Loving Yourself

When I was a child I was taught "Love your neighbour as yourself".My interpretation of this was that loving your neighbour was the important part and that to love oneself was selfish.
Since working with Lester Levinson's release technique this has changed. While at a releasing workshop last summer we were given what appeared to be a simple exercise.
"Look in the mirror and keep releasing (letting go) disapproval of yourself until you have only love feelings for yourself."
Sounds simple, but there was a huge resistance in me to doing this exercise.Being the persistant type I kept at it wondering all the while what the block could be.
Then a memory came back. As a child I loved to play in front of the mirror dressing up and pretending all sorts. When my mother cought me she would scold me and warn me that if I didn't stop "Barnaby" (the devil) would appear to me in the mirror and take me to hell. ( Maybe this is how I got my aversion to seeing myself in the mirror and to loving myself.) In any case once this memory came back a huge weight lifted. I could genuinely begin to love myself and my image in the mirror. This change in my way of relating with myself has transformed how I see and relate to many others in my life. Loving feelings and apreciation come much more frequently. John (my husband) tells me it is like living with the person he got a brief glimpse of when times were really good.