In "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens, we think of Ebenezer Scrooge as being lost to the meaning of Christmas because he is selfish toward the world. He refuses to donate money to the poor and needy; "Are there no workhouses?" he asks. He makes poor Bob Cratchit work late hours in a frigid office that he's too cheap to heat adequately. He even begrudges the poor man one day off a year: Christmas day.

But really, Scrooge's stinginess toward others is only a reflection of his stinginess toward himself. He's wealthy, yet his lifestyle doesn't reflect it. He refuses the company of others, including his own loving nephew. In the Alastair Sim movie, they added a lovely scene in which Scrooge is eating alone at an Inn and asks for more bread. When told it would be tuppence more, he says, "No more bread." Stingy, yes, but the poor man couldn't even be nice to himself. And with that deficit, he could hardly find it in himself to be kind to anyone else.

We all have known Scrooge in one form or another. The misanthrope who hates everyone, but none more than him- or herself. These are the obvious ones who cannot manage to give themselves anything nice or loving.

Less obvious are the people whom everyone loves, the Givers, the ones who expend their energy daily to give of themselves to their family, their friends, and their community. These are the ones who can't say no. These are the ones who, if they die young, make people wonder why they were taken so early, since they were so good and kind to everyone they knew.

There is nothing wrong with being a giving person, unless. Unless. Unless you can't give to yourself. And I have known many wonderful, giving people who drained themselves dry giving to everyone around them at the expense of themselves. This inability to give to themselves often does manifest in disease, particularly in the area of the heart chakra. And it often affects women, because women in particular are encouraged in our society to take care of everyone else's needs before their own.

If more water is taken from the well than the well can replenish, it goes dry.

We must come first in our lives. We must. It is our sacred duty to come first. In the event of an emergency, we must put on our own oxygen mask before assisting others with theirs.

Why do people allow the needs of others to come first? The answer is the same for Scrooge: because they don't love themselves, and they don't think they deserve to come first.

If I had to say, in ten words or less, why we are here on the planet, it is to learn to love ourselves perfectly. And it is possible. Christ did it. What he did, we can do. With perfect self-love, Christ understood, truly understood, his connection to the Divine, which allowed that connection to be open and unwavering. This is available to us all.

Of course, learning to love ourselves is so difficult in this world of imagined separation from God that it can take quite a few lifetimes to "get it." With each lifetime, we matriculate. And eventually, we do reach the state of Christhood, or nirvana, or whatever you're pleased to call it. And we don't have to return once we've done so.

So really, if you're reading this, you can assume that you probably don't love yourself completely yet, and there is work to do. That includes your humble author. Oh, yeah. It's a journey.

Last year, I gave a client a bit of homework to do over the holidays. It was a simple assignment. I instructed her to buy herself a present, wrap it, put her name on it, and then put it under her tree and open it on Christmas morning. Simple, right?

The truth is, it was so hard for this poor woman to give something to herself that she couldn't do it. I was persistent. I e-mailed her. I lovingly reminded her that she needed to buy herself a present. She said she would.

After Christmas, I wrote to her again. I asked her what she got for herself, and more importantly, I asked her how she felt when she opened it on Christmas day. I didn't hear back from her.

It can be very painful to let self-love into your heart. When true divine love begins to come into a heart, it can hurt, paradoxically. The healing, the shedding of pain, takes courage. In order to feel love, even Great Love, it means you have to feel. It means you have to feel all of the other stuff you didn't want to feel up until now. Once you go through that, then you can get to the Love. But you have to go there. You have to feel your pain, even if for only a few moments.

Scrooge's journey is a journey through his pain. His lonely childhood, the loss of his sister, the loss of his only true love. In order to heal, to have that moment of transformation at the end, he has to open his heart to emotion again, including his pain. Once he processes that, he can begin to find love for himself again, and in finding self-love, he can give it to the world.

"A Christmas Carol" is beloved because it speaks of our collective journey, and it shows us the glory that awaits us at journey's end, when we are fully healed and know that Love, truly, is all there is.