Question: Is caring for one’s self selfish?
Answer: Yes. And that’s a good thing. That’s because everything surrounding you reflects what and who you are. So anything you do, including what you do for yourself, or what you do for others, expresses a selfish focus.
Since life is 100 percent subjective, your subjective experience is all you can experience. Even if you think you’re experiencing something someone else experienced, you still experience your version of that. Walking in another’s shoes then, can never happen. You can only walk in yours.
Even when you’re focusing on someone else, you’re focusing on yourself. I describe other people in my life as emanations of my own conscious awareness. Those emanations help me better focus on that which I’m creating in life. Same goes for everything else in my reality. Everything reflects back to me my internal condition.
Create happy people
When I realized this perspective, life got real easy. It got easier caring for others too. Essentially, I stopped caring for others. That doesn’t mean I became callous, it means I realized I can’t do anything to make another happy. And the closer the other person was to me, the less effective I was at making them happy. Just ask my ex-wife!
Oh, someone can make another temporarily happy. Just look at a child and its mother. Eventually, the mother will get unhappy about that kid! Neither mothers, fathers, sons, daughters nor me or you can create lasting happiness for another. It’s better then letting go of that goal. Instead, I care for my own happiness.
When I do that I find I meet more people who have found their own happiness. Which means I don’t have to care for them. They’re caring for themselves.
I’m not suggesting you realize all this intellectually. An intellectual understanding helps. But when my experience proved how accurate all this was, my “understanding” deepened immensely.
Self care means creating a satisfying life. That’s the Charmed Life I always write about. I show people how to create their Charmed Life. That first happens within the individual. Then that internal condition gets reflected externally, including in people one meets.
So the Charmed Life starts with cultivating an internal happiness. Then any kind of life one wants becomes possible. It will unfold gradually, as all things do. But it will happen. And when it does, every moment becomes a happy one.