Remembering This Chart Can Save Your Life

There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind — you are the one who hears it.
Michael Singer

Recently, I had a challenging time navigating a period of depression and anxiety.

There were times when I thought that I was not going to make it.

But somehow, here we are, still, and one of the gifts of this period has been a significant increase in my self-awareness. I relate this self-awareness to what Michael Singer talks about in The Untethered Soul, that moment when we learn to disentangle ourselves from the voice of the mind, and from any circumstance that we might be projecting on our lives.

We’re not our addictions. We’re not our disease. We’re not our circumstances.

It is hard to understand this when we are in the midst of it — when faith and hope seem to be completely gone.

Until I thought — what is it that I seemed to be longing for?

A conversation with friends gave me the answer.

What I was longing for was a feeling of acknowledgement, of being seen — of feeling like, regardless of what I was going through, there was, still, a sense to my existence.

And then, I asked myself the question: In the past, when I had been on top of the world, what had made me feel that way?

My answer was that, for a considerable part of my life, I had felt that way after accomplishing something. Whether I won a tennis match, or had business success or some type of external validation.

For the most part, my self-esteem had looked like this:

Of course, I had my reasons to feel that way.

It was, partly, the way I was raised, and the culture and society that I grew up in. Triumphs were celebrated and exalted while failures were hidden and a source of guilt and shame.

That was the programming I received.

But is it true?

And then, this chart crossed my head.

For a long time, when teaching, coaching, or leading a business, that was a principle that I preached to everyone, especially when they felt sad, angry, or depressed due to an unfavourable situation:

You are worthy, regardless of your results.

Now, I needed to take a sip of my own medicine. And also, as I discovered, I needed to accept from those people that had relied on me during their hard times.

Intrinsically, there is nothing that increases or decreases our value as humans. We can feel a lot of pleasure, and we can feel a lot of pain, and we cannot experience one without being able to experience the other. If we’d like to numb our capacity to feel down, then, by default, we’re numbing our capacity to feel the highs as well.

So, I did another chart.

Look at the juxtaposition.

On red is our perceived self-worth, while the blue line is what our self-worth is always like — it doesn’t distinguish between failure and success, it doesn’t distinguish between the praise and the criticism that we might receive from others.

It simply is.

And, just like that, we can simply be.

If our worthiness is the same, regardless of what we do, why not try to be the best that we can be, and live this life to the fullest?

Then, we can, as Rudyard Kipling said — in the quote that is engraved on the entrance to Wimbledon’s Centre Court: If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same…

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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