo who commented that many people confuse self-love with selfishness, with pride, narcissism, centrism, when in truth self-esteem suggests a hug of tenderness in itself, a welcoming lap, like that of the mother who loves unconditionally, without violence or sabotage.

Pride and selfishness will never be acts of self-love, but of ignorance, because they end up by compromising, by complicating the person and the environment where they are inserted.

Thus, and returning to the genesis of the great existential crisis that we live in, of all suffering, I emphasize that ignoring our true essence makes the experience of love much more complicated, and more: it makes it impossible to abandon self-destructive practices that have made us reap bitter fruits for so many millennia.

The philosophy of the Vedas, which appeared more than 4,000 years ago, in the ancient Indus Valley (now India), considers that all suffering is a consequence of the lack of recognition that we are the fruit of the sacred and therefore the sacred itself. But not only for them does this line of thought exist: in ancient Greece a sage also wrote in the courtyard of the Temple of Apollo in the city of Delphi the following phrase: 

I warn you, whoever you are,
Oh! You who wish to probe the Arcana of Nature,
If you do not find within yourself what you seek,
Neither can you find it outside.
If you ignore the excellences of your own house,
How can you find other excellences?
In you is hidden the Treasure of Treasures.
Oh! Man, know thyself
And you will know the Universe and the Gods ". 

Do we need the mistakes to go right? - The important aphorism "Know Thyself" was also registered in the ancient temple of Luxor, Egypt, at the entrance gate.

A few centuries later, a well-known psalm made us understand that "we are gods" and, later, we learnt from Christianity that the Kingdom dwells in us, that is, that the Father's Love is already in our souls; little manifested, it is true, but ready to be awakened.

The Gospel, in fact, is a manual to teach us to unveil our divine aspect, for it speaks of the excellence of our spiritual home, of the greatest treasure we carry, since we are fully merged and filled with the sacred.

This is, therefore, the main point to be highlighted: we are already love, peace and happiness, from the point of view of Jesus and many other sages of Antiquity. The point would be to become aware of this. But if in the deepest essence we are the divine, why do we still act within a profane pattern? Why do we avoid the sacred and cling to ephemeral, pride, selfishness?

The problem is that when we identify with the material aspect of existence, we suffer because we are transitioning away from our real nature, which is spiritual, loving, and pacified.

Because we ignore our real condition as children of God, and because we mistakenly believe that life must be based on three false pillars: materialism, individualism and consumerism, we go through life, distant from ourselves.

Yes, it is true that we still need the mistakes to go right. We are experimenting until we understand the best way. From this point of view, everything is as it should be; in the meantime this awakening fits us! With low self-esteem we move through the planet doing much damage to us and to the world, beyond the necessary and the bearable.

How, then, do we educate ourselves for this love for ourselves?

According to Psychology, only when we accept the negative that still exists in our psyche, can we really detach from what makes us evil, abandoning dysfunctional thoughts and actions. 

Self-forgiveness is another important issue in life - We need to integrate every aspect of our psyche. We must recognize, admit, and accept our imperfections so that we can dispose of them. And this is by a simple logic: what we hate binds us; what we love, sets us free.

We can only change what harms us if we love ourselves the way we are, with all the good and bad we still carry in the mental world. This is the basic premise for self-love. However, there are more issues that should be included in this process.

The feeling of guilt, i.e., the awareness of a committed mistake, can and should exist, but it should never be a guilt which sets up an eternalized resentment in search of an illusory retaliation. After the painful confrontation with the reality of error, we must go to reparation, changing the course of thought, understanding that it is through mistakes that we can recognize the best ways and that this is part of evolution. We need to make peace with our mistakes... self-forgiveness is therefore another important point!

In fact, even good humor is highly necessary in this process. Laughter of small failures brings harmony to the mental world.

Of course, in big failures we will not be able to laugh, but we can maintain the necessary serenity, capable of assuring us firmer steps towards success. No desperation, no self-flagellations! Such posture only accumulates unreasonable, pathological anxieties.
Self-knowledge, self-acceptance, self-forgiveness and continual detachment from dysfunctional thoughts and actions are the precious movements toward a better world.

In the book "Philosophy of Well-Being" by Marcia de Luca and Lucia Barros, we read that "Social conditioning makes us reject our shadow so that we no longer recognize it. After all, we all want to be perfect, even if this simply does not exist, since duality is an intrinsic part of nature and life. In fact, in order to become better people, we must do the opposite of rejecting the shadow. We have four steps to follow, and the ideal is to teach these steps early to the children. They are:

1. Understand that we all have good and bad characteristics;

2. Accept the shadow itself;

3. Forgive yourself for it;

4. Turn the enemy into an ally, learn and transcend". 

It is fundamental to educate and educate ourselves for self-love - The construction of self-love is therefore the great step to change the world for the better.
We will never learn to love God, nor creatures, without first identifying ourselves with the divine, with our true essence, loving ourselves as we are.

We will take endless turns with innumerable self-sabotages while ignoring how much we have acted as enemies of ourselves, even though we are, in essence, powerful dynamos of love.
We will tend to project our shadows, attacking everything and everyone, for we will not endure our own imperfections. We refuse to recognize what must change, the distorted visions we have about ourselves and the world. Besides, if we do not like ourselves, we will, of course, constantly build problems! After all, if we do not believe ourselves to be worthy of happiness, the small and big choices will lead to unhappiness...

Parents are warned to teach their children first to love themselves as they are. And this is done by stating that mistakes are part, that they are rather imperfect, because they are apprentices, like all other humans and that this condition never makes them unworthy of love; rather, they need love to understand their true and fully developed nature.

We should always guide them, using love as a method, and never a punishment method.
As Gandhi once said, we must be careful, for from so much "an eye for an eye" we will all end up blind...

Educating our children for self-love is a preventive measure.

Educating ourselves today for self-love is a cure for our diseases.