If we would just love ourselves properly, we wouldn’t need to love ourselves too much.
Any truth can be distorted into an untruth. This is, hands down, one of the most powerful weapons of evil. Complete untruth is not the problem. But take something true in one setting and apply it over there, where it doesn’t belong—especially when it’s set up as a rigid rule—and we’re in dangerous territory. In this way, any truth can be bent into a distorted extreme that makes the truth null and void. And so it is too with self-love.
There’s a healthy version of self-love that exists in mature souls. But then if we fold in a few distorted currents, suddenly we end up with the wrong flavor of self love. The crudest of the many forms is selfishness, where we want an unfair advantage or to put ourselves always in a better light than others.
Another twist on this theme is a kind of self-admiration that’s of a sickly, obnoxious nature. We can easily spot this in others and often just as easily identify in ourselves. It’s actually more harmful if this exists hidden in emotional layers that are not so obvious on the surface, especially if the person believes their conduct truly reflects their innermost self. Such self-delusion is worse than the worst outer deed.
So first we need to ferret out these kinds of distortions. Then we need to find out the reason these wrong kinds of self-love exist. Without this, just knowing about these twisted currents won’t do us much good. Because we won’t be able to straighten them out.
What we’ll usually find is that the cause of lack of loving ourselves in the right sense is the same thing causing the distorted self-love. Simply put, if we don’t love ourselves as we should, we’re sure to go overboard in the wrong direction. We seek the wrong solution. But if we would just love ourselves properly, we wouldn’t need to love ourselves too much.
Jill Loree grew up in northern Wisconsin with parents who embraced their Norwegian, Swedish and German heritage. Foods like lutefisk, lefse and krumkaka were prepared every Christmas. And of course there was plenty of beer, bratwurst and cheese all year round.
She would go on to throw pizzas and bartend while attending college at the University of Wisconsin, and then moved into a career in technical sales and marketing. She would settle in Atlanta in 1989 and discover that the sweet spot of her career would be in marketing communications. A true Gemini, she has a degree in chemistry and a flair for writing.
One of Jill’s greatest passions in life has been her spiritual path. Raised in the Lutheran faith, she became a more deeply spiritual person in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) starting in 1989. In 1997, she was introduced to the wisdom of the Pathwork Guide, which she describes as “having walked through the doorway of a fourth step and found the whole library.”
In 2007, she completed four years of training to become a Pathwork Helper, and stepped fully into her Helpership in 2011. In addition to offering individual and group sessions, she has been a teacher in the Transformation Program offered by Mid-Atlantic Pathwork. She also led marketing activities for Sevenoaks Retreat Center in Madison, Virginia and served on their Board of Trustees.
In 2012, Jill completed four years of kabbalah training and became certified for hands-on healing using the energies embodied in the tree of life. She began dedicating her life to writing and teaching about personal self-development in 2014.
Today, Jill is the proud mom of two adult children, Charlie and Jackson, and is delighted to be married to Scott Wisler. She’s had more than one last name along the way and now happily uses her middle name as her last. It’s pronounced loh-REE. In 2022, Scott joined her full time in their mission to spread the teachings of the Pathwork Guide far and wide.
