Introduction

What does ‘love yourself’ mean anyway?

Welcome to Bad Yogi.

Which explores:
• Moral ambivalence: How to fail and still love yourself.
• How to be a good bad person and still love yourself.
• How to disappoint yourself (and others) and still love yourself.
• How to live with and love yourself if you are a bad good person.
• How to live with and love your good self and your bad self
.

Doing this through:
• A sentimental account, in random stories, observations, teachings and experiences, of a personal journey through the back end of the 20th and front end of the 21st centuries, with alarums and excursions into love both physical and spiritual, yoga, sex, celibacy, drugs, rock’n’roll, motorcycles, music, alcohol, addiction, craftsmanship, self hatred, self love … and God.

What does ‘love yourself’ mean anyway?
In the Bible, Matthew talks about loving your neighbour as yourself (22:39), but he doesn’t give us insight into the difficult, loving yourself bit.

Which includes forgiving yourself.

A way into it:
Most of us, unless we are blessed / cursed with a total lack of self knowledge, hate or despise ourselves in some way at times. We are nasty to children, animals or good people, we fail at our diet and go back to the ice cream, we let alcohol or other drugs past the gate we thought we had closed; we are self destructive, we destroy trust, we let people down, we lie, deceive, steal and are unfaithful, we forget important stuff, we are selfish, spiteful, greedy and sly.

Bad Yogi is an exploration of the precarious path between connecting to divinity and renouncing it, or at least concluding that it’s just too difficult to live with on a daily basis. The ideas of Soul and God are central to the work, but although they mean something deeply personal, powerful and true for me, that doesn’t mean it will be the same for you.

In a traditional religious context, renouncing or turning away from divinity, either that to be found within you or its external expression, can mean damnation – consignment to eternal hell, pain, desolation and despair.

Bad Yogi is here to tell you that ain’t necessarily so.

The stories, observations and ‘didactic’ teaching bits here are mostly autobiographical. The experiences of divinity through meditation come from six years in my 20s of total commitment to a life of celibacy and spiritual discipline, Raj Yoga, as taught by the Brahma Kumaris, in the 1970s and 80s. Their message and its delivery mechanisms have refined and developed over the years, to become more acceptable to western attitudes, but I personally haven’t been in direct contact with those adjustments since the early 1980s.

After a six-year period of struggle to achieve the ‘purity’ in thought, word and deed taught by the institution, and the rest of my life bouncing like a badly balanced ball between the search for love both physical and spiritual, sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, family, parenting, alcoholism, motorcycles and a career in the curation and critical appraisal of design, it’s time to come out with what I have learnt and observed, without fear or favour, and hope that you will find at least some of it useful and helpful.

The basic idea is that you can find peace and inner contentment without sitting with loincloth and begging bowl on top of a mountain for the rest of your life.

I still don’t really know what loving yourself means. What I do know is that turning your attention inside and experiencing your silent self – in whatever way suits you, but it does mean meditative or yogic practice of some sort – is the best, if not the only, way to get as near as you can to that place – a place of peace.

Mountaintops and loincloths not necessary.

©Aidan Walker, 2025