Coming Home to Loving Awareness - Part 1
Are you conscious of the ways in which you seek validation from the world?
This could be through personal relationships, through your career, or through social media? I’m referring to the sense of self that you construct through imagining how others are looking back at you: those very human desires that we all have to see and to be seen.
I’m also referring to the tendencies we have to look for true love and acceptance “out there,” rather than from within.
I’m getting some more insight into my own patterns of seeking validation. Recently, I became conscious of some of the ways that I attempt to affirm my sense of self-worth through the attention of beautiful, intelligent women that I’m interested in. This could be a woman with whom I have already been involved with or with whom I’m currently involved, or a woman that I’d like to be involved with in the future.
It’s essential to unpack the multiple layers of our thoughts and actions to better understand our motivations, desires, and insecurities. Clearly, as humans we have an innate need to connect, to love, and to care for one another. Of course, there’s sexual desire, which I’ve come to appreciate is linked to so many aspects of physical and mental health, a capacity for creativity, and a source of inspiration.
Historically, there’s a lot of shame around sexual desire through beliefs that we’ve inherited through the generations. If the behavior is between consenting adults, personally I think that whatever turns people on is fine. We’re all wired differently and if you’re reflecting on your own behaviors, perhaps in consultation with a therapist whose feedback you trust, and you conclude that your behavior is healthy and serving you well and serving others well, then why not?
Where we get into trouble is when our sense of self-worth gets wrapped up in our romantic or sexual longings. By nature, our ego feels an innate sense of separation: this separate sense of self that’s inside this body, to whom events are happening and who in turn has a sense of agency of acting in the world.
We seek to remedy this sense of separation through feelings of connection and through acts that manifest those feelings.
This separateness is often coupled with an innate sense of deficiency or inflation, though a superiority complex is always an inferiority complex in disguise. That feeling of “I’m not enough,” or “this experience, this moment isn’t enough” is a built-in feature of human consciousness. It’s one aspect of what The Buddha referred to as “dukkha,” which can be translated as suffering but also as dis satisfaction.
This is essential, to recognize this propensity for dis satisfaction for what it is: an inherent feature of the mind--not my mind, but the human mind that all of us share. This recognition allows us to see how our struggles are interdependent with other beings, rather than feeling isolated and cut off.
This innate sense of dis satisfaction is part of a cycle of craving. We’re perpetually grasping for more pleasure, recognition, love, which springs from a felt sense of lack. If I could only get ________, then, at last, I would feel whole and complete and worthy of love.
Often this sense of deficiency is exacerbated by our conditioning (what The Buddha meant by karma: cause and effect). If we did not receive sufficient attention or love as a child then this becomes part of who we believe ourselves to be. It is simply all that we know. Perhaps what we perceived relative to our siblings further informed these feelings of deficiency or unworthiness.
Maybe this past even includes trauma, like neglect or abandonment, if not outright abuse. We’re not able to receive love and to offer it with an open heart despite our deep desire to do so because, on some level deep down, we think that we’re not truly worthy of love. If you experienced some kind of trauma then that’s the message that you received from your parents and from the world during your formative years.
However, even if you grow up in the best of circumstances, you can still struggle with a seemingly unshakeable sense of lack, or what I like to call “The Trance of Never Enough.” By almost any account, I could not have had an easier childhood. I grew up in a highly developed country, the United States. In this society, I grew up as a member of the dominant culture: white, male, heterosexual, Christian. I had significant socioeconomic and educational advantages. Most importantly, I was raised in a stable household with two mentally healthy, sober, and loving parents. Though I have three older half-sisters with whom we share the same Dad, I’m my Mom’s only child and I was the center of her attention.
So naturally, I received enough love, affection, and attention in my formative years to make me feel whole and complete, right?
Well, in many respects there’s no question that this conditioning certainly made a massive difference in my sense of self-worth, then and now. Yet, on another level, the Trance of Never Enough is still a regular feature of consciousness, often emerging in subtle ways that can still pull me into feelings of self-doubt and unworthiness. With time, we come to recognize that the Trance itself is not a problem; if mindfulness can notice the trance, that simply act of noticing immediately begins to loosen its strength. With time and practice our true nature learns to awaken from this Trance of Unworthiness.
The reason that most people find this difficult to even speak about is shame, hanging over us like a dark cloud, keeping us from sharing our light with the world.
As I’ve become aware of my own habitual patterns of thinking and behavior, I’ve come to notice the ways in which I attempt to validate my self-worth through the approval of other people. Now that I’m single again, I’m recognizing the ways in which this shows up a lot with the attention of beautiful, intelligent women.
Mindfulness can empower us to notice the specific ways in which we’re seeking and getting hooked. With mindfulness, it’s so important to bring qualities of non-judgment and curiosity to our attention, because without these qualities, we will not be able to clearly see what’s arising and passing away within the heart-mind.
With mindfulness, I can notice the feeling I have when a woman that I’m interested in likes my post on social media. Or the feeling I have when she doesn’t like it...again and again and again. There’s what neuroscientists call the negativity bias of the brain, which predisposes our minds to focus more on negative events rather than positive ones.
For women that I have some sort of relationship with, and whose attention I seek, mindfulness can notice the anticipation that arises when I can see she hasn’t read my messages. Then the feeling when I can see that she’s read them, but she hasn’t responded: the anticipation, the doubt, the stories I tell myself about why it doesn’t matter, the other ways in which I attempt to distract myself, and yet my mind returns to that object of attention.
Mindfulness can investigate the feelings that are underneath these thoughts and stories.
When I notice a story around self doubt, I attune to the embodied feeling underneath that doubt and I contemplate the question: “What does it feel like to be trapped inside of this feeling?” If I notice anxiety I can investigate where in the body the anxiety is located?” With mindfulness I can start to see that what I take to be these solid stories and feelings are in fact far more fluid, they’re subject to change and impermanence.
Then there’s the dopamine rush when she does respond. That feeling that confirms “yes, that’s right: this person actually is interested in me.” Of course, it’s really about the belief that’s underneath that feeling like “I’m a person worthy of being interested in,” by this person that I perceive as embodying the qualities that I value and towards which my body-mind is attracted.
We all know that this is what technology is designed to do: it’s designed to captivate our attention, to hook us. Yes, the mystery and anxieties around romantic love have always been with us since the first humans; however, the design of social media and smartphones greatly enhances the extent to which humans are so easily influenced by these interactions.
Bottom line: a mind that is being pushed and pulled around by sensory experience is a mind that is agitated. A mind that thinks it will find any sort of lasting, imperturbable sense of happiness, peace, approval from sensory experience, from what it must acquire from the world, is a mind that is caught in delusion.