Loving Ourselves During the Low Points in our Lives

One of the most troubling aspect of working to achieve enlightenment is the vicissitude of life itself. We are living in a constant state of flux between happiness and sorrow, success and failure, love and hate, peace and angst and so on. While we know life is sometimes this way, we still find it too difficult to accept, particularly the low points in our lives.

Nevertheless, without planning to do so, we every now and then reach a low point in our lives. It's usually not something we anxiously awaited, like the joy from a wedding, it just suddenly happens.  This emotional downturn appears in our lives like the flu, a toothache, unemployment, or some other unwelcome problem.  And when it happens, we feel terrible. Life sucks. We quickly turn on ourselves by lambasting our behavior and stupidity.

During our moments of experiencing low points in our lives, we continually search for outside reasons to rationalize our decision making process. We struggle with guilt. We say  over and over again, "If only, we hadn't made such and such decision, then we would be in this fix."

Regardless to the number of times we vainly attempt to blame others, we always find ourselves right in the midst of every detail. And there's no amount of wishful thinking, "If we could just turn back the clock and start over again," that's going to assuage the pain of regret raging through us. The moans and groans only make us feel worse. 

During our conditioning as victims, most of us were never taught to love our low points. We were taught to seek the high points and shun the low ones. Yet it's the low points where we discover what's really happening to us. It's in our low points that we wage the most vicious attacks on ourselves.

When we feel down, we tend to search for more and more ways to attack our behavior, to demean ourselves. We find the attacks to be healing, to be liberating. They are our punishment to remind us not to make similar decisions again. These are the actions of self-victimization and powerlessness.

Similarly, the need for self-victimization is instinctive. We instinctively devalue ourselves so that we search for succor from others. The victimized mind is always uncomfortable with itself. There's little room for succor. We believe someone will provide us with the comfort, love, compassion, and inspiration that we're unable to provide ourselves. 

Meanwhile, and unbeknown to us, the power to liberate comes from us -- the ones who made the decisions that caused the low points in our lives. Our actions guide us. We follow them, however, we are their creator. And it's this understanding of personal responsibility and self-reliance that unlocks the mind to recognize the presence of enlightenment within us.

With open minds -- the awareness of personal responsibility and self-reliance -- we are able to love and comfort ourselves during the low points in our lives. We have the capacity to know that there's no difference between happiness and sadness, except our beliefs. If we believe such and such make us happy, while such and such make us sad, then we must ask ourselves who's making the decision about how we feel. We are.

One illustration of this power is the happiness we feel at a wedding or the sadness we feel at a funeral. These are feelings produced from years of victimization and from our limited knowledge about enlightenment. Enlightenment is available to us whether we're aware of it or not. We must treat it like a new invention.

Moreover, when we give power to events that don't possess, we devalue ourselves. We believe we are required to act in a certain manner during some situations. By embracing these beliefs and practices, we feed our victimization. For example, it's possible to be angry during a wedding and happy during a funeral, because we might dislike the people getting married, and feel happy  because someone we despised has died.

It's important for us to remain awake. And when we are awake enough to understand the low points in our lives, we also know that how we treat ourselves in certain situations depend more on our abilities to use love and compassion as effective tools of enlightenment than on the situations.

When we become awake enough to understand this concept of love and compassion, we will have the power give ourselves and others love and compassion. 

Meanwhile, enlightenment is just that simple. It's about using love and compassion during both the high and low points in our lives. If we do this, we will have opened our minds to see the limitless possibilities we have in the world.