Ever feel self-critical or discouraged? Here are 3 series of articles that can hopefully help with that.
1. Overcoming self-criticism
Extract: “Do you ever feel overly self-critical? Do we all feel like that sometimes? Most of us are not immune to identifying with a painful, limited sense of self and experiencing a resultant self-loathing.”
Being kinder to ourselves and others
Extract: “It doesn’t work to push these self-critical thoughts away or suppress them any more than it works to squish a jack back into the box and expect him to stay down. We can’t just tell ourselves to shut up. So what can we do?”
Toward an empowered sense of self
Extract: “Geshe Kelsang talks all the time about our innate purity, our Buddha nature, and our need to identify with it; but sometimes people don’t pick up on this, which is partly why I’m writing these articles.”
How to stop being so down on ourselves
Extract: “To summarize, this is all stemming from a painful experience that, because we identify with it, leads to a limited painful sense of self. This self doesn’t actually exist, there is just a mental image of it; but, believing that it does exist, we wish to serve and protect it, and then we act upon those wishes or intentions. Because we act upon them, we get the same results, the same underwhelming life, which in turn brings us more painful experiences and reinforces our limited sense of self.”
Giving up self-hatred once and for all
Extract: “The last 4 articles have been about toxic self-criticism or self-hatred, what’s wrong with it, and where it comes from, including the relationship between our experience, sense of self, intentions, actions, and life. Now, with all this practical insight, we’re ready to give it up once and for all. So how do we? First it might be helpful to see how NOT to.”
How to overcome toxic self-criticism
Extract: “In other words, you are not doomed, and nor is anyone else. It is so important that we understand this because, until we do, our wish for lasting freedom for ourselves and others will never be sustainable. We will just keep getting tired, worried, and discouraged, losing energy, burning out. We can’t sustain a wish for something we don’t actually believe in, and if we don’t wish for it we won’t have any energy, effort, or patience to achieve it.”
Time to unlock our infinite potential
Extract: “In these last 7 articles we looked at the inner critic, where it comes from, and what’s wrong with it. We looked at how our whole life depends on our actions, intentions, sense of self, and experience. We saw first how NOT to break that cycle, and then HOW to break that cycle by getting in touch with our pure and kind nature, identifying with it, and building upon that experience. All this can start with the simplest skillful breathing meditation.”
2. Overcoming discouragement
Here are some articles on how to overcome a delusion that really makes our meditation practice feel like an uphill struggle … Luckily, once we recognize discouragement for what it is, there are effective ways to overcome it and develop huge self-confidence, so please read on 🙂
Extract: “Discouragement is rampant in our times, and when it is applied to our spiritual practice it becomes a dangerous type of laziness, called the laziness of discouragement. Over the last year or so, quite a number of people have asked me to write something about it. Now that I’m back in the land of self-deprecation bordering on self-sabotage, I thought it would be a good time to start.”
Extract: “We want things to change and remain the same. So this ambivalence about change – wanting it and dreading it — can be a problem! Change makes us anxious, yet at the same time we know we need to change. Why? Because we’re not happy where we are, we are always wishing things were different at some level.”
Extract: “One major reason we feel discouraged when it comes to thinking about changing our mind is because we perceive ourselves as being fixed, as being someone who can’t really change, or not that much anyway. Easier to switch on the TV or go to bed.”
Extract: “In the same way, when we put ourselves down with negative self-talk, “You can’t change! You’re basically an irritating old (put favorite derogatory noun here)”, we are projecting an image of ourselves that says way more about our delusions of ignorance and dislike than about who we actually are. But we believe it anyway and then we’re stuck.”
Extract: “I like to meditate backwards – starting with where I intend to end up, ie, enlightened, and then sort of working my way back to the beginning. I start my day by tapping into an infinite source of power, confidence, freedom, bliss, and love. The following is an example of the kind of thing I do.”
Extract: How not to meditate (1) Start by feeling inadequate, insecure, limited, perhaps even depressed, and think: “I really should meditate because I am so inadequate, insecure, limited, perhaps even depressed.” ie, identify with being a limited person from the outset, rather than identifying with your pure potential.
Want quicker results from your meditation? Start where you are.
Extract: Being a miserable meditator is a contradiction in terms. If you feel that you are a miserable meditator, you might want to change your approach.
3. Cultivating four types of self-confidence
The year of living confidently
Extract: We cannot afford to become heavy-hearted or overwhelmed with all the things that will inevitably go wrong publicly and privately this year, or we will be of little use to anyone.
Extract: We need to change from deep within, not just on a superficial level of consciousness – our thoughts are too changeable on the surface of our minds, like waves or froth on an ocean, so even if we manage to change them they don’t stay changed. I find it is always pretty much vital, therefore, to start the process of self-transformation by diving below the waves of chatter and thoughts directed largely outward, to access a deeper level of awareness.
Extract: It is impossible to destroy our spiritual potential because this is based on reality, but it is perfectly possible to destroy our delusions because these are based on wrong conceptions that can be righted.
The age-old foes of our people
Extract: Everyone seems to be annoying everyone else these days, but in truth living beings are never our actual enemy – delusions are our only enemy.
Changing our future by changing our mind
Extract: Samsara is not a place. Sometimes, when things go wrong, for example when someone’s credit card is stolen, I think we say to each other, “Samsara is horrible!”, with a sense that there is a real horrible samsara out there. And it is true that samsara is horrible, but it is not true that it is out there.
Extract: To embrace this fact — that happiness depends on the mind far more than on external conditions — and to live by it, as opposed to just saying it with our mouth, we need the self-confidence that believes that it is true and that happiness is possible. If we change, if we conquer our delusions.
Extract: I don’t know about you, but I love the idea of being of instant benefit to this world before we have even lifted a finger.
Just who do you think you are?!
Extract: We are in service to all enlightened beings when we decide to help all living beings, just as we are in service to a mother when we decide to help her children. And they in turn will inspire and protect us in all our endeavors. We can feel them all around us and in our hearts.