Take Your Self and Throw It in the Trash
When people ask me if psychotherapy, life coaching or meditation is the right choice for them, I simplify things like this: how much do you want to care about your self? Psychotherapy can reshape the self profoundly; life coaching will help you polish it further as if the self were a work of art. And meditation? Well, meditation – if done right - will take your entire self and throw it in trash.
Allow me to explain. It’s less insane than it seems on the surface.
I teach meditation in two ways for two drastically different groups of clients. There’s meditation for personal growth and meditation for getting over personal growth – and yourself.
In psychotherapy and life coaching, I teach meditation mainly as a tool for growth, as these two ways of working with people involve that kind of work. Regularly practicing mindfulness has innumerable advantages for someone concerned with bettering themselves, especially in coordination with a mental health professional:
It stabilizes focus
It reduces baseline anxiety levels
It gives one conscious control over their behaviors
It helps one be more aware of emotions
It improves affective regulation
Improves mood
Better memory
Stress reduction
Better physical health
And the most important of all benefits - mindfulness is a wonderful tool for introspection. The nonjudgmental awareness of the content of your thoughts and emotions allows you to slowly see common themes and patterns, mechanisms that would otherwise operate unconsciously, directing your behavior in ways you can’t make sense of on the surface.
Equanimity that comes with sustained practice is a superpower, a source of strength, it prepares you for some memories that you perhaps had to shove in a dark corner of your mind, it prepares you to see the less flattering side of your personality, the dark, shadowy psychological swamp that we all have. To change and truly grow, that swamp needs draining.
And this is where most people start and finish. It’s not an easy journey by any means, and I understand why one would stop there. It’s a place where a person finds balance and strength and is able to give new meaning to their life. What more could one ask for?
Every now and then, however, a mindfulness student comes along and they have with bigger ambitions, and we have a moment of recognition.
When I had my very first, short mindfulness sitting of only five minutes, I remember opening my eyes and thinking to myself – Whatever this was, I need more of it in my life. Much more. I didn’t know why or what it meant, just that I have just discovered a solution for a need I didn’t even know I had. Every teacher I’ve worked with and learned from has asked me that same annoying question that I ask my clients too: „Why do you want to learn mindfulness?“ Without exception, I would shrug my shoulders and say that I don’t know, and if pressed, I would come up with a polite yet vague answer that essentially provided nothing relevant but was good enough to pass. For me, meditation feels much like hunger or tiredness, a call to satisfy a fundamental need, even if meditation sessions can sometimes feel like torture. My mind, much like the minds of others, isn’t the best place at all times. But, then, once I pass through the obnoxious storm of thoughts and memories and just plainly weird ideas, I come to a place of stillness where I feel I could stay forever.
Every Buddhist knows that mindfulness, even though now popular and solidly rooted in Western psychology, has far more potential than most psychologists take advantage of in their work. In fact, one could make the case that integrated as a tool for relaxation or emotional regulation, it only scratches the surface.
Mindfulness can go far beyond introspection and emotional balancing, etc. It has a truly emancipatory potential that I hesitate to call spiritual, because I don’t think of it as being such in the conventional meaning of the word. You don’t need to believe in anything to get there, you just need to practice enough. But with practice and discipline, you can certainly go beyond what we call psychological and venture into a space above it. Call that space what you will. I have no word for it.
To put it succinctly, if psychotherapy or life coaching help you to take your self and dust it off, repair what needs repairing and even alter it profoundly, mindfulness can go a step further. Mindfulness can help you get rid of the whole damn thing.
What do I mean by this?
Obviously, we can’t go around living in a society without that depository of social roles and other experiences that we call the self. If you just get rid of it, you won’t know what it means to be a teacher, a son, a partner, etc. Without your self, you would lack even the most basic tools to find your way around. We’re stuck with the self, but we don’t have to identify with it. And this is exactly where mindfulness comes into a play. With the right teacher, a dedicated practice, and time, you can learn to loosen the self’s grip on what is fundamentally unbound awareness – as much freedom as a human can have.
Students who take this path learn to be playful with their self, to take it as a toy, a plaything, a tool – something to use but not care that much about. You find yourself beyond being shameful or shameless, beyond being guilty or good, beyond having to care about others’ opinions, since you know that what they see is just the social façade you have to use to stay in polite society.
Suddenly, the self becomes worthy only insofar as it allows you to achieve your goals, to adapt to new circumstances and once it fails to serve you, you can throw it in the trash without unnecessary sentimentality and build another tool in its place.
Ultimately, what mindfulness can offer is true, compassionate freedom. It’s a radical kind of freedom, one that isn’t quite for everyone. What we so often see depicted as freedom is nothing more than selfishness, and when there’s no self, there’s no selfishness. That makes mindful freedom something much grander. It takes courage to go in this direction because it’s hard to predict the price that one might have to pay for it. You don’t know where the journey will take you or what kinds of sacrifices it will demand of you.
I am not writing this from the position of enlightenment and if I were I would have to seriously roll my eyes at myself. I hate pretentious gurus and I would like nothing less than to become one of them. Pretentious I am, but a guru I am not. I am on this path as much a anyone and it’s only fair to say that I have some years of advantage over my students and I’m, therefore, able to instruct them and challenge them in a useful way, but I’m not there yet and no person who is enlightened would say that they are. The old Buddhist adage goes: if you meet a Buddha on the road, kill him. I don’t condone killing, but certainly walk away.
What this other path offers is a way to escape the traps that society puts us in, the expectations that annoy and burden, the seriousness of it all, the weight. And it opens the road to authenticity, or as close as we can hope get to it.
