I’d like to revisit, if you’ll indulge me, my habit of building on previous posts. I wrote before about not being too hard on ourselves. Now I’d like to dig a little deeper into that.
I wrote before that it’s better if we’re gentle with ourselves when we fall short, I feeling that one consequence of not doing this is a negative spiral. If we spend time beating ourselves up and thinking of ourselves as “losers”, or some other negative term, we can easily create a situation where we reinforce a negative spiral in our self image. We make it easier for our self doubt and self pity to undermine us.
But exactly who or what are we trying to undermine here? From a Zen perspective, there is no concrete self, so who are we doubting and pitying? The person who made the mistake no longer really exists, there is nobody to beat up.
I feel that once that’s realised, we can find a great deal of freedom in that truth.
Lewis says:
Ah dude, that’s it - if we can stop taking ourselves so seriously, because we’re not so much of a fixed entity as we might think, we’ll find great freedom there, what a holiday it’ll be!… if only the ego wasn’t so convincing!
12 June 2007, 9:00 pm