The importance of choosing yourself first lies in the secret of healthy, long-lasting relationships with others. In any interaction, in any environment, genuinely being yourself and embracing your full authenticity is the foundation of a strong connection. Accommodating others in order to receive validation is a distorted way to establish the basis of any social or emotional contract. When we accommodate, we enter a frequency in which we send the message: I am not good enough, but I will hide my sense of inadequacy so that you will accept me.
Energetically, the other responds with a similar distortion: I am not good enough either, but you are less than me because you are trying harder to be seen; therefore, you will not notice that I do not love myself either.
After a short period of time, we begin to feel the need to reconnect with our true essence, and we realize that being ourselves now feels like a form of betrayal to the character we created. This self-denial causes pain, even if we are in what we believe to be the relationship of our dreams — or rather, the relationship of the dreams of our ego. Fear begins to whisper: Would this person still like me if they really saw who I am, not who I have pretended to be? As frightening as this question may be, the truth is that someone who does not truly know you cannot truly love you. They may love a version of you that is fictional, constructed, and disconnected from your essence. And someone who does not accept your genuine authenticity does not love you.
It is not worth trying to adapt to another person — physically, mentally, or emotionally — just to fit in. Because beneath the surface, love becomes painful when we know internally that this person did not choose us, but rather the character we were performing.
The art of authenticity begins with a deep, intimate relationship with oneself, in which we spend enough time getting to know who we are, what we love, and what we enjoy. At the same time, we understand that this version of ourselves is not fixed; time changes us, life reshapes us, and nothing is permanent. And yet, there are essences that never change: our soul, its purpose on Earth, its gifts, and its unique frequency.
To accept who I am is to love who I am — not the character I pretend to be, not the version that tries hard to capture attention from the outside world, but the being I fall asleep with and wake up with, the one who hears my inner thoughts, my wishes, my desires, and my fears. To acknowledge who we are means placing ourselves at the top of our priorities and, in doing so, gently removing our gaze from others. It means stopping the endless wondering about what someone else is doing and beginning to ask ourselves: What am I doing? What am I feeling? How do I process this? What do I truly want, and what do I no longer want?
Knowing ourselves is the only way to establish true boundaries.
Entering our inner world gives birth to the most sincere form of love. True love awakens when we connect with our essence. A lack of self-love, on the other hand, is a symptom of our identification with the ego: with the character, with the narrative we invented out of our limited perception of life, and with the constant comparison of our achievements to those defined by society, trends, and fashion. Meanwhile, our true nature expresses itself silently within us — carrying qualities that can never be grasped by an egotistical mind.
Who we truly are is felt, not explained. It is transmitted, not performed. It is shared, not imposed. Who we are in essence is indefinable by words and can only be perceived by the heart. And when we reconnect to this truth, we fall in love with ourselves, and our essence becomes non-negotiable — because we can no longer betray ourselves.
Only then can we truly see the other in their inner beauty — a beauty we can recognize only because we have learned to see our own. In their inner greatness and in their absolute freedom of will, they hold the power to choose who and what they want. In reality, we are first chosen by ourselves and accepted by ourselves, and then the other becomes merely a mirror of that self-acceptance or self-rejection, that self-love or self-denial. Their decisions are honored with the same respect with which we honor our own — not from ego, but from coherence; not from pride, but from self-fidelity.
Healthy love is born from an inner, healthy relationship with oneself — where I love myself, accept myself, and acknowledge myself. From this place, I no longer need masks, pretenses, or chameleon-like personalities in order to belong. I do not need to be lighter, easier, more agreeable, or endlessly cheerful to be worthy of love. I only need to be myself — fully, courageously, and without fear of the outcome.
Because the more genuine I am, the clearer the energy becomes to attract not only someone authentic, but someone with great emotional maturity and a natural resonance with who I truly am.
The Circle of Hanik 