So here you are, feeling guilty.
You should be meditating, but instead you are scrolling on your phone, your dull face lit up by the screen. You were going to work out, but instead got hungry. Now that you ate something, your stomach is too heavy to exercise.
You were planning to eat something healthy too, but the asparagus and frozen fish would have taken too much time to cook and you were hungry, so a granola bar was the next best option.
Your Duolingo app reminds you that it’s been 187 days since you last learned a new word in Chinese. A missed call from your Mom remains unanswered, and a work email just popped up.
I’m here to tell you, ask you and even beg you to stop. You deserve better.
Here’s why:
The Underlying Aggression
Underneath every desire for self-improvement is an underlying feeling of self-aggression that there is something wrong with the way you are now.
Beneath our attempts to improve ourselves is the assumption that there is something that needs to be improved, or there is something you need to do to be accepted or feel loved.
Don’t worry, you’re not alone in this feeling. We live in a culture that’s so focused on productivity and capitalistic materialism that not doing something feels like you’re falling behind. It seems like everyone else is running around on their own super-serious self-improvement project, so you should be too.
You know what else is increasing along with the pace of our lives? Burnout. Anxiety. Depression. Propelled by social media, the inexorable creeping thoughts of feeling like you’re “not enough” are ready to ruin your day if you are not working overtime to buy new clothes to take the perfect picture with the latest, fastest phone.
Believe it or not, regardless of how tan you are, how much money you make or how many friends liked your latest status update, you are still worthy of love and belonging; not only from others, but yourself too. In this moment, no matter what is left undone, how messy the house is or what your kid said to the teacher last week, you are worthy of all the love and acceptance your heart can handle.
We Give Our Emotions Too Much Credit
I know what you are thinking, “But if I didn’t feel guilty about not doing things I’m supposed to, there would be nothing motivating myself to do it.”
I know exactly what you mean. I am a worrier. Anxiety likes to run my life. I worry about being late to things and end up getting to the airport four hours before my flight.
I only drive defensively because anyone on the road could kill me at any moment, and when I’m in the passenger seat, I will remind the driver of how they could be driving more safely too. Strangely enough, they do not appreciate the feedback.
Of course, it doesn’t take a PhD in evolutionary psychology to recognize many of our inhibiting emotions are rooted in the fright, flight, and freeze response. A long time ago, this stress-response system did a good job at making us run from tigers. Unfortunately, it is not nearly as effective at giving PowerPoint presentations in front of the board of directors.
The fact of the matter is, we give our emotions too much credit. We think they have assessed the situation correctly and are the correct response to the given situation when in reality, they could have no basis at all, or they could be arising from past patterning or cultural conditioning.
The point is, we needn’t rely on such negative emotions as a motivating force for good. You can drive without feeling anxious, give a presentation without feeling fear and go to the gym, not from a sense of lacking, but as part of the path towards health and wholeness.
What is the biggest difference between doing something out of love and doing it out of frustration? Our intention.
We Have To Know Our Intention
You might recognize the word “intention” as something your yoga teacher tells you to set at the beginning of class, but don’t think for a second that spiritual circles are immune to the same problems of the endless pursuit of self-improvement.
We can easily do our whole spiritual practice out of ego, out of a desire to look good and impress people. In fact, the modern Western spiritual seeker tends to be on a path of collecting more and more notches on their spiritual belts, as they go from the sweat lodge, to the yoga studio, to the plant medicine ceremony, to the next big thing.
We can meditate because we think we should be, not because we genuinely want to. In knowing the difference, we have to first gain a level of self-awareness strong enough to truly recognize the motivation behind our actions. Are we on an endless pursuit of a higher, more spiritual, more transcendental version of whatever it is we are seeking?
Once we realize what we have been doing might be coming from the wrong place, rather than focus so much on the how and the what, we need to focus on the why.
The why must come from the heart; from what D.H. Lawrence calls the deepest self, writing, “People are not free when they are doing just what they like… People are only free when they are doing what their deepest self likes.”
Once we get in touch with our deepest self, we discover just how ridiculous trying to improve it was.
Your Self, Actual Self, Big S Self, is Changeless
The final and most important reason to stop improving yourself is it is an impossible task. You are not who you think you are. You are not the size of your muscles or the width of your hips. You are not how many languages you speak or how many books you have read.
Rather, who we are is something much larger and expansive than what we normally think. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you who you are. If I tried to, I would simply be conveying a thought using words, but you go beyond both. The writer Jose Saramago hinted the same when he said, “Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”
One way to describe it is that you are the sky. What you are feeling right now is just the weather. You are not the guilt you are feeling, you are that which is aware of the guilt.
The same awareness that is aware of guilt right now is the same awareness that was aware of joy, sadness, happiness or grief at other points in your beautiful life. While the weather may have changed, the sky has remained untouched.
Our desire to change ourselves is just another cloud in that sky; just another obstacle to discovering who we truly are. As the Tibetan Buddhist meditation master Chögyam Trungpa put it, “We go around and around, trying to improve ourselves through struggle, until we realize that the ambition to improve ourselves it itself the problem.”
Whether you believe me or not, that doesn’t change the truth of who you are, which is the same as me, actually. The same timeless formless changeless nameless presence that is reading these words is the same timeless formless changeless nameless presence that wrote them.
Again, it’s okay if you don’t believe me. All I am trying to say is you are perfect just the way you are. There is nothing you need to change, nothing you need to worry about or feel guilty about.
You are enough.
(Thanks for reading. Cover photo by Christopher Lemercier. To read this article in poem form, see here. To read an entire book of poems based on this idea, see here.)
