The Authentic Life (10 page)

So instead of following our usual strategies, the practice is to first
recognize
what's going on—that is, to see our anxiety as just
a conditioned response. And second, to
consciously refrain
from immediately engaging in our strategies of control and escape. This allows us to take the third and transformative step of
returning
to and residing in our experience itself, where we can begin to get a taste of the real freedom that arises from the power of awareness itself. My wife and fellow teacher, Elizabeth Hamilton, refined this practice and gave it the acronym “RRR,” as a reminder of these three steps—Recognize, Refrain, and Return. Through this threefold process the ground is laid for being able to live more genuinely.

It is so very easy to lose sight of our spiritual path and just fall back into complacency and ease—the kind of false complacency that is sustained through our habitual strategies of behavior. We have to understand that even though our complacency keeps us asleep, and even though our discomforts can be our teacher, we have much less aversion to our complacency than we do to our discomforts. To live most authentically, we need to learn to fear our complacency far more than we fear our discomfort and distress.

9

The Misguided Quest

W
hen I was partway through writing my first book, which was eventually published as
Being Zen,
I sent the first few chapters to a large publisher, certain that they would agree to publish the book. When I got the rejection letter back, along with the note saying they didn't think there was a market for my subject, I was both shocked and disappointed. My self-judgmental mind took the rejection as proof that I was somehow fundamentally lacking, and the disappointment quickly spiraled down into a feeling of doom. To avoid having to feel this, I immediately began the misguided quest to measure up—strategizing how to revise the book to make it fit the prevailing market.

Fortunately, after a day of this I realized what I was doing: I was considering forsaking what I truly wanted to write just to measure up and achieve external success—all to avoid having to feel the pain of unworthiness. Instead, I began to meticulously observe my mind. Interestingly, the two strongest believed thoughts were the self-judgment “I'll never measure up” and the counterstrategy “I
must
measure up.” As it became clear that
these two beliefs were two sides of the same basic fear of not being enough, the practice also became clear: to willingly reside in the physical experience of fear itself. As the fear became less and less solid, I no longer felt driven by the need to measure up in order to avoid feeling the fear, nor did the negative self-judgment seem so true. As I resumed my writing, I felt much freer of the attachment to outcome and more willing to write what I genuinely had to say, regardless of success.

Almost everyone lives out of this misguided quest to measure up. We may not expect life to be perfect, but we often expect others, and especially ourselves, to measure up. This quest is often not on the conscious level; in fact, many of us might deny that we even have it. But on an unconscious level—the level that dictates how we feel and act—the need to prove our worth is much more obvious.

Every time we are disappointed in ourselves, it's like a mirror being held up to us, showing us how we've been living out of the belief or expectation that we need to be better, that we shouldn't make mistakes or be flawed—in short, that we should measure up to some undefined ideal. This may sound like an unreasonable thing to believe in, and on some level it is; however, we need to remember that this belief is often not a conscious one.

How did this belief, this quest, arise? Let's speculate a little. There's no doubt we came out of the womb with the unspoken pain of separation, as well as the pains of being born. To interpret and make sense of this pain, very early on we construct the judgment, the belief, that we're basically flawed in some way. But this is not something we can easily live with, so to counter the belief that we're basically lacking, the ego gives us a way to control it and overcome it: it tells us we must measure up. As we make efforts to avoid feeling the original pain of separation,
every time we falter, the small mind of the ego is there with a self-judgment: “You must do better!” This whole dynamic is based on the belief that we are fundamentally lacking in some way, coupled with the consequent quest to avoid feeling the discomfort this brings up.

Is this an accurate interpretation of how things actually evolved? Truthfully, I don't know for certain. But does it really matter? Does it matter anymore than it matters whether our personal “stories” are true—about why I'm the way I am or who's to blame. The only thing we can experience and work with is what our life is right now; and one thing that is certain is that, regardless of the exact cause, we judge ourselves mercilessly for not being enough.

This belief that we're fundamentally lacking is not new; it probably goes all the way back to the belief in original sin. Over time we've given it a little more psychological sophistication by giving “sin” some new names: being unworthy, flawed, neurotic, not enough, and so on. Nor is the concept that we have to measure up a new one. Every religion and every morality has some version of “You must do better!” This explains why guilt and especially shame are so much a part of religion and morality. Shame tells us that we're basically defective, and that the only way out of this uncomfortable condition is to pursue the quest of measuring up.

The deep-seated belief that we're not enough doesn't seem to substantially diminish regardless of how much success we have or how well we are regarded. Perhaps this belief has become so deeply a part of our conditioning that it's an integral part of what it feels like to be a “Me.” Even when we're not in touch with the sense of our imagined inadequacy, it's still there, lurking. We can prove ourselves, improve ourselves, tell ourselves that everything is okay; nonetheless, the judgment that
we'll never quite measure up still remains, almost as if it's embedded in our cells.

Let's look at this from a slightly different point of view. When a difficulty arises, we almost always think something is wrong. Often fears will be triggered; for example, we fear that we'll get hurt, or that things will fall apart. These fears often take us back to our fundamental pain of separation. It's a given that humans don't want to feel this discomfort, so to counter having to feel these fears, we try to find a way to address the situation. We instinctively seek ways to find safety and comfort, to take away whatever we see as “wrong,” So we ask ourselves, “How can I fix it?” “How can I measure up?” This whole dynamic begins with the belief that something is wrong; and often, when we judge or believe that something is wrong, we conclude that something is wrong with
us
. In other words, at the root of our fixing pattern is the self-judgment of our own unworthiness. Our negative self-judgments have many flavors—feeling unworthy, stupid, incompetent, unappealing, or, more generically, that we're simply not enough.

As we already saw, our deep-seated self-judgments arise early on from the inevitable pain of our formative years. Over time, these judgments become more and more deeply ingrained, until eventually we regard them as the unquestioned Truth. Until we begin the work of honestly observing ourselves, these negative, painfully demeaning self-judgments may not even be open to question.

For example, the deeply embedded judgment “I'm unworthy” may not be on the surface of our thoughts, and may even be covered over by self-confidence. Yet because we don't want to feel the pain of this belief, it may nevertheless impact the way we relate to the world. Often our self-judgments act like radar; in other words, we perceive things based on what we believe
and expect to see. For instance, if we believe we're unworthy, all we have to do is have one small setback and we'll immediately conclude, “See, I'm not enough. I'll never measure up.” Consequently, these self-judgments guarantee that we'll stay stuck in our psychological pain. In every case, we're caught in the narrow, inaccurate confines of the thinking mind, and we believe in these judgments as the absolute truth. This perpetuates our suffering, and the cycle is vicious and relentless.

For some, a fundamental belief in their own unworthiness may drive them to be productive or to succeed, in order to compensate for this sense of inner lack. Others may withdraw or cease trying, in order to avoid risking failure. For many it surfaces through finding distractions or ways of numbing ourselves. In all of these cases, the motivation is the same: we don't want to feel the pain of believing we're not enough.

Our self-judgments are often below the level of awareness, but sometimes our negative self-judgments are also on the conscious, surface level. For instance, if we do something a little silly, the small mind of judgment is right on board to let us know about it. One of my students told me he realized his whole life had been about trying to get someplace, trying to be somebody. He said it seemed like it had been this way since he was a child. He realized his quest to measure up was mostly about trying to cover over a sense of lack—constantly judging himself for not being enough. A depiction of the extensiveness of our self-judgment was humorously portrayed in a
Peanuts
cartoon, where Charlie Brown was sitting on his bed thinking, “Sometimes I wake up at night and I ask, ‘Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, ‘This is going to take more than one night.'”

Interestingly, our self-judgment can wreak havoc even during meditation. How many times have you judged yourself as a failure at meditation, simply because you had difficulty paying
attention? When I first started meditating, my self-judgmental mind had a field day. I had the expectation that if I were a good meditator, my mind would automatically become calm. An expectation like this, however, is a setup for both ongoing disappointment and unending self-criticism.

Self-judgment adds a whole extra layer of suffering on top of whatever pain we might already be feeling. Remembering Buddha's analogy of first and second arrows—he said if we're hit by an arrow, it will surely hurt, but if we're hit by a second arrow in the same spot, it will hurt much more. This may sound like common sense, but if we use the second arrow as an analogy to help clarify the harmful qualities of the judging mind, its meaning deepens and becomes more useful. For example, if we get a headache, there's no doubt it can be somewhat painful. But if we have the thought “This is terrible” or “Poor me,” it's like being hit by a second arrow, and it may intensify the physical pain as well as adding emotional pain.

As we observe ourselves, we'll see that we shoot ourselves with second arrows quite regularly, even though we're normally not aware that we're doing this. Why? Because we identify with our thoughts and judgments as the unquestioned Truth. How many times, after making a mistake, which we can call the first arrow, do we add on the second arrow of self-judgment, “I can't do anything right”?

As we add on layers of self-judgment, we can easily become caught up in the desire to get away from all the yuckiness. At this point we automatically move into the fix-it mode, toward the misguided quest to measure up. Even after years of practice we may still be subtly caught in this quest. Even though life is continually telling us otherwise, we still believe, on some level, that we can finally measure up. Sometimes it's only when our body begins to age, despite our frantic efforts to exercise and
diet our way back to youth, that we learn the unwanted lesson: that our desire to measure up and be in control will never be realized. Then we can finally understand that our belief that we have endless time to make things right is just an illusion, a fantasy.

This is where practice comes in. To work with the roots of self-judgment, we have to first refrain from the movement toward fixing our experience. This is not so easy, because the habit of fixing ourselves is so deeply ingrained in our conditioning. We get good at what we practice, and what we've been practicing our whole lives is trying to fix ourselves, trying to measure up. But once we've experienced the disappointment inherent in living this way, we may be motivated to actually refrain from the fixing pattern, at least on occasion.

Then, once we refrain, what's next? We become aware of how pervasive our self-judgments actually are. This is challenging, because these self-judgments are often one of the most elusive aspects of the thinking mind, and one of the last things we want to deal with. This is why relentless self-observation is so necessary. As with our other believed thoughts, we must first observe them with objectivity, labeling them for added clarity: “Having a believed thought
I'll never measure up
” or “Having a believed thought
I'm basically flawed
.” We may have to name our believed thoughts in this way many times before our investment in them, our identification with them, begins to diminish. The more we can see this pernicious pattern with some objectivity, the less we will identify with it as the reality of who we are.

This process of seeing ourselves more objectively also brings in the quality of kindness—which is the exact opposite of self-judgment—in that the increased objectivity allows us to see and relate to ourselves with more benign tolerance. We can then begin to cultivate a sense of space around our self-judgments,
which allows us to stop struggling
against
ourselves. Perhaps we can learn to look at ourselves the way we look at a small child who is having difficulties. When we see a child struggling, we can readily understand that the child might be hungry, overtired, or just a little cranky. We don't judge them as being defective, nor do we berate them for not measuring up.

When we can look at ourselves in the same way, we learn what it means to see our “stuff” as simply our conditioning, as
just
old wounds and deep beliefs. That allows us to be with
whatever
arises. It doesn't mean we like it, but we can relate to it in a new way. To soften around difficult self-beliefs is the path to truly understanding that these are not the deepest truths about us. As we learn how to make this soft effort around our relentlessly judging mind, we can relate in a new, more spacious way to the ancient wound of our seeming separateness. To be able to relate to the judging mind with the warmth of kindness is perhaps the single most potent antidote to our deep-rooted tendency to judge ourselves.