I wonder about the balance between having good self esteem and pride. This seems a more subtle part of the story that you just told about the warrior heart. So much harm is done between people. I, for one, have had injury to my sense of self worth. The differences between the lessons of the warrior heart and the rock star are confusing to me when this self esteem issue is at hand also. I struggle with that and I see others struggle with it. Will you tell a story or share something on this topic?
–from Maine, USA

Here is a story I have heard from my Buddhist friends. Some Westerners were visiting the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. One American visitor brought up the topic of self-hatred. How can we work with self-hatred in a spiritual practice? The Dalai Lama was utterly astonished. He could not fathom the concept of self-hatred. Tears began to roll down his cheeks upon hearing that a feeling of self-hatred is common in the West. He asked: How can it be that people feel self-hatred when we all have Buddha nature?

Lack of self-esteem is another way of saying that we are experiencing a feeling of separation from our true nature. We all feel some variety of this separation until we are Self-realized. However, some people have a greater capacity to “tune-into” Shiva or Buddha nature–our essential nature–even in the midst of experiences of limitation. Other people feel more overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy or self-hatred.

Direct realization Tantra offers many tools that a person can use to work with these feelings and relax painful tensions.

Here it is useful to make a distinction between working in the context of a direct realization tradition and typical forms of psychotherapy. I don’t know anything about Buddhist psychotherapy, so I am not commenting on this.

The usual kinds of psychotherapy in the West today proceed from a dualistic View. They don’t question, and in fact tend to support, the belief that other people have caused your feelings of being harmed and uncomfortable emotions. In addition, therapy leaves untouched the concept that you can be fundamentally damaged by another. This keeps you in a state of fear, even if that fear goes underground during the “good” times.

While therapists may emphasize your heroic recovery rather than victimization, in general, they do their best to support you in creating a more functional story about yourself: the story of the strong self. All psychotherapy is based on affirming the individual self as a separate entity and upon story-telling about the self.

Some teachers say that a psychologistic View has created Western psychology. Psychology is real for us, and so we need psychotherapy to work through that. This sounds reasonable, but I still think that direct realization traditions can offer an alternative right out of the gate, even for “Western minds.”

Direct realization traditions emphasize connectivity and direct experience rather than shoring up the boundaries of the self and story-telling. A person who is in a situation of feeling low self-esteem and comes to work with a teacher will be asked to cultivate a greater degree of concrete, immediate connection and openness between themselves and their environment. This can be done through health cultivation, working with nature and sensory awareness, and ritual and service within a group context. There is much less emphasis on introspection for a person in this situation.

The View of direct realization traditions is that a person is not a closed individual. There is only ONE world of continuity. We have experiences of individuality, but these are just experiences. We never lose these, and there is no reason to desire this. Suffering arises when we mistake the experience of individual life for the fundamental Reality. So the aim of practice is to be able to live in the world of diversity from the base experience of continuity rather than separation.

In truth, there is no “other” to blame, either yourself or another person. And we know that others do not cause our responses to life. This is proved by the fact that two people can be in the same situation, and one may feel victimized while the other may continue to feel that everything is fine. In direct realization Tantra, taking full responsibility for one’s own responses in the world, without blame or shame, is radically emphasized over looking for causes and solutions in others.

There is only one source of true self-esteem, and this is the Vajra pride, or adamantine pride that the Cosmic Self expresses. It is a kind of pride in the wonder of life that is always on-going and is for us to discover. It is our true birthright. We do not have to cultivate it. It is. We come to embody Vajra pride in the course of our practice.

What we normally think of as self-esteem is an echo of Vajra pride, and for this reason the best way to cultivate self-esteem for those at the beginning of the path is to begin to relax and de-identify with any stories you are carrying around about yourself or others, and begin to re-identify with the magnificence of the creation as evidenced in your very own body, in nature and in relationships with other beings.

It is important to begin to draw nourishment from your environment rather than continuing the tendency to experience others and our world as threatening. Health cultivation is absolutely essential as your base form of nourishment. Connecting with the richness and sweetness of life is also key.

There are two beautiful meditations from the Tantras that are simple and can be done by anyone. First, you can make ghee (recipes are available online and from the Ayurvedic Institute). Melt some each morning and pour a few inches of luminous ghee into a glass bowl. Then gaze steadily, but in a relaxed way, into the bowl each morning for 20 minutes. See what happens. Be sure to use organic butter. Don’t use store-bought ghee. You can do a similar meditation with a beautiful fresh flower. Put it on your altar at the height of your natural gaze. Sit about one foot away from the flower and gaze at it softly for 20 minutes each morning. Replace the flower as soon as any wilting appears. You can adopt either of these as practice for a month and see what happens.

In Ma’s love,
Shambhavi

*Ghee Happy is the name of the website of the wonderful cartoonist, Sanjay Patel. Hi Sanjay! Hope you don’t mind me stealing your name for this one post.

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