The Buddha said,

“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”

Welcome to The Soul Podcast. I’m Stacey Wheeler.

Today we’re going into the deep end. We’re talking about something that shapes our experience in the world more than almost anything else. It’s that big. And what makes it special is that it’s entirely in our control. When we understand it, it gives us real power to change how life feels. The wild part? It’s hiding in plain sight—so close we can forget it matters. But nothing matters more.

Of all the relationships you have—or will have—the most important is the one you have with yourself.

Don’t believe me? When other relationships go wrong, we can usually set them aside for a while and come back when we have more energy to give. If they’re hopelessly broken, we can even walk away. Friends, partners, even family. It’s rarely easy, especially with the people who’ve seen us unguarded. There are psychological reasons for that pull—shared history, the feeling of being known without armor—but we don’t need to unpack them here. The point is simpler: those are still relationships with other people. They can change. They can end.

The relationship you have with yourself is different. You cannot walk away from it. When this relationship is neglected—when you’re not being true to yourself, not nurturing or trusting the connection—you become disconnected from your deepest self. And without a solid foundation there, it’s hard to be deeply honest with anyone else. The honesty we have with ourselves sets the limit on how true we can be with the rest of the world.

I look for friendship, honesty, mutual respect—the kind of connection where both people bring something real. It’s natural to want people who lift us and who aren’t hiding too much, and to step back from those who push us down or feel false. That selectivity has been challenging, but it has brought me more ease. It’s also shown me the limit. We don’t become whole by clinging to others. The highest fulfillment available ultimately runs through the relationship we have with ourselves.

As an aside:

Some will argue the highest fulfillment comes from a relationship with a higher power. Even then, it still comes down to how you internalize that connection. There’s a linkage—self, soul, and whatever we might call God—that runs through you. You have to be open to receiving that love, which means knowing, at some level, that you are worthy of it. The relationship with yourself sits at the center of that. It determines how honestly you can relate to others, and how open you can be to anything larger.

So this relationship is different from all the others. You don’t get to walk away from it. It stays through every other ending, and through the stretches when no one else is around. There’s no door that leads somewhere else. Even the idea of death doesn’t fully solve it, if you hold any sense that something of you continues—the same self would still be there, living with whatever you left behind.

This is the one we can't outsource or abandon. And it is the one that quietly shapes how we enter, and how we leave, every other relationship we have. When the inner relationship is harsh or neglected, the outer ones tend to absorb the overflow. We might grasp for a external acceptance more, because we're lacking it inside. We cling where we should let go. When our inner relationship is steadier, it becomes more clear whether to stay or go.

There’s a name for what happens when that inner relationship gets strained: inner turmoil. It’s the feeling of being at odds with yourself. We’ve all known that pull—two directions inside, a decision that won’t settle, the sense that part of you wants one thing and another part wants something else. When you’ve done something that makes you respect yourself less, that conflict has to be faced.

It doesn’t stay private. It leaks into the choices we make. Some are small and silly. Some are costly. The person struggling with addiction, the person who can’t stop the sharp word, the person who finds it hard to care for their own body—these are often people in a quiet crisis with themselves. What shows up on the outside is usually the overflow of an inner relationship that’s been neglected. When we love ourselves more steadily, the outside starts to change too. What’s happening inside doesn’t stay inside.

When we strengthen the relationship with ourselves, balance returns and the choices get cleaner. It took me a while to accept that this was the most important love of my life. I’d been taught to hear “love yourself” as egotistical or self-absorbed. Those things exist. That’s not what I mean. The love I’m talking about is the one that grows when we let ourselves see the journey we’ve actually been on—the hard parts, the places we did well, the places we got it wrong—and then ease up on the harsh judgments and recognize our evolution through the process of living. It comes from giving ourselves forgiveness and grace. It deepens as we get better at seeing ourselves clearly and staying connected to the deeper part of us. There is a beautiful person inside you. Why is that so hard for many of us to remember?

No one knows your journey the way you do. No one has sat with every anguished minute, every shuddering tear, or the way beauty touches you in the unnamed corners of your soul. No one has held you as you cried, the way you have held yourself in those moments. Loving yourself matters. And that begins with knowing yourself.

The great Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh said, “To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.” 

You are the primary witness, my friend. Most of us have felt unseen—“If they only knew me.” 

William James, widely regarded as The Father of American Psychology, wrote that the deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. That craving is real. And the simplest place it can be met is inside. There are two of you in every moment. One can hold and appreciate the other. That internal appreciation is greater than anything another person can offer, because no one else has been present for your whole story. Every moment, every pain, every doubt, every fear and every tear. 

No one can know you the way you know you. Embrace that. It’s not a reason to shrink. It’s a reason to bloom. The best selling author Byron Katie put it plainly: 

“It’s not your job to like me… it’s mine.” 

And here’s the quiet result. When we learn to like ourselves, it shows. People are drawn to that energy. Think of the opposite. The person locked in self-loathing is usually the one we step back from. Negative energy repels. Positive energy draws. Love yourself and the world has an easier time loving you too.

We can walk away from negative relationships with other people. We cannot walk away from the one with ourselves. It can only be ignore or repaired. Internal conflict can be postponed, but it remains until it’s addressed. Ignore it and it piles up. Eventually the container breaks. So the maintenance matters. And internal conflict, when we meet it, is often an invitation to grow.

Conflict with another person is complicated. Hurt feelings, two egos, emotions facing each other like loaded weapons, a real chance that trying to repair it will make things worse. Sometimes the variables feel so uncontrollable that walking away looks wiser. 

Conflict with yourself is more straightforward. There’s only one ego. The emotional charge is inward. There’s no fear of another person’s judgment or volatility. After years of practice I’ve learned that the process usually starts with one thing: granting myself forgiveness and grace. Many of us struggle with that. Don’t. You’re a flawed human, figuring it out as you go, just like the rest of us. You are not what you’ve done. You are an evolving human. If you stay in judgment of yourself you stay stuck—like a dinosaur in a tar pit. Take the items you judge yourself for, one by one, and forgive them. That is how you start to break the grip of the tar pit of your decisions. 

Develop the relationship you have with yourself -and evolve your life's experience.

You've felt empathy for others. Now it's time to give yourself some of that.

When you do, it's like a loving hug to your deepest self. 

It grants you permission to move forward.

And practice makes the maintenance easier. Sometimes all it takes is a balancing minute. One minute in the mirror, looking into your own eyes. Your eyes are a way to see the deeper part of you. In that moment the outer you and the deeper you meet. You see more of yourself. You come back to the guiding force and the dear friend who has been there the whole time. You come back to you. A moment in the mirror with yourself can bring a powerful opening and expansion, as you remember the truth: You are more than the body. 

To accept ourselves as we are means valuing the imperfections as much as the perfections. It means practicing the end of the mean names we call ourselves. 

The legendary comic actor, W. C. Fields (jokingly) said, “It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.” 

Know yourself and love yourself, and what anyone else calls you loses its power. It may be that our greatest achievements grow from this relationship. So it is a worthy goal. Our lives are filled with scattered moments of learning to accept ourselves as we are, while we are also challenged to become better. We are human evolution in constant flow.

An old Hindu proverb says, “There is nothing noble about being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.” 

Write that on a post-it note and put it where you'll see it every morning! Remember that and you'll evolve.

We are all a work in progress—the evolution of a single human life: A Soul's journey. The question is how you are evolving. In a good way? In a bad way? Are you working on it? Is the direction one that lets you love and respect yourself more?

“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”

There’s no relationship more important than the one we have with ourselves. Today, nurture that relationship. And do it again tomorrow… and the day after.

Want to learn more about how to expand your internal relationship. If you're a SoulCircle member, there's another episode waiting for you, where we go deeper, with daily practices to help you expand your relationship with yourself. 

Not a SoulCircle member yet? Use the link in the show notes and get access to this bonus episode and all the other's in the SoulCircle members-only library. It cost about the same as a cup of coffee and you get much more than a quick buzz!