Whisper #5The Sacred Selfish
June 17, 2025 | Safwen Daghsen, 10 min read
Last week, I closed the whisper with this:
Don’t call it love until you’ve made peace with the parts,
you prayed no one would ever see.
Find it here if you missed it.
That peace… is the beginning of real love.
Everything else is performance.
A mask you wear until you can’t peel it off your heart.
Which brings us to the onion theory:
Take a breath, dear reader.
Think of yourself as an onion.
Layer by layer, you peel away the performance, until you can simply be.
With no pretending.
No effort.
Just presence.
You can’t slice through the onion.
If you try, you’ll hurt yourself.
So life sends you people, heartbreaks, and sacred triggers.
And your only task is to peel gently.
One layer at a time.
One whisper at a time.
It’s okay if you cry along the way.
There’s no path to consciousness that doesn’t pass barefoot through your own hell.
So today, we go one layer deeper.
Bring all of you.
Take a breath.
My whispers are only reminders.
So find your center.
And meet yourself here.
Some of you wrote me after last week’s letter.
You said: “Choosing myself makes me feel guilty. It feels selfish.”
Good.
Let’s talk about that.
Side note —
If these whispers touch something tender in you, my DMs are always open.
Love is never neutral.
What we call self-love is often dictated by the shadow that dominates:
Sometimes it’s the need to be seen as “nice.”
Sometimes it’s the vow to never feel vulnerable again.
In both cases, it’s not love.
It’s a mask made of fear.
You either burn yourself to keep others warm.
Or light the match, burn the room, and walk away with your head high.
And you swear you had no choice.
But pause here my dear onion.
Breathe again and know:
You always have a choice.
Even in your most doomed moments, your intention is yours.
Sacred Selfishness is the fire that warms without destroying.
Not the kind that burns others to feel free.
Not the kind that burns yourself to feel loved.
But the kind that holds heat without harm.
The kind that says:
I’m here. And I’m not leaving myself again.
As Osho teaches:
Only a person who loves himself can love others.
But what most people miss:
A man who loves himself finds there is no ego in him.
Love always melts the self.
Sacred selfishness dissolves the ego.
It doesn’t feed it.
And if you think you have no ego, coz you're just kind.
That's exactly your ego in a form you haven't recognized yet.
You're human, my dear onion.
Thus your ego is here with you.
🌋 A Flame that asks for nothing
Someone dear to my heart called me selfish, for speaking my truth, for following what I felt, for showing up without asking for permission.
But here’s what I’ve come to know:
Self-love begins where performance ends.
It’s not a negotiation.
It’s a declaration.
To love yourself is to give your heart freedom to speak.
Not to win.
Not to convince.
but because silence would be betrayal.
What looks selfish from the outside
is often just truth with nothing left to prove.
No grip. No mask. No agenda.
Just flame.
it doesn't show up to win.
It simply is.
Because truth asks to be spoken out loud
Without needing applause, outcome, or reward.
That’s sacred selfishness.
It’s the love that sets your soul free
without needing to trap anyone else.
Because real love expands.
It doesn’t beg.
It doesn’t perform.
It burns clean.
And maybe the most selfless thing we can do,
is to stop abandoning the truth that lives in our chests,
just because someone else might call it “too much.”
🔥 The First Flame: Self-Belonging
We’re all looking to feel safe.
To belong.
Take it from someone who never did.
I’m half Tunisian, half Lebanese.
In Tunisia, I grew up as the Lebanese kid.
In Lebanon, I was the Tunisian one.
I stretched myself so thin, I started to say:
“I belong everywhere. To the earth. To the stars.”
But that too… was bypassing.
Because if you belong everywhere, you forget where your feet are.
What I missed is this:
Before geography.
Before nationality.
Before approval.
I belong to myself.
To this breath.
To this body.
To this soul.
The world mirrors back how deeply you belong to yourself.
And most of us?
We’ve never even visited home.
We keep outsourcing belonging:
To partners.
To jobs.
To likes.
To titles.
If you’ve read the previous whispers, you know my story:
Fighting to fit into the engineer’s life.
Only to meet the void.
As Brené Brown said:
True belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world.
And to be even more precise:
To be authentic is to be alive.
To be genuine to the moment flowing through your veins, unfiltered by who you think you’re supposed to be.
Self-belonging means:
I won’t abandon myself, even if you do.
Ironically?
That’s what makes you safe to love.
Because if you’re unsafe inside, you’ll either avoid love, or attach to it obsessively.
And in the context of self-love?
That unsafety breeds extremes:
You abandon yourself to be accepted.
Or you amplify your ego to control.
So today, just start here:
Sit with one hand on your heart.
Whisper: “I am home here.”
Say it until your body believes you.
💧 The Second Flame: Self-Nourishment
My dear onion,
Pouring from an empty heart only makes you bleed.
Most people think they’re kind.
They’re just exhausted.
They give and give, until what they call “love” turns into silent resentment.
They say they’re “being there” for others.
But they’ve already left themselves behind.
I’m not preaching from a podium.
I’ve been there too.
I didn’t know how to say no.
I stayed in rooms I didn’t want to be in.
Went out when I longed to stay home.
Stayed in relationships that drained me.
Avoided conflict.
Hoped people wouldn’t leave if I just kept stretching.
Love is nourishment for the soul.
So what are you feeding yourself?
What rituals return you to your aliveness?
What’s in your cup before you offer it to anyone else?
Self-nourishment means:
Tending your roots before you bloom for the world.
And if you’re wondering how to begin:
Start with the tiniest yes to yourself.
A walk without your phone.
Sitting down to eat without rushing.
Choosing silence over people-pleasing.
Every morning: ask yourself
What do I need today?
Every night: ask
Where did I abandon myself? What felt not loving to me?
This isn’t indulgence.
It’s return.
🗣️ The Third Flame: Self-Truth
If you keep muting your truth to stay safe,
you’ll forget the sound of your own voice.
Self-truth isn’t about telling everyone everything.
It’s about not lying to yourself.
There’s a voice inside you.
You know the one.
The one you’ve learned not to listen to.
The one you betray then you say: “I knew it.”
That’s the voice you need to give the mic to.
Take it from a yoga teacher:
Your body always knows.
You can feel the betrayal in your bones every time you say yes but mean no.
Every time you dim your light to avoid tension.
Every time you say “I’m fine,” when what you really mean is “I’m falling.”
Brené Brown warns:
If you trade in your authenticity for safety, you may experience: anxiety, depression, burnout, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, inexplicable grief.
That list?
It’s not abstract.
It’s your body telling the truth you’re not allowed to say.
So here’s a little practice:
Place one hand on your throat.
Whisper a truth you’ve been scared to speak.
Even if it’s just to yourself.
Before we move on, ask gently:
Am I choosing myself to connect deeper with truth?
Or am I choosing myself to avoid intimacy?
And know, my dear onion:
One is sacred.
The other is a shield.
🥀 When the Body Says No
So what happens when you actually try to choose yourself?
Not in theory.
Not in a Pinterest quote.
But in real life, when you say the no.
Cancel the plan.
Hold the boundary.
Your body says no back.
You feel it in your stomach.
Tight chest.
Jaw.
Shame.
Guilt.
Your nervous system flares.
You hear your mother’s voice.
Your ex’s silence.
Your teacher’s scolding.
“Too much.”
“Too selfish.”
“Too sensitive.”
But here's the thing:
A wound unspoken will write every rule you live by.
Until you love what hurt you, you will keep hurting what loves you.
That guilt you feel?
It’s not always a warning.
Sometimes, it’s just your body rewriting the code.
So if your no feels heavy — say it anyway.
If your boundary makes your voice tremble — hold it with grace.
If you say no then relapse — start again.
Yes, some people will leave.
But not the ones who were really with you.
🪞 The Hidden Mirror
If you’ve read this far thinking:
“Finally, someone gets why I cut everyone off!”
Pause.
If your boundaries are walls.
If you haven’t apologized in months.
If you can’t remember the last time you asked “How are you?” and actually waited for the answer…
This next part is for you.
Narcissism doesn’t come from too much self-love.
It comes from self-hatred dressed in pride.
Some of the coldest people I know are not cold because they don’t care.
They’re cold because caring once cost them everything.
So now?
Everyone else pays that cost.
You call it peace.
But it’s absence.
You call it strength.
But it’s fear.
You call it boundaries.
But it’s a fortress.
You’re not selfish.
You’re just hiding behind an egotistical pride.
And I say this with love:
The terror under your armor is sacred.
It’s trying to protect the child who got annihilated, silenced and abandoned.
So if your strength is a mask,
if your peace is isolation,
if your “I don’t care” is your religion:
You don’t love yourself yet.
You’re still performing safety.
Sacred selfishness doesn’t protect the ego.
It dissolves it.
✍️ The Letter Practice
Let’s integrate.
Write a letter.
Not from the person you show the world,
but from the one you’ve silenced.
If you’re not sure which one you are,
you might be both.
We all wear different masks in different rooms.
Start here:
If you tend to abandon yourself:
- Name one thing, you've been doing and you know it's not loving to you.
- What part of me have I betrayed to be accepted?
- What boundary am I afraid to set?
- If I truly belonged to myself, what would I stop doing?
If you tend to protect yourself with pride:
- What feeling am I avoiding by staying in control?
- Whose needs have I minimized to protect my comfort?
- What part of me is still afraid of being seen?
Then read the letter out loud.
Let your voice tremble.
That’s the sound of returning.
Sacred selfishness doesn’t scream my dear onion.
It doesn’t justify.
It doesn’t need applause.
It simply stops abandoning itself,
and lets love return as a consequence.
The sacred selfish is not selfish at all.
It’s the most generous thing you can offer this world:
A human being who has come home.
Love, when it starts with the self, has no choice but to expand.
It becomes lighter.
Freer.
Less of a grip and more of a gift.
The deeper we dive into self-love, the more love itself evolves.
It stops being about possession or expectation and becomes something purer.
Something vast.
Larger than life itself.