Over the past couple of weeks we've been looking at making ourselves safe from within.
We've explored the importance of relaxing,
Learning to relax into our wholeness,
The whole messiness of who we are,
And these reflections that I've offered are all in the service of self-compassion.
This is the overarching theme,
Self-compassion and compassion for others,
And it's a crucial part of our path of practice.
I remember hearing an instruction once.
It was a meta instruction,
A loving-kindness instruction for ourselves,
And because we've been culturally conditioned in a world of comparing ourselves,
A world of better-than and less-than,
Because self-hatred is alive in our culture,
And self-esteem,
A cultivation,
Self-worth,
A learning,
Because of that the instruction was to start with offering kindness,
Loving-kindness to a being that's easy to love,
Like a pet,
Or a child,
Or a family member,
A loved one.
Start with someone other than ourselves,
And I want to explore that strategy further because it can be useful as a tool for some people,
But it also has the flavor of bypassing something really valuable.
I want to look at why we can't love ourselves the same way that we love another.
That feels like an important question.
Many of you have heard the story about the Dalai Lama,
Where he was in a small conference in India with a group of teachers and psychologists,
And a teacher in our tradition,
Sharon Salzberg,
Asked the Dalai Lama,
You know,
What do you think about self-hatred?
And he was very confused by that question,
And he asked his translator to explain this to him,
And then he asked Sharon,
What is that?
What is that?
So she tried to explain that it was self-judgment,
Inadequacy,
Negative thought patterns,
And his response to that was,
How could you think of yourself that way?
How could you think of yourself that way?
And he explained that we all have Buddha nature.
Isn't that interesting,
That the Dalai Lama was so surprised about this negative way of relating to ourselves?
And yet it's an attitude that seems so common to so many people in the United States.
There are,
You know,
Problems in every society and every philosophical school,
But I think it's pretty powerful to reflect on what the Dalai Lama is pointing to.
When we look underneath our habits and our desires and our fears,
What's there is Buddha nature,
The capacity to love,
The first lines in the Dhammapada,
The words of the Buddha,
Oh nobly born.
He's speaking to us,
Oh nobly born.
Remember who you really are.
But we forget,
You know,
I've found that many people whom I've spoken to over these years of practice feel the greatest sense of struggle around the question of cultivating love for oneself.
We're conditioned to associate self-love to some degree with selfishness and self-deprecation with virtue.
When we were exploring humility in early May,
We learned that the near enemy of a humble person is self-deprecation,
A sort of false humility.
Like,
Oh I'm the worst,
I'm a terrible person.
And so they kind of lower themselves and keep lowering themselves because of a strong negative self-image,
Attitudes that are self-limiting.
Our perception has a great deal to do with our ability to love ourselves without condition.
Our perception,
The stories and the concepts we live by,
Have so much weight in how we live our life that our perception and our ability to love ourselves without conditions,
They're actually not separate at all.
The author of Nonviolent Communication,
Marshall Rosenberg,
Said that every judgment is an expression of an unmet need.
Every judgment is an expression of an unmet need.
What a powerful statement that is.
So we have to investigate and get below our perception and our stories to explore and find that unmet need.
We're learning to listen for the way we talk to ourselves when things get challenging or things get out of control.
What's happening inside?
What are we telling ourselves?
Is our self-perception inferior or superior?
Is our self-perception always right or always wrong?
Are we resisting?
Are we blaming?
And just so you know,
Our self-perception is often really old.
I'm working on stuff that I learned back when I was seven and eight years old.
That's over 40 years ago.
So around that age we start creating a self and other people start layering their perception on us.
You know,
Kind of creating these building blocks on how we eventually come to be.
And if the messages we received were positive and affirming,
We may have a very good relationship with ourselves.
We may feel a deep care and even reverence for our life and the details of it.
A love of our life.
And if the messages that we received were cruel,
Were harmful,
We responded to those messages with armor,
With protection.
We built up these big walls around ourselves.
And then we say this is who I am behind the walls.
And that changes the course of our life.
But as a human being that still breathes,
We're growing and we've been growing and we won't stop growing until we die.
We are a living process.
And in that living process we're seeing through practice how we built up the walls,
The ego,
And how we transcend the ego.
So that we are not our egoic clinging.
We are not our personality or our views and our perception.
There's real freedom in that.
We're,
At the very least,
We're easier on ourselves.
We're easier on other people.
Transcending the ego is how we experience the teachings of not-self,
Anatta.
Transcending the ego is what they refer to as emptiness in the Zen tradition.
Empty of self.
Empty of separation from others.
Empty of becoming.
Just fully being.
So I'll stop here today and we'll continue exploring the features of self-compassion in dialogue and then again on Thursday.
So thank you for your kind attention,
Your consideration,
And I welcome comments and questions.
