Sacred Life Sunday: Healthy Selfishness

It has only been for the past few months that I've understood on a fairly deep level that I have the right to be who I am.

Sound familiar?

It seems it is mostly women who get caught in this spiral, the belief that we should be all things to all people and even all things to all things.

While I am not caught up in the guilt spiral, I did get caught up in the belief that if I was going to be "good", I was going to be exceptionally good. That meant finding any and all possible hammers in my personal belief system and using them to beat myself up for not being "perfect" enough.

If I was going to be a good Buddhist, as an example, I should put the Dalai Lama to shame. I should be perfectly patient, perfectly serene, never state a preference, never *want* anything, especially anything from anyone else. I should never get angry, sad, frustrated and I should certainly never set a boundary on anyone else's behavior. I should never make a judgment and never turn anyone away.

It doesn't work. I doubt even the Buddha himself was quite so self-sacrificing. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, he did exactly what he wanted to do, exactly the way he wanted to do it.

The first truly selfish thing I ever did was to admit that I could no longer live the way I was in 2004 (journal entry from that time in the previous post). I used the medical system (legitimately) to get out of it. I got out of it to save my life. My life. No one else's. My life was valuable enough to do that.

[.....]

And then believed it was necessary to make penance for the rest of my life for the degree of happiness I found as a result of the freedom it allowed me. I was let out of one prison but began serving a sentence in a new prison.

I'm coming to realize that happiness is the natural state, not the one we only get as an occasional reward for being lowly, self-sacrificing and living small. Happiness is something we cultivate within ourselves, something we adopt as a way of life. It is not dependent on other people or cirumstances. It is healthy selfishness, along with generosity. Generosity without happiness is martyrdom.

It is the recognition that we have the right to be ourselves while not harming others. It's the willingness to admit that we can't be all things to all people. That's not even such a noble goal after all. Happiness (contentment) is a freedom all its own. It is probably the truest freedom there is.

We are here to be happy. We are here to be content. We are here to tell the truth. We are here to choose that. And I do. I take baby steps, learning how to assimilate who I am with what I have to offer.

In case you didn't see it, there was a comment last night from Heartsinsanfrancisco which I think is worth quoting here. It really says it all.

"As Thoreau said, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them." Our life's songs are meant to be sung, so sing yours today and for all the days when you could not. "


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