So this week we have been looking at how our self-perception,
Our behaviors,
Our thoughts and feelings have defined this sense of self,
Me,
Myself,
Mine.
And how we see ourselves in the world has a strong link to how we actually care for ourselves.
So our self-perception has a direct link to our ability to love ourselves and to love others.
And the invitation on Tuesday was to reflect on your earliest memory of when you became aware of who you were and how other people saw you.
So our early self-perceptions can be likened to a computer's operating system.
So at some point in our lives we told ourselves something,
Some message,
This is who I am.
This message is based on our thoughts,
Our feelings,
Our behaviors.
So what was the message?
Can you remember?
And maybe the message came from someone close to us as kind of an inherited self-perception.
Maybe the message was cruel.
Maybe it's not true and we believed it anyway.
And it's also possible that your self-perception was positive.
Perhaps you were blessed with healthy role models.
And therefore as an adult you have a really healthy,
Loving relationship with yourself,
With your being.
But the assertion here is that if you grapple with loving yourself without conditions,
If you have difficulty with really loving and caring for yourself,
Likely the self-perception,
The message that you have,
That you've been feeding on is a barrier to true self-acceptance and love.
So we need to see the barriers to uncover them.
There's a story that illustrates this.
The story,
It happened in 1957 and an entire monastery in Thailand was being relocated by a group of monks.
And one day they were moving a giant clay Buddha when one of the monks noticed that there was a large crack in the clay.
So on closer investigation he saw that there was a golden light emanating from this crack.
And the monk used a hammer and a chisel to chip away at the clay exterior until he revealed that the statue was in fact made of solid gold.
And it was later discovered that this was the largest pure gold statue in all of Southeast Asia.
And the belief was that it was covered over in clay by these Thai monks several hundred years earlier to protect it from difficult times,
From warring.
And this illustrates how so much of the way that we cover over our purity,
It's what we do when things are difficult.
We develop armoring,
Our defenses,
Our strategies.
These are like we pile layer upon layer of clay over our own golden light.
So we have this idea of self and this is one of the layers of clay that cover over our being,
Our lightness.
And in the Buddhist teachings,
The idea of self is a projection.
Our self is coming through these filters of concepts and ideas that we have been taught to identify with.
Like these projections we've been taught to really this is who I am.
Some profession,
Some role,
Some idea.
This is the type of person I am or the kind of person I'm expected to be.
And what happens is it tends to limit people.
It tends to be kind of a magnet for all kinds of suffering,
Really all kinds of stress.
And it gets complicated with more layers of clay.
We become an inadequate self because of the projections of others that they lay over us or projections that I'm supposed to have certain attributes.
And we take on these projections of others.
We internalize what people say about us and how they treat us.
And we're all the time projecting ourselves onto things all the time.
So we have a thought and if it's a wonderful thought,
We kind of pat ourselves on the back for our brilliance.
And if it's a horrible thought,
We feel really bad about ourselves.
We feel embarrassed and ashamed.
But there's another option and that it's just that we're having a thought.
It's just a thought.
It's just an idea.
It's just a concept.
And we don't tie ourselves to any kind of identity or define ourselves by it.
It's just a thought.
And it can be seen as kind of second nature or inherent that we should always measure ourselves by whatever thoughts we have.
But that's kind of a form of selfing,
A projection,
A construction,
A constructed idea that every thought I have somehow has comes back and reflects who I am.
Every thought is who I am.
The construction,
The perception of self,
Not only is it stressful,
But it's just again,
It's this magnet for our history,
Our memories,
Our past experiences,
Our values.
All of this comes tumbling in and can become really big and a place that we act from over and over again.
So for people who don't meditate and get quiet in this way that we've been doing,
They may not understand what I'm saying because living in our self perception and taking things personally is just kind of who we are.
But as we get quieter and we practice meditation and mindfulness gets stronger,
What we're doing is we're beginning to deconstruct all of this construction,
All the ways we latch onto things,
Including our self perception,
Which is really often a barrier to our vulnerability.
It's a barrier to loving without conditions.
Our self perception is a barrier to intimacy.
It can be.
And earlier this month,
I defined love as simple connection.
So what we're doing here is we're connecting with ourselves,
The operating system,
We're connecting with it.
And the operating system,
It's not hardwired.
It's important to see the construction of it.
Sometimes the construction is just like a jumble of wires and it's really messy.
But as we're going deeper into meditation practice,
And the activity of the mind getting quieter and quieter,
We're no longer actively constructing the projections.
We're untangling the wires.
We're seeing them.
And the teaching is to see things as this is not me.
This is not personal.
It becomes more and more clear and more and more an aspect of meditation practice as we get quieter.
As we connect with our being,
We're not overlaying judgment.
We're just seeing,
Oh,
This is something to look at now.
And we begin to live differently.
The poet Mark Napo put it this way.
We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is a want to be loved and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.
When we hesitate in being direct,
We unknowingly slip on some added layer of protection that keeps us feeling the world.
And often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness,
Which is if not put down,
Diminishes our chances of joy.
It's like wearing gloves every time we touch something and then forgetting that we chose to put them on.
We complain that nothing feels quite real.
Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world,
But to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handles feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being,
Soft and unrepeatable.
Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world,
But to unglove ourselves.
So thank you for your consideration.
