The recognition that unconditional love of one’s self is never a selfish journey… (is the less familiar path, learning to trust instead our own experience). Most people, if challenged to love themselves unconditionally for fifteen minutes, reel in embarrassment. “What is love without judgement? How can I love myself so long as I am this assertive little prick? What does that mean – love unconditionally?” Ultimately that is what the journey is about.
In our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. we think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety, – in fact all neurosis and compulsions – are ultimately a defence against loving ourselves without condition. We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly, yet exquisite roots of our being that stretch deep down into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light. Ego wants to be glad of our own idealised projections; spirit wants to be incarnated in our humanity, where it can grow in wisdom through experience.
Marion Woodman : Dancing in the Flames : The Dark Goddess and the Transformation of Consciousness
Emerging From The Dark Night 