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The 12 Steps from a Buddhist Perspective
Taking Refuge as a Higher Power
Admitting When We Are Wrong While Refraining from Blaming Others
Replacing Shoulds with Healthier Self-Talk
Handling Others' Projections of Character Defects We Actually Have
The Unbearable Cuteness of Consumer Addiction
Being the Best versus Doing my Best
Should I Be Ashamed of Myself? Powerlessness and Unmanageablity as Manipulation
The Process of Awakening to a Non-Defensive Self
...I am willing to suspend self-harming judgments long enough to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself.
One of the most profound realizations I have ever experienced—a satori moment—in my life was my response to being told in what I took as a rather nasty and dismissive tone to “learn to love myself.” In a burst of negative emotion that called my attention to the problem, I muttered, “F* you, so-and-so, I don’t have to love myself!” Whenever I tell others about this, their first response tends to be one of grave concern for my sanity, and they usually hasten to reassure me that yes, indeed I do need to love myself. However, what I meant by “not having to” love myself is that I cannot experience love for myself while I am trying to live up to others’ expectations of what self-love should look like. I do not need to be trying to present myself to others in a way that reflects back to them their own ideas of how someone with high self-esteem should act. Indeed, the harder I try to look like I do not have any problems with my self-esteem, the greater those problems become. On another occasion, I put the same realization in different words: “I need to be able to not judge myself even when I am judging myself.”
How can I be honest as I go about inventorying my problems if I cannot accept that my taking a judgmental attitude toward these problems is one of the problems? Trying to get rid of unwanted parts of myself that do not fit into the image I want to have of myself, I try to get others to validate a facade I am putting up as reality. How I feel about myself then depends on other people telling me I am okay. But it’s important to realize that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with wanting to feel good about myself. Feeling good about myself at someone else’s expense, however—something that I do not feel often, if at all—is not something I reject as being “wrong” but as a very ineffective way of going about feeling better about anything! My Principal Witness is aware that hurting others always feels bad at a very deep level. I can have compassion on both myself and others, not for being hypocritical or putting people down, but for the desire to feel better about ourselves that motivates the hypocrisy and the put-downs.
Through an honest moral inventory, I can discover and allow my own self-love instead of trying to make other people take the blame for hurting me by failing to love themselves. I can compassionately accept that other people often don’t love themselves any more than I do, and that we all resort to the same tactics of trying to fix someone else’s lack of self-love, until, at some point, we discover they don’t work. It is the gentleness of this whole process that can bring down our defenses, dissolve our perceived need for self-justification—which is, after all, an illusion.
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