Your experience of life is based on self-references and habits of
personality that are familiar to you but restrict you from discovering a deeper
and more expansive experience of who you are.
The sense of self is formed in early childhood and gradually hardens
into self-concepts and beliefs, creating a personal identity that can define
and restrict you for the rest of your life.
The stories you repeat make up your personal history and identity.
Who you believe you are began in your early relationships with your
caregivers, and it was in these exchanges that you decided if you were worthy
or unworthy, adequate or inadequate.
Projection is a kind of trance that forms the basis of all our
relationships...where we may tend to project onto our partners the unpleasant
thoughts and emotions we haven't yet worked through.
We have to heal the self that was created in childhood before we can
enjoy the freedom of not being confined by personal narratives.
The narrative-based self exists across time and continuously creates
itself through the stories it repeats.
The immediacy-based self is not a thing but rather an active center
of awareness from which you can acknowledge moment-to-moment experience.
The narrative-based self lives in a continuum of past and future,
and as such is the source of wanting, dissatisfaction, and judging -- in short,
suffering.
Many of the things you might discover as you feed into your long
buried feelings have nothing to do with any actual inadequacy on your part.
Oftentimes the things that lead to the development of a sense of
unworthiness aren't caused by some big trauma; they're just the events of
ordinary life and aren't even all that noteworthy at the time they occur. The
child just feels that something isn't quire right emotionally.
Just as the nose smells, the eyes see, the tongue tastes, the ears
hear, and the body feels, the mind thinks.
This is just what it does -- it's a mental processing plant, but it's
not you.
Reality is a single frame at a time. Because the mind likes
continuity, it uses a self-story to link multiple but separate experiences of
self into a cohesive story.
Thoughts and emotions are the primary building blocks of the story
of deficiency you identify with.
Sometimes we can only recognize who we really are when we can take
note of who we are not.
As you gain more understanding of what fuels your sense of
inadequacy, shame, or unworthiness, you'll feel better.
Mindfulness practice can help you experience freedom from all that
enslaves you with clinging, aversion, and unawareness. It plays an extremely important role in
mental development by giving you the ability to step back and watch the mind
clearly, without distortions or misconceptions.
The moment you realize you aren't present, you're present once
again.
We've all heard the advice to take life one day at a time. Mindfulness means taking life one moment at a
time.
If you weren't mindful, you wouldn't even know you'd wandered off.
When you come back into the present moment and notice where you
drifted off to, you can discover elements of doubt, desire, or anger that you
were caught up in. This offers insight
into hindrances and difficulties, including how the judgmental mind creates
feelings of deficiency and inadequacy.
The body scan is a very concrete, non complex place to start the
work of self-acceptance and nonjudging.
Years ago at an extended meditation retreat, a meditation teacher
informed us that he wasn't interested in any of our stories. We were stunned and taken aback -- until he
went on to acknowledge the profound tenderness, woundedness, and pain that our
stories hold but said that he wanted to help us explore possibilities that lay
beyond these self-limiting definitions of ourselves.
A pervasive sense of unworthiness has core components of self-blame,
self-consciousness, and resentment.
These habits of mind are all connected and stem from the habitual ways
of looking at things.
Allowing is a kind and curious attitude that enables you to look
more deeply into your stories and to learn from them rather than becoming
entranced by them or trying to block them, both of which will leave you more
stuck.
Allowing enables you to recognize that a thought is just a thought,
whether you like it or not.
Witnessing is curious and nonjudging. It doesn't cling to or avoid anything.
When you use allowing, witnessing, and acknowledging to see the
storyteller at work, you can finally stop identifying with the self created by
your stories.
The heart you have abandoned is still waiting where you left it, and
within it is all the vitality you lost when you turned away from your pain.
Self-compassion is giving to yourself what you would like others to
give to you.
Setting a goal of a better self calls froth wanting. Wanting calls
forth striving. Striving calls forth
judging. And judging becomes a way of
life that brings a critical orientation to everything.
If you want compassion to grow in your life, practice compassion. If
you want criticism to grow in your life, practice criticism.
Self compassion lets you be with all of the hurt, loneliness, and
fear that the narrative-based self has concealed.
Perfectionism is an effort to win the attention and approval you
crave by doing everything just right.
Meditation is sometimes called a "shit accelerator". Whether you want them or not, sooner or later
you discover feelings that were squelched for one reason or another.
Seeing your ego more as a tool and less as your identity will help
you free yourself from stories that constrict and limit your life.
Becoming real doesn't happen to people who are too fragile.
Anytime you feel compelled to do something impulsively or find
yourself reacting in automatic ways, be very suspicious.
Habitual behaviours that arise form old stories are often driven by
craving or fear.
