Original Goodness


One of the great attractions of Buddhist thought is that it functions very much like a spiritually-effective form of psychology, helping us to heal our wounds through the practice of mindfulness to return to what the spiritual writer Jack Kornfield calls ‘our original goodness’. Although Buddhism arose in the East, its approach is incredibly helpful for the uniquely Western condition of self-loathing, the malaise that lies at the heart of a lack of self-confidence.

The Buddhist writer, Pema Chodron, has spoken of being with the Dalai Lama at a conference with Western Buddhist teachers, where a meditation teacher brought up the subject of self-hatred. As Chodron recalls, “The Dalai Lama didn’t know what she was talking about. So he went around the room and asked the other Western teachers about it, and every one of them agreed with her. Self-hatred was something the Dalai Lama didn’t understand. The first noble truth of the Buddha is that people experience dukka, a feeling of dissatisfaction or suffering, a feeling that something is wrong. We feel this dissatisfaction because we’re not in tune with our true nature, our goodness. And we aren’t going to be fundamentally spiritually content until we get in tune … only in the West is this dissatisfaction articulated as ‘something is wrong with me’. It seems that thinking of oneself as flawed is more a Western phenomenon than a universal one.”

There’s comfort to be found in those words. If self-loathing is uniquely Western, it’s not part of who we are at heart, but simply a form of cultural conditioning. That makes it about as valid psychologically as a cultural preference for tea over coffee – just because it’s habitual doesn’t make it important. Part of the release from self-destructive habits comes in the form of recognition and detachment, by realising that they actually mean nothing about you. You may have a long-held story about your unworthiness or your unlikeability that you keep running in your head, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true. Knowing that self-loathing isn’t a universal disease is a helpful step in uprooting the belief that it’s normal to treat yourself that way.

Another step in releasing those kinds of demons is to face them. We spend our whole lives running away from what we fear and trying to do the opposite to convince ourselves that we’re OK. If we’re afraid that we’re bad, we try so hard to be good that we overdose on people-pleasing and have trouble setting boundaries. If we’re convinced that we’re weak, we’ll knock ourselves out trying to seem strong, putting up defences in all our relationships, afraid of the vulnerability of allowing others to see us as we are, lest they see our fragility. Those coping mechanisms just make the problem worse, however, as they reinforce the need for a false persona because we believe our true nature to be flawed. To shake free of these chains, we must face what we most fear – our own pain and self-loathing.

Describing her own experience of feeling deeply into an ancient pain, Chodron says “There was a recognition that I needed to relax into the pain. Until then I had avoided going to this place where I felt bad or unacceptable or unloved. No language could express how awful that place felt. But I just started breathing into it … but as I relaxed into that feeling, it passed through me. And I didn’t die. It passed right through. That was a big moment for me. I realised that resistance to the idea that I was unlovable only made the pain worse … I realised what a source of happiness turning towards pain actually is. Our avoidance of pain keeps us locked in a cycle of suffering.”

We’ll be held in the grip of a nightmare unless we remember that we’re dreaming. Any story you tell yourself about not being good enough is just a story, and an old one at that. When you can really face your fears about how bad you think you might be, on the other side lies the truth of your original goodness.

There’s plenty of evidence for the beauty of our original nature. The Tibetan Book Of The Dead instructs us to remember “O nobly born, O you of glorious origins, remember your radiant true nature, the essence of mind. Trust it. Return to it. It is home.” Recalling a mystical experience where he was shown the truth about humanity, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote “Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of the Divine. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed … I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”

This week, live as if you remember your original goodness. Know that wherever you’re habitually attacking yourself, you’re telling yourself a lie. When you have some quiet time, step into the lie more fully. Really feel all the dreadful things you believe about yourself deep down. Feel them as deeply as you can until you pop right through to the other side. Release yourself from the bondage of an old, outdated story that never was true in the first place. When you’re no longer afraid of what you might find, you can embrace exactly who you are with love and compassion, with no need for defences. When you have nothing to defend, the paradox is that you’ll become incredibly strong, with an unshakeable depth of self-acceptance and confidence. How else could you be if you knew the fabulous truth about yourself?

For the Coach Fabulous archives, go to www.coachfabulous.blogspot.com and for the I Am Fabulous archives, go to www.fabcentral.blogspot.com. You can email me at coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk. All material ©2008 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 16 Jun 08)

Scary Monsters

I love all things quirky and nobody does it better than Louis Theroux. He’s on a quest to expose the most eccentric forms of human behaviour, via his documentaries for the BBC, in his own curiously laid-back style. Last night’s programme focused on the modern plague of plastic surgery and – in the interests of understanding the addiction to going under the knife – he even had some lipo of his own. That’s above and beyond the call of duty in my book, but he does tend to do total immersion in his subject.

A woman of only 26 was a plastic surgeon’s receptionist, so she’d already had numerous procedures and was moving on to breast realignment, lipo for the love handles and a nose job only a few months after what seemed to be a completely unnecessary tummy tuck. Another woman went for a complete body makeover in the hopes of getting her astonishingly shallow boyfriend back, but the ones who scared me the most were the men.

One guy looked like he’d been stuck in a wind tunnel for years with a face that was pinned back so tight it was a wonder he could speak, but the saddest case was the man in his fifties who’d clearly had plenty of facial work, plus implants in his pecs, a tummy tuck and bicep implants to make his arm muscles look bigger. Louis’ very innocent style of interviewing lulled him into revealing that he’d been called an ‘ugly bastard’ by his stepfather for years and still saw himself that way, hence all the effort he put into sculpting his appearance. Although he’d had therapy, there was still an enormous gaping hole in his self-esteem that he thought plastic surgery could fill.

That poor man will probably spend the rest of his life – and his bank balance – trying to overcome his lack of self-worth by applying a cure that will never work. Nothing that is based solely on external appearance and approval by others will ever make a person with low self-esteem feel good for any length of time. It’s a quick fix that’s ultimately detrimental if it masks the need to address a lack of self-acceptance and self-love. Renovating the outer without taking a look at the inner is just throwing a bit of window-dressing over the problem, and the same issues will continue to erupt in your life no matter how much money you throw at them.

If you find it difficult to accept yourself as you are, by all means work on the outer issues that bother you, but never forget that the real work is done inside your own mind. It’s not always possible to forget the types of taunts that man endured as a child, but it is possible to transform the relationship you have with those kinds of memories. What matters is not what occurred, but what we make it mean about us.

We can choose to live as though unkind words are the truth about us, or we can choose to see them as thoughtless and insensitive comments from people who were incapable of acting kindly towards us. When we unhook ourselves from the belief that we were treated badly because we deserved it, we free ourselves to become self-accepting and ultimately to develop a degree of self-love. Then, what we think about ourselves becomes far more important than what others think of us.

As Phillip Moffit wrote recently in Yoga Journal, “Transform does not mean to fix or make go away whatever trauma and scars you may be carrying from childhood: instead, you slowly develop a new relationship with your difficulty, such that it is no longer a controlling factor in your life.”

There’s no denying it’s a process that can take some time, but when you liberate yourself from the stories you’ve been told about who you are – and have continued to tell yourself over and over – those emotional scars can fade away. Like all scars, they’ll still be there, but they’ll have much less power to affect you. Then you can begin the work of building your own self-worth from within and become the authentic self you were always meant to be.

The effect of this kind of confidence is best described by the Dalai Lama, who has said, “With the realisation of one's own potential and self-confidence in one's ability, one can build a better world. According to my experience, self-confidence is very important. That sort of confidence is not a blind one; it is an awareness of one's own potential. On that basis, human beings can transform themselves by increasing the good qualities and reducing negative qualities.”

Not just this week, but every week, try to excavate at least one lie about who you are from the vaults of your memory and see it for what it is – someone else’s projection. So often people don’t even remember the comments that have wounded us, because they were said in anger, in passing or simply out of plain spite, yet we take them to heart and wound ourselves over and over with those words.

Especially, don’t let the words of someone you neither liked nor respected steal your sense of self-worth. Learn to let other people’s poison wash away and keep your self-esteem intact. This goes as much for the present as for the past. Make your opinion of yourself the priority and let other people’s judgements be seen for what they are – reflections of their own insecurities, projected on to you.

Be kind to yourself with what you perceive to be your failings and learn to celebrate your good qualities. Know that out of some of our most painful experiences the greatest wisdom can grow. The poet Antonio Machado knew this when he wrote, “I dreamt last night, oh marvellous error, that there were honey bees in my heart, making honey out of my old failures.”

Dream some honey bees tonight and let your heart – not your surgeon – do the work.

Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column by using the link in the Favourite Sites section on the right or by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com. For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. To contact me, email coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk. All material © 2007 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 8 Oct 07)