Many many years ago I learned the art of self-encounter, the art of clear communication with myself. I had to answer 3 questions: Who am I? Where am I going? And Why?

When I answer these questions today, the answers are so clear in my mind.

Who am I?
I am love, you see, god, heaven and hell and all of existence is within me, created by me and because I am, everything outside of me exists.

And where am I going?
It's very clear: I will continue to fulfill my life to be what turns me on.

And the final question: Why?
I have no choice when it comes to love.
I need to receive love, I need to give love and finally I need to feel self-love. I am love.

Veeresh, what is lovable about you?

I care, I really care, and I give, in everything I do in my life. That makes me such a lovable person. I'm amazed at how I'm ready to do all I can when it comes to helping another being, a friend. I'm more than a therapist, I'm a unique human being. What I've done in my life is so special. I've come from the hell of drug addiction to helping thousands of people, and I've never given up on anybody. I've been frustrated, but I've never given up. I learnt that from my mother. There have been a lot of things in my life that I guess any mother would give up on - fourteen years of addiction is enough to shatter any mother's dreams, but my mother has never given up on me. She didn't understand it all, but she never gave up and I picked that up from her.
When I was working in London there were four hospitals which would send me the drug addicts that they couldn't work with because it was like a last resort, they knew I wouldn't give up.

Did you have this feeling of being lovable when you were a child?

Yes. My father would come in after being away for a long time working on the ships and he would grab me, lift me up and he'd just laugh and cry... I was his son! He'd hug and kiss me and say 'you are my son!' He'd say it with such enormous passion and I'd be so happy that he was home. So he always gave me the feeling that I was special.
And, at some point, I lost it. At the age of fourteen I started to go into a black hole.
It really began with my father being away and my mother being involved with my alcoholic stepfather. I had a key to get home at night, and I would always lose it because I didn't want to be home. I would stay out as late as possible and I ended up with the gangs in the streets - they became the family I was looking for. I could have been jumping rooftops, I could have been doing anything the gang was doing, just for that sense of belonging. It turned out that they were into drugs, so I just followed them.
Fourteen years later I came out of this black hole. I went into Phoenix House, a drug rehabilitation program in New York where they taught me that to feel lovable you need to be able to receive love and give love, and in this process of giving and receiving, you learn to feel self-love. I understood the concept, it made sense to me, but it took many years for it to sink in.

Does the approach of positive affirmations alone help? Looking in the mirror and saying 'I'm beautiful' and 'I'm lovable', etc...

In a sense that's true in the here and now, but unless you deal with the dark areas hiding behind the surface, that's the 'quick fix trip', pouring syrup on shit. People say they're ok just the way they are, that they don't have to change anything and yet they're festering with years of unresolved traumas. As soon as these issues are touched again, they'll go into a big black hole again. You can rationalize the pain away, give yourself affirmations, but if you don't work on it and dig down to the roots, nothing will change.

And does behavioral therapy go that deep?

No, and analytical therapy doesn't go that deep either. You can have the understanding and the insight, but unless the emotions associated with the trauma come up, nothing will change. I've seen that in myself and in other people. You ask a person to act positive and by doing it they see how ugly they feel inside, then those issues have to be looked at.

So your recipe would be a mixture of behavioral therapy and primal therapy?

Behavioral therapy, primal therapy, self-acceptance therapy, meditative therapy... the underlying emotions have to be looked at. If you build a house and the foundation is not secure, it will collapse eventually. You can put in beautiful windows, a beautiful rooftop, you can put beautiful lights in it, but, if the foundation is not stable, the house will collapse and that's what I've seen over and over. Of course, if someone is in trouble, if the roof is leaking, you can patch up the roof, but then the time comes when you have to work on the foundation.
Doing that to myself taught me that I'm okay. I wasn't born with this. I learned how to care, I learned how to love, how to go beyond my limits and other people's limits, so that I could find out what makes me happy. It took me years, lots and lots of work on myself. Today I can look into the mirror and say: "I'm lovable. I'm a good person. I have a good heart." And my mind can say that it's a self-glorifying number, but I have hundreds of friends that have seen it in me and tell me. They appreciate me. They love me for all I am and for what I am doing, my way of being.
Osho said his therapists needed to be enlightened. It is true, if you want to help people you have to relate to who you are. Or else you play the therapist, gather a lot of techniques to impress people and in the end that can be dangerous. You can see if a person is authentic and coming from his heart and you can also see if he is ego-tripping, staging: 'I am great, look at my technique, my method'. I am not impressed with that at all.

Would you say that self-love comes from being loved by others first?

Yes, it has to be. As a child, first you need to receive love from your parents to give you the strength and the backbone to stand up and start giving love back. A child doesn't know how to love, it has to imitate its parents, and the way the parents love the child is how the child starts to love the parents back. The interaction of giving and receiving creates a foundation that allows the child to say 'I am lovable' to the world. Usually the process is off. The parents don't give you enough love, so you end up walking around the world treating the world as a big tit, saying 'gimme, gimme, gimme, I need, I need, I need' and you can't see anybody else, you just complain about your need for love.
As an adult, if you come from the position of love, then you say 'you're ok and I'm ok'. If you come from a position 'you're not ok' or 'I'm not ok' or 'we're not ok', your choices are not loving choices. They are reactions. Changing the position to 'I'm ok, you're ok' is quite a journey, a therapeutic journey.

Can people love themselves and not love other people?

That is not really loving yourself. I think it is blowing smoke up your own ass, just believing that you are great. I do not think that is about self-love. When you genuinely have a loving heart, it doesn't stop with yourself. How can your love be restricted to 'me, me, me'? If it is, it is really childish stuff. If you love yourself you have no choice but to share that with others.

And if you were in the Himalayas by yourself for a couple of months, would you still feel lovable or you would miss people to share with?

Well, for sure I would be hanging out in the moment and to be enjoying this beautiful world by myself, I want to share who I am with anybody I meet.
Like when I am on a plane, in business class, a guy sits next to me and says, 'what's your line of business?' I tell him exactly what my line of business is and it blows his mind! What he usually gets is 'well, I work for this company and I am traveling over here and making business deals and contracts...' but I tell him from my heart exactly what is going on and suddenly I see that he changes. He comes down to this human level where he sees all the superficial bullshit that he talks to all these business people. By the time I leave, he is really grateful that I opened my heart to him and he ends up doing the same with me. I do that with taxi drivers, I do that with everybody who is genuinely asking me something.

What did you learn from Osho on loving yourself?

The way he related to me, he treated me from the very beginning as a friend. Not a disciple, not a therapist, but a friend. He showed me the meaning of unconditional love. He showed me that he loved me not so much for what I did but for who I was. Over and over he would reinforce that the way I am is enough, that I do not have to do anything. All throughout my history with him, he kept a straight line: "never compromise who you are".
I once sent him a question saying that I felt like a misfit, I didn't fit within the sannyasins, and I didn't fit within the psychiatric hospital where I worked. He just said that he had always been a misfit and that he loved misfits. That a person who is genuinely living his life is bound to be a misfit and it is ok to be a misfit. And he said that I am more than ok, that I am perfect just the way I am. So all this constant reinforcement that "I'm ok" was what I needed.

Was it a balance for all the time in the therapeutic community where you have been confronted over and over again about your negative behaviour?

Yes. In the therapeutic community, you received positive reinforcement when you behaved in a certain way, and Osho wasn't so concerned with my behaviour. He would always look at who I was, my inner being all beyond my ego and he led me to that space inside of me. I use that approach in my commune also. I try to convince people over and over that they're ok. They may act stupid, they may feel stupid, they may behave stupid, they may have a job that they don't like, they may be sexually dysfunctional, their parents may be a drag, they may not be happy with their relationship, but, they should never forget, they are ok. If you don't take that position you will be a casualty, a problem, a survival trip.
I got that from Osho. He reinforces the basics of people: 'you are lovable, you are ok'. And certainly you have lots of things to improve, but that is your foundation.
Whenever you are lovable, you become an ambassador for god. That means when people want to know who god is, they have to look at you.