Self-improvement or Self-awareness?

   In trying to make improvements, that is the way you’ve defined yourself, and therefore you will not be able to use energy joyously because you will be using it with an ulterior motive. In approaching “the problem,” you have defined yourself as a motivated and driven being, as a puppet.

- Alan Watts Still the Mind

The self-improvement industry is a big business. All of us want to improve in some way, whether its losing weight, feeling more confident, developing more concentration, creativity, intuition, compassion, prosperity . . . The list goes on and on. Why shouldn’t we want to improve ourselves and thus our lives? Maybe we need to overcome an addiction or are struggling with chronic or life-threatening illness. Maybe it’s depression or painful anxiety. As a yoga teacher and therapist, I actually encourage people to come to me to work on “self-improvement.” Behind all of the specific problems and issues that we struggle with though is simply the desire to be happy, to be at peace, able to relax and enjoy life.

We tend to think, “If only I was good enough, smart enough, attractive enough, rich enough . . ., then I would be happy and content.” “If only I had the right job, partner, house, car . . .” This list may sound simplistic. Whatever we are struggling with in our lives seems so real and complicated. Even many of the self-help “gurus” have their problems, moments of self-doubt, financial worries, or substance abuse patterns. The celebrities that we admire, emulate and envy are in and out of rehab, relationships, or jail. It seems that true happiness, like true love, is very hard to find.

Could it be, though, that we are trying to improve ourselves before we even know who we truly are? There is a huge tendency for people to think they are who they think they are. Our ideas of ourselves are due to our conditioning: by parents, educational and religious systems, media, friends, work evaluations, etc. All of these sources are interested more in getting us to be the way they want us to be rather than who we are. Of course, many of us judge ourselves critically as well. We learn early to identify ourselves with external factors creating an externalized image of who we think we are. Typically, psychotherapy is aimed at adjusting and helping us to become more realistic and comfortable with our self-image.

Beneath, behind and beyond the self-image is our essential being: who we truly are. By the time we are adults this essential self has often been buried under heaps of self-concepts. Our true self is all but unknown to us. We become the roles we play in life, parent, spouse, career, daughter or son and myriads of others. We can even be caught up in being a swami or meditation teacher. The forms and the roles change though and can leave us feeling a loss of identity. As Deepak Chopra has said, "Any name or label you identify yourself with is false. The real you is unbounded & nameless, beyond all labels." Sometimes it is the pain and confusion that comes from role loss that prompts one to awaken to his deeper nature.

“Meditation” has many connotations for us. Sometimes “self-help” people teach us to use meditation as a tool to achieve some imagined goal. This is not completely wrong. Visualization is a powerful tool for achieving life goals. However, this is not meditation. Many people believe that meditation means “making my mind completely empty.” Most of us know meditation as a particular form of practice. True meditation, however, means being awake and aware within this present moment. The practices are primarily means to overcome the habitual tendencies of our minds to keep us attached to self-definitions, and future hopes and fears. Meditation is a state of consciousness rather than any particular practice.

We can define meditation as “the state of being who we truly are”. As Patanjali tells us in the Yoga Sutras, “Yoga (meditation) means disconnecting from the habitual, conditioned patterns of the mind so that one rests within one’s true self.” We have described this true self as the “inner witness,” however, any description or definition is bound to be misleading. Rather than something or someone outside of ourselves, it is a deeper more basic aspect of who we are. The innermost “I” is witness to all of the mental constructs and activity going on ceaselessly within. Through meditation practice – that is through any of the various means we might use to cultivate this state – this innermost “I” becomes independent from self-definitions, self-images, etc. Within the yoga tradition, this is what is known as moksha or liberation.

There are many, many stages in this process of liberating ourselves from mental patterns. The tendency we have to identify with our constructs is very powerful and very tricky. Whether we identify primarily with this idea we have of “the body,” with our intellectual capacities, with emotions, or intuition, the process of identification is subtle. And it is frightening sometimes to let go! “Wherever I climb,” wrote Nietzsche, “I am followed by a dog called ego.” The real “I” doesn’t need to think “I-thoughts,” it simply knows “I am.” When we are able to let go and to go deeply into our inner being we recognize it as the inner being of the universe, of “God.” As the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart stated, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”

We live in a culture and a society which propagates a strong false ego-identity. In a recent article on Huffington Post, Douglas LaBier explores our concepts of psychological health as we struggle with the changing conditions of the twenty-first century. The definitions of self that we developed in the previous century have become increasingly unhealthy, isolating and violent. He writes, “. . . the 20th Century view equated psychologically healthy with adapting to the values and behavior that were culturally rewarded. For example, adversarial competition; power-seeking for oneself; consuming material goods; living with trade-offs between your personal values and outward behavior; depleting resources in disregard for future generations.” This has been our collective definition of ego. The twenty-first century is demanding that we redefine ourselves.

Perhaps it is demanding that we wake up to our deeper being wherein we as individuals are essentially One. This means turning away from the outer world of appearance, which is predicated on our self-definitions to encounter the deeper consciousness within. I am going to borrow from the Upanishads again as translated by Eknath Easwaren. In this beautiful passage from the Aitareya Upanishad, the Sage explains,

Who is this Self on who we meditate?

Is it the Self by which we see, hear, smell and taste,

Through which we speak in words? Is Self the mind

By which we perceive, direct, understand,

Know, remember, think, will, desire and love?

These are but servants of the Self, who is

Pure consciousness.

This Self is all in all.

He is all the gods, the five elements,

Earth, air, fire, water, and space, all creatures,

Great or small, born of eggs, of wombs, of heat,

Of shoots; of horses, cows, elephants, men and women;

All beings that walk, all beings that fly,

And all that neither walk nor fly. Prajna

Is pure consciousness, guiding all. The world

Rests on prajna, and prajna is Brahman.

Those who live in Brahman live in joy

And go beyond death. Indeed

They go beyond death.



So, the suggestion here is that before we seek to improve ourselves, we might be better off inquiring into who we really are, not conceptually but through meditation.

Om.

Join us for Meditation group in Riverside, CA or for Hatha Yoga and Meditation in Yucaipa, CA.  Contact me at: turiyasaraswati@gmail.com
 
References:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-labier/jared-loughner-changing-face-of-psychological-health_b_807476.html