Chapter 1
We do not deal much in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.
—Mark Twain
To feel unworthy is to suffer. It feels like you’re flawed and must conceal your faultiness from others or risk being shunned. But concealing, pretending, and holding yourself apart from others tends to make you feel alienated and then interpret these feelings as proof that you’re flawed. This is a vicious cycle of self-doubts and self-judgments that separates you from others and prevents you from feeling whole and complete. Though you may be stuck in this self-concept, it’s far more arbitrary and malleable than you may think.
Author and organizational consultant Margaret Wheatley describes this dynamic well: “We notice what we notice because of who we are. We create ourselves by what we choose to notice. Once this work of self-authorship has begun, we inhabit the world we have created. We self-seal. We don’t notice anything except those things that confirm what we already think about who we already are… When we succeed in moving outside of our normal processes of self-reference and can look upon ourselves with self-awareness, then we have a chance at changing. We break the seal. We notice something new” (1999, 1). This is a powerful insight into not only how the concept of self is perpetuated by habits of mind and perception, but also how you can free yourself and discover a much larger experience of who you are. Perhaps none of us discovers who we really are until we free ourselves from concepts of who we are and are not. Therefore we begin this book by exploring how the fiction of self is created and maintained.
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 self is conditioned primarily in early interpersonal relationships, and we then tend to see only those things that confirm who we think we are, and we screen out everything to the contrary. This is what it means to self-seal: closing off possibilities for yourself and sealing your identity, and your fate, within whatever self-construct was created when you were quite young. This self becomes a prison of beliefs that color and distort your experience of who you are.
Margaret Wheatley’s quote offers insight into how we can free ourselves from this prison of funhouse mirrors with distorted reflections that we mistake for reality. If you can experience yourself from the immediacy of here-and-now awareness rather than through the narrowed perceptions of a self created long before this moment, you can find another way of being in the world. How do you develop this here-and-now awareness? Mindfulness is the key, and as you work your way through this book, we’ll offer many practices that will help you develop this perspective.
Because it’s important to understand where you’re starting from, in this chapter we’ll explore how an identity of deficiency is constructed and persists from a Western psychological perspective as well as from the point of view of Buddhist psychology. As you learn to bring mindful awareness and inquiry into these self-limiting constructions, you’re likely to discover possibilities for greater freedom and peace. It’s like the Zen cartoon that shows an anguished prisoner clinging to the bars of his cell while a small door in a dark corner of his cell is clearly open. Until you let go of the bars of your prison of self and begin to explore the dark and unlit places within yourself, you can’t find the door to freedom.
The stories you repeat make up your personal history and identity. They include the place and time you were born, the way it was in your family, the things that happened to you, the things you did, the things others did, your first love, and your first betrayal. It goes on and on—as long as you repeat it. When you really look at your self-stories, you may discover that they’re repetitive and even arbitrary, depending on your mood. It’s likely that the details don’t even match up with those in the stories of your parents or closest siblings. A good question is “Who would you be without your story?” Seeing yourself without your story is an excellent way to let go of taking things personally (which can be very helpful with shame and inadequacy).
Self-authorship begins very early in life in our responses to our caregivers. If we are raised in a safe and secure environment in which we feel accepted and validated, we tend to have more self-compassion and less self-criticism (Neff and McGehee 2008). But if our caregivers are more critical or aggressive or we feel unsafe with them for any reason, we tend to become more self-critical and insecure as we grow older (Gilbert and Proctor 2006). We see ourselves in the mirrors of others’ eyes and behaviors, and our stories reflect what we see there.
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. Your story has developed within this original theme from then on. If you feel inadequate, for example, you may seek a sense of adequacy from people or things, from what you’ve done, or from your appearance, your talents, or your performances. This never works out. A sense of adequacy doesn’t come from any of these things; it comes from who you are. This is why so many of us feel deficient and unworthy no matter what we do. We perform. We get wonderful things. We may even succeed in proving our adequacy to others, but we never quite prove it to ourselves. Shortly after every standing ovation, the sense of inadequacy returns and follows us as inexorably as a shadow.
The sense of inadequacy also follows us into our love relationships, where we tend to play out our role in some of the most dramatic ways. Surely the one who loves us will give us what we always longed for. Surely this person’s love will be enough, and through it, we will finally be enough. This never quite works out either, even when our partners do their best to assure us that we’re okay, or even far more than okay. In fact, the distortions of our self-authorship often manifest more dramatically in these relationships than anywhere else, due to the extraordinary perceptual distortion known as projection—attributing your own thoughts and judgments to others.
Projection is a kind of trance that forms the basis of all our relationships, but it’s particularly prominent in our love relationships, where we may tend to project onto our partners the unpleasant thoughts and emotions we haven’t yet worked through. No matter what our partners say or do, we typically believe they’re expressing something else. This can drive us nuts until we start figuring out that we aren’t seeing things the way they are; we’re seeing things the way we are. But it can take a long time to gain this insight—if it ever comes at all. Most of us completely buy into the fiction of who we are, rarely noticing that we ourselves are the authors of the stories we live in.
Projection is a huge dilemma in our lives; it colors all of our relationships. It’s a convoluted fiction that solidifies who we think we are and who we think everyone else is, and it drives the wedge between us ever deeper. As long as we are living within this narrative, we continue to believe we are separate and alienated from everybody else.
Western psychology has studied in depth how an alienated and deficient sense of self is formed in early childhood, and how failures in attachment and bonding with caregivers can create a craving for reassurance and a deep distrust of others later in life. Buddhist psychology has studied similar questions in depth, looking at how we create suffering by identifying with a fabricated self and all of its cravings, aversions, and confusion. It offers steps to help us disidentify from this separate and contracted sense of self. Both of these orientations offer understanding and tools that we can use to free ourselves from the suffering that flows from a distorted sense of self based on a faulty narrative.
When we live within unresolved childhood trauma and woundedness, it’s very difficult to get glimpses of the clarity and selflessness of a here-and-now reality. We keep getting jerked back into our narrative-based self and unfinished business, no matter how desperately we’d like to leave it behind. It’s like having a long bungee cord attached to your butt that won’t let you move on until you’ve finished what you evidently need to finish. It is an enormous work for any of us to awaken from the trance we ourselves have intoned by the repetition of our stories—stories that obscure the truths and feeling we can not yet bare.
The inadequate and deficient self forged within painful interactions in early relationships will continue to plague us until we’re willing to do the work of healing the child within. Mindfulness can help us open to and be near our own anguish and pain without judgment, avoidance, or pretense. But even with our growing mindfulness, this work is very difficult to do alone, particularly when working with unresolved childhood trauma. The self forged in childhood has so many defenses and self-deceptions that working alone generally isn’t sufficient to access the feelings we need to feel or regulate them well enough to get free of their toxic influences. Because the sense of a deficient self is formed within interpersonal relationships, we often need to work within interpersonal relationships to understand and heal the identity we formed there. We need to cry our tears and rage our rage, and we need to find a way to reclaim all of these feelings without being overwhelmed by them. This usually involves deep personal investigation with a skilled and trusted therapist or teacher who can help us integrate and self-regulate all of the feelings we’ve cut ourselves off from.
We can use the wisdom and tools of Western psychology to heal the wounds of childhood and free ourselves from destructive mental and emotional patterns. And we can use the wisdom and tools of Buddhist psychology to find a larger sense of who we are that isn’t driven by self-criticism and unfulfilled desire. These two orientations dovetail nicely to guide us on the path to freedom.
Many people who have practiced meditation for a long time have nonetheless done their best to avoid the difficult work of recovering and experiencing disowned feelings. It would be nice to just transcend the wounded self altogether and live in a higher state of consciousness that isn’t troubled with messy things like unpleasant feelings and thoughts. But try as we might, these things keep coming up and undermining our sublime bliss. Unpleasant thoughts and feelings don’t go away just because we don’t like them. We have to heal the self that was created in childhood before we can enjoy the freedom of not being confined by personal narratives.
Buddhist psychology asserts that we are born with a hunger for pleasure, as well as a hunger for existence and yet another hunger for nonexistence, and that these different forms of hunger are the cause of human suffering. In Western psychology, Sigmund Freud established these same human drives and acknowledged their power to cause suffering. He called the hunger for pleasure “the pleasure principle,” the hunger for existence “life instinct” or “Eros,” and the hunger for nonexistence “death instinct” or “Thanatos.”
We don’t have to look long or hard to see how these hungers create suffering in our lives. Our first experience of hunger is the hunger or will to live, which emerges immediately as a craving for physical sustenance. Immediately after birth, we cry at the top of our lungs to draw our mother’s attention. We long to be reunited with her body again, and when she responds, we begin to seek for and suck from her breast. The softness of her warm skin and the nourishment of her milk are pleasurable.
We may also feel our first cravings for nonexistence very early in life. If our caregivers don’t respond well to our first cravings for succor, we may eventually stop expressing this need and become withdrawn and listless. For infants, this may take the shape of failure to thrive. All of us experience this at least on occasion—times when we just want to shut down, escape, avoid, or not feel what’s happening. This craving for nonexistence drives addictions of all kinds and also the urge to isolate and close ourselves off from everyone—even ourselves.
The hunger from unmet needs can form a central theme in the story you repeat to yourself, creating a narrative of a wounded self. As described above, the narrative-based self exists across time and continuously creates itself through the stories it repeats. We mistakenly believe this “self” is a somewhat permanent entity that endures through the constant changes of life. Psychologist William James characterized the narrative-based self as a construction of narratives woven together from the threads of experiences over time into a cohesive concept we reference as “me” to make sense of the “I” acting in the present moment (James 1890). The immediacy-based self, in contrast, is a creature of the here and now. It is grounded in the experience of who you are in each moment. This sense of self exists only in the present moment and therefore is ageless and timeless. It is the primary orientation from which awareness is experienced and thus is not characterized by concepts such as gender, race, religion, and personal history. As such, the immediacy-based self is not a thing but rather an active center of awareness from which you can acknowledge moment-to-moment experience. From this perspective, Descartes’s famous dictum becomes “I experience what’s happening, therefore I am.”
Neurological research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has shown that these two forms of self-awareness—narrative-based self and immediacy-based self—are located in two separate areas of the brain (Farb et al. 2007). Using neuroimagery, which can detect which “self” people are operating from, this study compared novice meditators to people who had participated in an eight-week program in mindfulness meditation. When participants shifted from a narrative focus to their immediate experience, fMRIs indicated that the experienced meditators had less activity in the region associated with the narrative-based self. In other words, through the practice of mindfulness meditation we can disidentify from the self we’ve created with our stories and discover a new sense of self based in the present moment.
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. The immediacy-based self exists only in the here and now. These two orientations in the world are fundamentally (and neurologically) different. The immediacy-based self lives with the inescapable emotional pain of being human, yet it is also present for the breeze on your face or the birdsong that you cannot feel or hear when you’re preoccupied with thoughts and stories. The narrative-based self can help you avoid much of the emotional pain that’s inevitable when living in the here and now, but you pay the price, as you must instead live with the suffering that self-limiting stories create.
It’s important to understand the distinction between pain and suffering. Some amount of pain is inevitable in life. We’ll all experience loss, setbacks, illness, and more. But suffering is different. It comprises the thoughts we heap on top of pain—thoughts that often make us feel far worse than the original pain. For example, pain is transformed into suffering when we tell ourselves things like “I’m never going to get over this. This pain is going to torture me the rest of my life.”
The pathway of healing is a journey of feeling the disowned and unwanted pain that stories of unworthiness have covered and concealed. Mindfulness is a key skill for making this journey, fostering the present-moment awareness that will enable you to turn toward and be with the inevitable pain of being human. Awareness allows us to look deeply into the pain of our lives because awareness itself isn’t subject to pain. It can witness pain but isn’t in pain itself. It doesn’t screen out feelings that seem difficult or may be unwanted; it enables you to open your heart and deeply experience what’s in it.
Mindfulness and self-compassion provide a safe holding environment for your aching or raging heart—the kind of environment that a loving parent offers a child. As the restraints of your old, self-limiting stories fall away, you’ll experience a measure of pain, but it’s akin to the pain of childbirth, bringing a new way of being into the world. In fact, your willingness to turn toward your pain and suffering from the wide-open heart of mindfulness is a way to end suffering. In doing so, you may discover your wholeness and how to live from what is and always has been whole and complete in you, no matter what has happened in your life. This way of being is more capable of being fully present, more capable of loving and being loved. Your heart may break, but it breaks open, and this is where the light shines through.
When a baby is born, she cries, and something in the mother’s heart immediately responds. The baby’s longing to be nourished calls forth a longing in the mother to comfort and provide. The highly evolved neocortexes of both mother and baby attune and resonate together, and a built-in capacity for empathy typically guides the mother’s response to her child. How the mother and other primary caregivers respond can dramatically influence the child’s emotional state and later ability to emotionally self-regulate. If they don’t or can’t respond well to the child’s emotional needs, this can contribute to feelings of unworthiness later in the child’s life.
In his book A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development (1988), psychiatrist John Bowlby discusses how central the attachment or bonding relationship between infant and caregiver is to the development of adult personality (Bowlby 1988). Bowlby believed and eventually demonstrated that the craving for attachment or emotional connectedness is an innate drive, independent of the craving for physical nourishment. He further demonstrated that how caregivers respond to the need for emotional bonding is essential to healthy social and emotional development.
Bowlby’s theories correspond to parallel discoveries that had been made in the study of other primates. In a series of experiments done in the 1950s and 1960s by Harry Harlow and colleagues, infant monkeys were taken from their mothers at birth and raised with two inanimate surrogate mothers, one made of hard wire that provided the infant with a bottle of milk, and the other soft and cuddly but with no bottle. The researchers found that the infants clearly preferred to bond with the soft and cuddly “mother” even though it provided them with no food. The nourishing comfort of contact was even more important than being fed (Harlow 1959).
Bowlby and subsequent researchers in the study of attachment made similar observations about the importance of emotional nurturing and bonding in humans, and their work still provides one of the clearest explanations of how feelings of inadequacy and emptiness arise in early childhood. The research repeatedly demonstrates how important accurate empathy is for our sense of adequacy, and how we need a safe parental relationship that provides an environment where we can express our despair, anguish, and rage. If you are in some way deprived of this, your sense of self can be injured, creating what’s known as a narcissistic injury.
The sense of self that’s injured in these early relationships is the ego identity, or conditioned self. This is the part of your consciousness typically regarded as “me” in the narrative-based self—the very center of individuality that feels separate and distinct from everyone else. This self is the central character in the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. For those who feel unworthy, the narcissistic injury is usually one of deprivation—a wound of neglect. It isn’t about what happened to you; it’s about what didn’t happen—what you didn’t receive that you needed for a safe and nurturing emotional environment. The emotional safety and accurate empathetic reflections you needed weren’t there, creating a narcissistic wound from which a sense of unworthiness grows.
Paradoxically, feelings of unworthiness can also be created when a child is flooded by parental attention. This creates a type of narcissistic injury known as engulfment. In deprivation the child may conclude that he isn’t being taken care of because there’s something wrong with him. In engulfment the child may conclude that he’s being taken care of so excessively because he’s incapable of taking care of himself.
It may seem that this creates an impossible quandary for parents, but research shows that there is a middle way—an amount of attention that’s neither too much nor too little (Winnicott 1996). The good news is, you don’t have to be perfect to be an excellent parent; you only need to be good enough. In fact, good enough is perfect! This corresponds nicely with Buddhism’s middle way, a concept discovered by Gautama Buddha about 2,500 years ago. There’s a middle way in all things, even if we sometimes have to go to extremes to find it. As we negotiate the path to balance, it’s critical that we treat ourselves with self-compassion.
There are many reasons why you may not have had your early interpersonal needs met, and often no one is really at fault, particularly you. Maybe you were the last of seven children and the sheer number of kids was overwhelming. Or perhaps you are a girl and your parents wanted a boy, or vice versa. You may have received that vital attention at first but for some reason it slipped away. Maybe your mom had to go back to work and no longer had enough time for you, or perhaps a baby sister or brother came along, so there wasn’t as much time for you. Or maybe someone in your immediate family died or your parents got a divorce. As you can see, many of the things you might discover as you feel 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 quite right emotionally, perhaps a vague feeling that something is absent. Trying to make sense of this feeling, the child starts trying to figure out what’s wrong as soon as she can begin forming rational thoughts. But because she can’t see the big picture, she’s likely to mistakenly conclude that she must be lacking. This is the origin of the self-judging personal narrative. Painful questions are often too scary to verbalize: “Why don’t you love me? What’s wrong with me? What did I do wrong?” Yet even if unasked, these questions still beg an answer, and because nature abhors a vacuum, the child fills in the empty space with conclusions about what’s wrong, often leading to the thought “There must be something wrong with me.”
Though this may seem a strange conclusion, it makes sense. It’s preferable to thinking that there might be something wrong with Mommy or Daddy. That thought is too terrible. Among other things it implies that the child can never get the loving attention she craves. Plus, the child can go to work on correcting herself, but there’s no way to fix Mom or Dad. A great many of us arrive at feelings of unworthiness and inadequacy in exactly this way.
The motivation to do something to help or change yourself comes from a good instinct, because you really are the one most able to help yourself. But as long as you’re looking for and trying to correct your deficiencies, you’ll perpetuate feelings of inadequacy. In part, this is because searching for what’s wrong with you is certain to yield a great many things that do indeed appear to be wrong with you, at least from the perspective of a critical mind. This approach is actually one of the well-known pitfalls of scientific investigations: The search to prove a hypothesis can bias a researcher to investigate, and sometimes recognize, only those things that support the hypothesis. The problem lies in not recognizing that our assumptions are only hypotheses, and in terms of the faulty self, we’ve assumed we are deficient only because we didn’t get something we needed.
As we grow into adulthood, we often end up searching for someone to give us what we didn’t get as children. The absence of sufficient attention can create a gnawing hunger for outside approval. Some people become very seductive; some search for other ways to manipulate or impress. Some perform to get attention, while others become impossibly helpless. Some even try brute force and become violent in pursuit of this craving.
Though others’ responses to our efforts feed our hunger, the satisfaction is only fleeting, and in the end we feel empty again. Watch a five-year-old child pursuing your attention, and you can witness the entire spectrum of human behaviors in the child’s quest for satisfaction. If you look closely enough, some of these strategies may feel familiar. Even the sweetest of smiles and gestures can become a goal-oriented strategy.
What we typically don’t realize as we pursue our external quest to get something we didn’t get when we were little is that this convoluted effort is entirely futile. At the end of the day, no matter how well we perform or how much we get from others, it’s never enough; we still end up feeling empty. The awful yet liberating truth is that the time for getting these needs met was in your childhood. You cannot get now what you didn’t get then. No one else can assume the role of the loving parent you didn’t have then. You may be loved and even adored in mature relationships, but that can’t fill the empty space of what you didn’t receive so long ago. The good news, though, is that you can learn to be with the ache in your heart with understanding and self-compassion and find peace and freedom in letting go of the desire for things to be different. Coming to terms with the way things are, with acceptance and compassion, can help you free yourself from the suffering that has imprisoned you.
Although none of us ever adequately fills the empty space in our hearts with something or someone else, the empty space itself can be something sacred in its own right. Perhaps this realization comes only after you stop thinking of the emptiness as something to be filled or hidden, and perhaps it can happen only once you come to terms with your life just as it is. It’s akin to why symbols of empty space are often honored and celebrated on altars in the form of a chalice or bowl. Empty space is infinitely valuable. In the teachings of the Tao, the empty space at the center of a wheel is what makes it useful. This is also true of a vessel, a room, and even your heart and mind. Known as the sacred feminine or yin energy in Chinese philosophy, it represents the universal spirit of receptivity embodied in the accepting openness of a lake or the vibrant potentiality of a womb.
The pathway of healing involves finding ways to honor and explore the empty spaces in your heart and take ownership of the feelings you wouldn’t or couldn’t allow yourself to feel before. It involves feeling into the truth and contacting your hurt, for the injured place in your heart is the site where healing must occur. Rather than being something abhorrent, this wound becomes something precious to you: the heart that was once abandoned and lacking in love and compassion—from others or even yourself. You can learn how to allow disowned feelings to once again become part of you by opening to them little by little and learning to accept them with loving-kindness.
You don’t have to do this alone. Often it’s best to do this work in therapy or at least with the support of a trusted teacher or friend who has already traveled this difficult journey. On your own, you can begin to integrate these feelings through mindfulness meditation and self-compassion practices, yet even then it is often helpful to work through this healing process with someone else. Meditation doesn’t replace therapy, but it is an invaluable adjunct to therapy. Likewise, therapy can’t replace meditation, but it can support and enhance meditation practice.
When you bring compassionate awareness to the wounded heart, your narrative-based self begins to fade, and in time something new will be revealed. As you surrender into what is, you’ll discover a wholeness that you couldn’t know as long as you were avoiding your feelings and searching to fill the void with something from someone else.
Karen’s Story
Karen, a wife, mother, and teacher, had all the things that are supposed to make life happy and full, but she felt as though her life was some kind of existential play. It seemed to have no meaning, no purpose, and no joy. She felt she was in a puzzle that she couldn’t figure out, and finally she just quit trying. She knew she wasn’t happy, but she had no idea what to do about it. Eventually, she wasn’t even sure what being happy is.
She was in a decent marriage to a nice guy, but she wasn’t in love with him and wasn’t even sure what being in love was. She felt as though she could stay married or not, and it wouldn’t make any difference to her. She didn’t like her life the way it was, but didn’t know if there was really anything any better. Most of the time she was so caught up in what she should do and had always done that she didn’t know how she felt about anything. She was good at meeting other people’s expectations, but didn’t know what she wanted for herself. The last time she could remember feeling happy was when she was only about four years old.
In her meditation practice, Karen began to explore where and when she had lost her innocence and capacity for joy. She remembered living in an orphanage with many other children and being cared for by three wonderful women when she was five years old. One day a man and woman came to visit and were talking with one of Karen’s “moms.” She looked serious as she talked with them, and then they all stopped talking and looked at Karen. They smiled, but Karen felt weird, and when Karen’s caregiver asked her to go outside and play, she knew that they were talking about her. So she didn’t go outside—she stayed and listened at the door. She remembered everything as though it were yesterday. She heard her caregiver say, “She’s a delightful child and we adore her—her songs, her dances, her dear laughter and sweet loving-kindness. She’s an absolute jewel, but I’m afraid there are some problems with her papers.”
That’s when Karen lost her innocence. All of the women who cared for her in that big home were her “moms,” and she loved them and loved living with them. As she listened at the door, she thought, “If they really love me, they’ll keep me here.” And with what she had heard, she knew she had some power to control her fate—she knew what they liked and how to please them. From then on, her smile and her songs were no longer a simple expression of joy. She learned to watch others’ eyes to see if they were happy with her. She was no longer innocent; she had become purposeful. Even her laughter became another performance as she learned how to figure out what others wanted and how to give it to them. From that moment on, her life took on the purpose of keeping safe by pleasing others, and this was what governed her every choice.
Pleasing others to keep ourselves safe is just one of the personality patterns created by the narrative-based or conditioned self, but it’s a fairly common one. Many of us can identify with Karen. In attempting to give others what they’re looking for, we start to feel like life is just a series of performances geared to fit others’ expectations and make them happy. It seems like a good thing, but you can lose touch with who you are as you seek to please others. And because this kind of giving has a purpose, it creates an expectation that others will value and love you because of what you give. Unfortunately, employers, coworkers, spouses, children, other family members, and friends may consume your generosity without thinking of reciprocating, so you may end up feeling hurt, angry, and miserable—and filled with yet more self-loathing—as you experience failure and disappointment again and again.
If you can follow the thread of your own process of self-authorship, you may find in yourself a very young child still living out self-protection strategies that arose long ago. You are holding one end of this thread right now. It’s the way you are—the way you do things. It’s your personality and it’s got a particular style intended to get something from or get away from significant others in your life. Follow the thread and you will discover how you’ve created the sense of self that you are living in today. Yet this thread is something spun by your internal narrative, and remaining attached to it is neither inevitable nor inescapable.
As you follow this thread to see how your narrative developed, you may become angry. You may feel like blaming those who were supposed to take better care of you. That’s okay. These moments of anger and hurt may help you reclaim feelings that you’ve lost touch with. That said, it’s important to acknowledge at the beginning of this inner exploration that the goal is not to find fault or place blame, but only to better understand how you came to feel deficient and unworthy.
Of course, there are horrible parenting failures that deeply injure children, and these kinds of traumatic injuries are often passed down from generation to generation until someone in the succession of wounded innocents breaks the chain and travels the path to healing. But often even parents who mean to do the best by their children find it very difficult to discern the middle way, of neither too much nor too little attention. Parents can fail even when trying to do the right thing. For those who were neglected in childhood, it can be all too easy to engulf their children with too much love, and for those who were engulfed in childhood, it’s all too easy to be too withholding.
Having looked at how a sense of inadequacy arises due to influences on childhood development, let’s now explore this feeling from the perspective of Buddhist psychology. When the Dalai Lama first heard that Westerners often feel a tremendous lack of self-worth or self-esteem, he was surprised and puzzled. It took a great deal of explanation for him to understand this nemesis of Western civilization. It was hard for him to conceive that we could feel so deficient (Goleman 2003).
In Buddha’s Brain, Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius say that “from a neurological standpoint, the everyday feeling of being a unified self is an utter illusion: the apparently coherent and solid ‘I’ is actually built from many subsystems and sub-subsystems over the course of development, with no fixed center, and the fundamental sense that there is a subject of experience is fabricated from myriad, disparate moments of subjectivity” (2009, 211). It may be tempting to think that the self must be your thoughts, but these too are always changing and rather arbitrary. Interestingly, in Buddhist psychology the mind is considered to be one of the sense organs. 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.
Perhaps it’s akin to hardware and software. Being a human being means you have hardware that’s equipped with the apparatus of a mind, body, and senses, but the lens through which you see yourself and the world is software that’s been programmed with self-definitions of who you think you are and further reinforced by those close to you. This essentially arbitrary self-definition is dependent on your early childhood experiences and perpetuated by your self-story and the expectations of others.
Buddhist psychology speaks of this confusion around self as similar to watching a movie and getting caught up in the drama. Yet when broken down, the reality is one 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. But a fixed and stable self is an illusion. In this way, imposing a story about your deficiency on your life takes a subjective experience from the past and projects it out into the future.
From the point of view of Buddhist psychology, you can free yourself from suffering and the limitations of the narrative-based self only when you awaken from the illusions this self creates. In the words of Margaret Wheatley, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, this awakening allows you to “break the seal [and] notice something new” (1999, 1). It frees you from the story that keeps you trapped in a constricted sense of self, and only then can you outgrow the self you have created. As you build your mindfulness meditation practice, you’ll develop the deep insight into the workings of your mind that will allow you to deconstruct your conditioned self. The hurt, anger, or unworthiness you feel, and even the personality that pursues satisfaction of its cravings, is only the result of your early programming. They are not you. Your wholeness and deep connection to every other living being has always been present; it’s just that you’ve been caught up in other things and couldn’t see it.
Buddhist psychology regards ignorance as the source of all suffering. And of all forms of ignorance, it considers thinking that you’re a separate self to be the first and worst kind. This is the ultimate source of all the mind traps of hunger and fear. The antidote is mindfulness practice, which allows you to witness the coming and going of thoughts and emotions and to recognize how you create a deficient sense of self through a personal narrative of thoughts and emotions focused on “I,” “me,” or “mine.” You’ll come to see how you create a sense of being faulty through thoughts like “I wish I were a better person,” “I just don’t belong anywhere,” or “What’s wrong with me?”
Buying into the fiction of a stable and unchanging self is the greatest trap for subjecting yourself to destructive emotions, and often the most difficult to extricate yourself from. At first the realization that the self in your story is no more than a fabrication of your own mind may be more than a little disorienting, not to mention distressing. But if you can stay with this and continue to investigate it, you’ll find that this insight is extremely liberating and can completely change your orientation and way of being in the world. When you let go of your attachment to a fixed and separate self, you’ll get your first taste of true freedom. To get you started on your healing journey, we’ll close this chapter with a meditation that can help you learn to live in the present moment.
Mindfulness Practice: Meditation on the Breath
If you’re new to meditation, we’d like to offer you a few general pointers on body position and other physical aspects of practice. Sitting is generally preferable, but you can also lie down if you’re able to remain alert, and you can even stand if you like. In any position, keep your head, neck, and body somewhat aligned. If you sit, aim for a posture that’s self-supporting, rather than leaning back against a chair, and make sure your legs can rest comfortably, without requiring muscle tension to hold them in place. Find a place where you can rest your hands. Look for your middle way—not too tight and not too loose, a position where you can be comfortable and alert for the entire practice. Feel free to have your eyes closed or partially open—whichever you feel most at ease with. If you keep your eyes partially open, your gaze should be more inward, on whatever you’re focusing on, rather than outward, where you may get lost in what you’re seeing. If you find yourself getting sleepy, you might want to open your eyes or stand up.
The breath is an excellent focus for mindfulness practice. Your breath is always there, always coming and going. It’s also something that’s available to you anytime, anywhere.
Give yourself ten to fifteen minutes for this practice.
Begin by bringing your attention to the breath in either your nostrils or your belly—wherever you feel it most distinctly. As you breathe in, be aware of breathing in, and as you breathe out, be aware of breathing out. Let the breath come and go as it will, normally and naturally. Let the felt sense of the breath coming and going be your way to be present for the full duration of the in breath and the full duration of the out breath. Letting yourself be…
There’s no need to visualize anything or regulate the breath in any way. There’s no need to engage thoughts or words or phrases of any kind. Just be mindful of breathing in and breathing out, without judgment, without striving. Just watch the breath ebbing and flowing like waves in the sea.
Notice the inevitable moments when your attention wanders from the breath. When this happens, don’t criticize or berate yourself. Simply acknowledge where you went, perhaps into the future or the past, or engaging in some kind of judging. Just return to the breath, again and again, every time you leave it.
There’s nothing to accomplish, nothing to pursue, nothing to do but simply sit and be where you are, noticing your breathing. Living your life one inhalation and one exhalation at a time…
As you come to an end of this meditation, please extend some appreciation and congratulations to yourself for giving yourself this gift of mindfulness.
In this chapter you learned a foundational mindfulness practice: meditating on the breath. This is a powerful way to ground yourself in the present moment. Remember, your breath is always there—always available as a way to bring yourself back into the here and now. We highly recommend practicing mindful breathing daily, and making this a lifelong practice. Try doing a few minutes of mindful breathing before you even get out of bed in the morning, as a way to set the tone for your day, and to establish an intention to live more mindfully. Focusing on the breath can also bring you a measure of calm in difficult times. Anytime you feel yourself becoming stressed, upset, or beset by difficult thoughts or emotions, pause for a few mindful breaths. This will create a little space and may allow you to choose a different way of responding to the situation.