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You need to find yourself before you can lose yourself...
Bunks
Australia Veteran
I can remember reading the comment "you need to find yourself before you can lose yourself" in a dharma book some years ago.
It is a phrase that has stuck with me ever since.
As some of you know, I have decided to seek some formal therapy (on top of my dharma practice) in order to discover why I do what I do and think what I think.
I think I need to get my own house in order before I can truly let go and properly assist others.
Thoughts / comments welcome!
Peace and blessings to you all.
8
Comments
Sounds good I hope you find a good therapist and a good relationship.
Just keep on being mindful every day.
@Bunks
Some folks think that it is not that you need to find yourself before you can assist others but that those two things have always been one.
That to really find yourself is finding out that the self and other was always one.
Let us know how it goes.
Blessings back at cha.
Your self will be out there acting in the world whether you have determined that it has no real existence or not. If you don't know what it's up to, or choose to believe that it's doing something other than what it actually is doing, well, bad karma could easily be the result. Progress is stalled.
So I agree with you @Bunks and I'm sure you are on the right track now.
My imaginary self has been behaving itself for the most part, though it's been suffering some anxiety lately over mechanical issues. I had hoped I was past all that.
Funnily enough, I went to a lunch time buddhist class and the monk starts by saying:
"There is a popular present day myth that we need to love ourselves before we can love others. This is wrong. We should be doing it the other way around"
Go figure.........
Just love.
Only the ego says to care where it goes.
No you don't need to. This is a Western misunderstanding.
It's sort of like the Western concept of getting over angry by BEING angry ... all you do when you beat up a pillow is strengthen the anger imprints/pathways in your brain. Yes, it provides a temporary sense of relief but now the habit of anger has become stronger.
In a similar way, you get over yourself by doing practices that train you to get over yourself. Focusing on yourself only strengthens your imprints/pathways OF focusing on yourself. The strongest "get-over-yourself" behavior is that of serving others and of cultivating compassion and humility.
You are seeking insight therapy? That was introduced by Freud, and has pretty much been debunked. Insight into why you do what you do does not actually retrain/re-route the programs in your brain. It might motivate you to work harder on cognitive-behavioral techniques that DO retrain the programs in your brain. But by itself insight does nothing. And it can become a trap.
Be careful to not become a "professional patient". These are the people who go into therapy and become quite addicted to focusing on themselves. Insight after insight comes, layer after layer of the "onion" is peeled off, and this make them feel like they are getting somewhere .. it is reinforcing/rewarding. Except that you never get to the final layer, and the problems that you went into therapy FOR still push you around.
You do not need to know "why" you do what you do. You only need to be aware that you do it, and then substitute something else in its place that changes that inner pattern.
As the Native American analogy says:
"There were two wolves outside the tepee door. A good wolf and a bad wolf. Which one survived? Whichever one got fed."
If you want to heal yourself, help to heal others.
You don't need to come first and neither does a supposed "other".
When I read the title in the forum list I thought "Is this the same as "check yo'self before you wreck yo'self?" LOL
Trungpa always says it as "take out your trash before helping someone else with theirs" which I found useful, so I think yes, you are correct. We can help along the way when opportunity presents, but it doesn't do much good if our lives are wreaking of our trash while we help others clean up theirs.
I know you didn't mean home literally (probably?) but this quote I also highlighted of Trungpa's
"the most practical and immediate way to begin sharing with others and working for their benefit is to work with your own domestic situation and to expand from there. So an important step is to become a family person, someone who respects his or her everyday domestic life and is committed to uplifting that situation first."
I think that it can be easy to distract ourselves with other people and their situations as much as we distract ourselves with internet or drugs/alcohol or tv. If you are helping other people as a means to not deal with things in your own life or your own head and heart, then even though you might be offering something to someone else, are you really opening your heart to them and the situation? Are you really available to them and their situation in that way if you are using them to hide from something else in your life?
Charity begins at home.....
How can you lose something that you cannot find?
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn22/sn22.059.nymo.html
I think it is wonderful to work with others. It is also a great example to set for children. But you have to strike a balance because if you are overly focused on other people, your family ends up losing part of you in their lives and that isn't good, either. You can't let other areas of your life suffer because of a focus on "outside" people. Bring the family along with you to help others, it's great for them, too! They learn how to be considerate and generous by watching you. But not if it comes at an expense to them. When you make a choice to have a family, you don't then just suddenly get to change everything about yourself and how you manage your life and expect them to like it and come along for the ride. Sometimes that balance is hard to find. The last thing you want is your wife and children to feel like you love someone else more than them. It might be an ultimate goal as a Buddhist to love everyone the same, but when your family is not Buddhist, they aren't necessarily going to agree with that aspiration.
A somewhat related story:
I met my husband at work and fell in love with him because of how very patient and calm and kind he is at work. He's extremely helpful and a wonderful coworker. Now I stay home and he works a different job. His job is quite stressful (he works in the revenue/tax collection department for our state) but he stays calm and patient, he's incredibly good at his job and his coworkers go to him with everything. He gives and gives and gives to them and they all completely adore him. People tell me every day how much they love working with him, how nice he is, how helpful. While we were on vacation, coworkers were texting him and instead of telling them "sorry, ask someone else we are on vacation" he just kept answering them. So half our time at disney was him responding to stressed out coworkers who can't function at work when he isn't there. Anyhow, then after 10 hours of work, he has nothing left to give. He comes home exhausted, with few of those qualities remaining. He has not found a balance yet between being a good employee, being good to himself and being a good husband and father. Don't get me wrong, he's still a terrific husband and father. But all those qualities are lacking because he puts forth TOO much at work. He doesn't have patience to help kids with projects. He just wants to fall in a chair and watch baseball and have a beer. It doesn't work for us at home and we are working together to find an answer. Thankfully he is quite receptive and aware of the problem. Balance is so important.
@Bunks I just read this in a book I have been reading forever, and thought it might be helpful for the things you were talking about. It is from BKS Iyengar's Light on Life book.
He says, in a peaceful person who hasn't built up years of irritability (I use that as an example because I am irritable, lol, but it can apply to any quality from addiction to fear to whatever) when something happens they might become irritable but it washes over. Like a wave. The lake bottom is smooth and the wave passes over without causing much trouble under the surface. But when the person repeatedly engages with the irritability and uses it over and over again, the waves come on top of each other and start to swirl the water, and eventually the sand, making a mound. Over years of the same reactions, you get quite a mound of irritability (addiction, fear, whatever) built up. It's why if you have years of irritability built up with, say, a parent or a spouse, we react inappropriately to even minor interactions with them.
When you realize you are doing this, and you can work to be less irritable. One day you are peaceful. But then the next day you are irritable again and feel even worse because you couldn't hold onto the peace from the previous day. He said to remember that the mound you created by waves of irritability have been in the making for years. And it'll take a long time to practice the other behavior before it starts to remove from the irritable pile and fill into the peaceful pit that was left behind. Eventually, it equals out and the waves can come and pass over again instead of building to a mound that we react from.
Does that even make sense? LOL it's several pages in the book and I feel like I didn't do it justice. Anyhow, he said you have to both actively work to stop the "bad" behavior and cultivate the good...that cultivating the good by itself isn't enough because it doesn't lead to balance. He said you do have to recognize both and actively work on both. One does not erase the other. You might feel peaceful if you choose to work at a volunteer for the homeless for a long period, but if you never work to reduce that mound of negative feeling/behavior, it won't go away by itself, and when you are presented with a situation that brings it up again, it'll still be there, unless you have done the work to balance them out. Distracting yourself, for most people, does not do enough to deal with the problem that caused it to start with.
Clear as mud? Or sandy water as is the case? LOL
I found it interesting, the analogy made a lot of sense to me.
I've read in some books it is wise to develop a healthy ego first,
before you try to loose it practising buddhism
my tai chi teacher told me practising enlightenment can be dangerous if a person is unbalanced. Small cracks in one's mind and behaviour can become big craters leading to serious mental illness. Based upon personal experience I agree.
Learn to swim before you dive in the stream.
I think you can practise buddhism next to therapy and such, but take your time and don't get all hardcore too soon.
Middle path middle path middle path middle path.
That is exactly what the last factor of the Noble 8 Fold path is.
Sama samadhi or right stillness/calm. To cultivate calm in the midst of storms.
Let go of everything and just watch the breath, chant the mantra or whatever works.
I think it helps to remember that a lot of classical Buddhist teaching comes from the monastics. Most of us here are not monastics and unlike them we are deeply involved with at least some of the following: making a living, being part of a family, interacting with the overall society and having romantic/sexual relationships.
These attributes of a "worldly" person take *a lot* of energy to manage. It seems that to be able to manage them at all, one needs to maintain some sense of separation from others; aka "a self". Furthermore, one needs to be actively on the lookout for dangers to that separateness and opportunities to improve its quality-- in other words, have some desire and aversion. Human society is competitive and being completely open and accepting will quickly ensure that you are either living on the streets, are isolated or even dead. Unless one is very sheltered and is living in a controlled environment, like a monastic.
Yes, I think that classical Buddhism cannot be taken literally and applied wholesale to the life of someone living in, say, New York. But I also believe that parts of it can help the said New Yorker greatly. Going back to the question of self, it appears that most of us have an idea about ourselves that is too rigid and too narrow. Letting go of a good deal of our ideas and desires will make us happier and Buddhism offers a lot to help with shedding unnecessary ego burdens, from meditation to ethical teachings. One truly needs much less than they are conditioned to believe, in every sense, and Buddhist teachings are great at driving that point home.
I understand that in most traditionally Buddhist countries, lay followers do not meditate and are not focused on Nirvana- that is only for monks. Western Buddhism is an exciting experiment to partially introduce those more "advanced" aspects into our lives but it is a synthesis between Asian Buddhism and our Western reality and background, not an import. I am grateful to be a part of that experiment and I intend on keeping my self but pushing it to lose as much weight as possible.
"You need to find yourself before you can lose yourself..."
What tends to happen @Bunks, is one eventually gives up looking for what can't be found - giving it up as a lost "cause" so to speak... Or as one neuroscientist puts it
"It's not so much that we have a self, it's that we do self-ing. The self has no inherent, unconditional absolute existence apart from the network of "causes" it arises from, in and as! " ( Rick Hanson's book Buddha's Brain -Page 214)
Yes, Shoshin. And when you realize there is no one you are, you realize there is no one you have to be. This is very liberating.
Liberating yes, but then you have to start making real choices.