Loving yourself

Christianity specifically says, "Love they neighbor as thyself", echoing many other religions, but this behavior first requires those feelings about yourself before you are able to feel the same way for anyone else because. . .

a person cannot feel an emotion for anyone else

which they cannot first feel for themselves.

This means that you must feel non-judgmental, unconditional love, forgiveness, acceptance, caring, and respect for yourself FIRST before you can truly feel any of those emotions for anyone else. Without this initial connection to yourself, caring behavior towards others simply means your behavior is asking for the love and acceptance from others that you're denying yourself.

And since your thoughts create your reality — you will never be able to achieve your own peaceful contentment of acceptance without first learning to be kind to yourself.

"What is this self inside us, this silent observer,
Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us,
And urge us on to futile activity,
And in the end, judge us still more severely,
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?"
-- T. S. Eliot

In order to have those positive feelings about yourself, you must start listening to, and when necessary, changing your self-talk — the way you talk to yourself does matter. Hopefully you speak to yourself with as much respect, compassion, dignity, and encouragement as you speak to anyone else. Learning to accept, appreciate, and forgive yourself is more important even than feeling that way for another person.

"Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship to myself." -- Nathaniel Branden