We Are Not a Self-Improvement Project

I often find myself reflecting on the phrase, "We are not a self-improvement project." This is something I like to share in my Dharma talks, and today, I'd like to discuss my beliefs around this concept. I hope you can take these thoughts into contemplation in your own life.

First, I want to distinguish between the enhancement of self and the pursuit of understanding our human predicament from a place of care. These are two very different things. One involves using wellness techniques to bolster a sense of self, while the other involves investigating our human predicament through awareness and meditation.

When we try to improve ourselves, which self are we trying to improve? This is an interesting question because we often perceive ourselves as a singular, permanent entity. But when we look back at our lives, we see that our sense of self is made up of a series of different causes, conditions, moods, thoughts, and beliefs.

In my teenage years, I went through many phases of relating to different identities, mostly influenced by the music I was listening to or the friends I was hanging out with. It was a painful time for me because I was frantically searching for belonging and peace.

So, the first question is, what is self? This is a big question and not easily answerable. I recommend keeping it as an open question, something you're contemplating.

From there, we can ask deeper questions. If the self exists as multiple things and changes over time, how do we relate to that? Not necessarily as something to improve, but as something to get to know through compassion, love, and care.

Reflecting back on my teenage years and early 20s, I realize a lot of my decisions and seeking came from a sense of hollowness, feeling unworthy or unlovable. This led me to various spiritual paths, eventually Tibetan Buddhism, where I became a monk for nine years. These paths gave me more tools to explore my feelings of unworthiness, unlovability, and hollowness.

However, any spiritual or wellness path can be brought in as a self-improvement project. It's all about our intention and how we use the path to understand ourselves, our human condition, and what's causing our suffering.

When we take on our emotions or problems as a self-improvement project, it often comes from a quick fix mentality. We just want the pain to end. But it's not that easy. If it was, our world would look a lot different.

So, the question becomes, what kind of path or way of working with ourselves do we want to invest time into in the long term? How can we shift into new relationships with our emotions, thoughts, and identities?

The wellness industry often feels like a treadmill, where we're just running in place, going from one modality to the next, trying to improve our ego. But ego is like a black hole of hollowness, aggression, and attachment. The more we feed it, the more it wants.

The recognition that this treadmill isn't working anymore can be painful. It requires a leap into the unknown, into uncertainty. But it's a necessary step towards understanding and genuine growth.

Before we close, I want to share a universal concept found in many religious and spiritual traditions, as well as secular thought and philosophy: the sense of interconnection and being. Being is about not needing to become or prove oneself. It's about being present with awareness in a simple way.

From being, interconnection can take place. It's not focused on self, but on the universal, on our connection with the world around us. We're being influenced by it, and we're influencing it. This sense of interconnection and being isn't something that just happens by chance. It's something we can practice and train in.

Instead of putting energy into the wellness treadmill and the constant mode of self-improvement, I recommend putting energy into interconnection and being. I personally use Buddhist meditation for this, but there are many other ways to practice this healthy sense of understanding your own human condition from a place of love for yourself.

The process of turning towards interconnection and being, as opposed to self-improvement driven by hollowness, has helped me to trust more in myself. It's not so much about belief for me, but about where I choose to put my time and energy, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.