Are you your own biggest critic? Do you always berate yourself for your weaknesses? Beating yourself up is a terrible habit that does immense harm to you: it makes you doubt your capabilities; you suffer tremendous emotional pain; you feel despondent; but worst of all, you lose out on your inherent potential for love, happiness and success. Cultivating compassion for self can help you unlearn this tendency of self-bashing so that you can learn to relax and open up to possibilities you had hitherto no access to.
This kind of compulsive concern with “I, me, and mine” isn’t the same as loving ourselves… Loving ourselves points us to capacities of resilience, compassion, and understanding within that are simply part of being alive.
—Sharon Salzberg, The Force of Kindness
In this incredibly competitive society of ours, how many of us truly feel good about ourselves? It seems such a fleeting thing—feeling good— especially as we need to feel special and above average to feel worthy. Anything less seems like a failure. I remember once as a freshman in college, after spending hours getting ready for a big party, I complained to my boyfriend that my hair, makeup, and outfit were woefully inadequate. He tried to reassure me by saying, “Don’t worry, you look fine.”
“Fine? Oh great, I always wanted to look fine...”
The desire to feel special is understandable. The problem is that, by definition, it’s impossible for everyone to be above average at the same time. Although there are some ways in which we excel, there is always someone smarter, prettier, more successful. How do we cope with this? Not very well. To see ourselves positively, we tend to inflate our own egos and put others down so that we can feel good in comparison. But this strategy comes at a price—it holds us back from reaching our full potential in life.
Distorting mirrors
This story is from the June 2016 edition of Complete Wellbeing.
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This story is from the June 2016 edition of Complete Wellbeing.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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