Is self-esteem while still on the path possible?

[tatsumaru]

Being on the path, being aware of one's own ignorance and uncertainties can one still have a sense of self-worth and self-esteem? I mean how can one value their current situation and seek improvement at the same time? I often feel like I can't give myself permission to accept myself unless I know all the answers first or in other words I can't accept myself as being worthy unless I am enlightened. This often makes me feel quite sad, timid and insecure but at the same time if I were to simply be confident without really knowing what I am and why I am here I would feel like a fraud or an impostor. Any advice?

[WonderSeeker]

Self esteem is still important, yes. Through trial and error you will learn how to raise and balance self-esteem and spiritual altitude simultaneously. My guess is eventually you will have enough self-esteem that it's no longer something you're "working on." Then, all of the attention can be laser-focused on self-transcendence. Good luck!

Edited March 11, 2021 by WonderSeeker

[soos_mite_ah]

I'd argue that its essential. You need to build a solid self esteem and a good foundation or else when you go on to integrate deeper truths, it's going to backfire because you will misinterpret it when then can cause you to inflict pain on yourself and others. 

[Moksha]

"Self-worth" is so short-lived. A wave on the ocean, your self will, far more quickly than you may hope, resolves into the ocean from which it arose.

You are so much more than your self. You are the very ocean.

[mandyjw]

esteem (v.)

mid-15c., from Old French estimer "to estimate, determine" (14c.), from Latin aestimare "to value, determine the value of, appraise," https://www.etymonline.com/word/esteem

There aren't two of you, one that can honestly determine the value the other. 

The game is rigged, it's like playing chess with yourself, you always win and you always lose, and it's really not that much fun.

The desire for good self esteem points to the desire to feel good about oneself. All you really want is to feel good no matter the subject, or regardless of the subject though.

1 hour ago, tatsumaru said:

I often feel like I can't give myself permission to accept myself unless I know all the answers first or in other words I can't accept myself as being worthy unless I am enlightened. 

You cannot really accept or reject yourself. Are there two of you, one that can accept or reject the other? What is it that knows the answers about itself? Are you the knower, or the known, or the knowing? What is your experience of yourself right now? 

 

[PureRogueQ]

What is important is that you are k with yourself, no matter how lost you are , such things as confidence and so on that you want to rub on others are not important. 

[universe]

You don't need to fix yourself. You grow. We all do.

Forget about worthiness or feeling worthy. It doesn't exist.

In the meantime you can work on your Emotional States by integrating your emotions.

 

You don't feel confident because you need reality to be a certain way. You need all the answers to be more in control of your situation. This need is an emotion and can be felt and released. The truth is you don't need anything. You are already complete and dandy.

Everything we need, be it answers, love, validation, control can never be given to us from the outside world. We can only give it to ourselves.

 

Check out this foundational video if you haven't seen it yet.

❤️

[Forestluv]

 

17 hours ago, tatsumaru said:

Being on the path, being aware of one's own ignorance and uncertainties can one still have a sense of self-worth and self-esteem? 

Yes, yet it depends on how one uses self criticism.

17 hours ago, tatsumaru said:

I mean how can one value their current situation and seek improvement at the same time? 

Imagine you travel to a village in Guatemala to learn Spanish language and culture. Once there, you realize this is going to be harder than you originally thought. There is no hot water, no air conditioning, you can't speak the language well, wifi keeps going down and you miss people at home. We can beat ourself up and say we were stupid to come here, it sucks, we're not as good as the other Spanish students, we don't fit in etc. . . Yet we can also recognize these aspects from a detached observer. In one respect, this inner turmoil is arising because the person wants to fit into community. It put all the effort to come to Guatemala to become part of a new culture - to make new human connections, to learn new history, food, music and art. Yet it's not feeling that way. At a deeper level, it's a desire to feel connected, part of one's community, desire for curiosity, engagement, fascination. Yet it goes through a conditioned filter and ends up being experienced as yucky self criticism like "I've made bad decisions. I wish I never came here. I don't fit in. I'm not good enough. Other students are learning faster than me".

We can value this as part of the human experience and desire to live a good life. And we can also see that there are some appearances interfering with our progress. We are both Perfect exactly as we are Here and Now as well as an imperfect work in progress within a timeline. 

What would healthy self criticism for improvement look like? I would first see that I'm taking things waaay too seriously and I need to loosen up and start enjoying some of the process. Perhaps I can make Spanish fun. When I was in a Spanish-speaking country, I beat myself up because I couldn't speak the language well. So, I decided to flip the script. Rather than be afraid to make mistakes and avoid them, my goal was to make 100+ language mistakes everyday. To do this, I had to engage in speaking the language. It takes a lot of speaking to make 100+ mistakes. . . Then I started observing how the other students were learning. Why were they learning faster than me?. . . I noticed one student would laugh whenever she had a hard time pronouncing a difficult word. She would try to say it, stumble and laugh at how ridiculous it sounded. She had a light heart and was enjoying the process. So I decided I would start laughing when I had difficulty pronouncing a difficult word. It worked! It started to become fun. . . . And sometimes I would ask the native Spanish speaker to say "hippopotamus". They sounded ridiculous! Now we both sounded ridiculous and we were laughing together at ourselves. . . This led to improvement in how I related to others, how much I was engaged and enjoying the process and how fast I started to learn the language.

Part of the process was observing myself, yet not under a hyper self critical microscope. Yet, there is also a 'being' component. It's important to have simply 'being' experience time in which there is no self evaluation. "Self worth" doesn't even make sense. It's a balance. To learn Spanish, I there were times I needed to evaluate myself. What aspects of the language do I have the hardest time with? What methods do I learn best with? . . . Yet there was also times I needed to just speak the language and enter Beingness zones without self evaluation. One day I told my teacher "No textbooks or lessons today. We are going to show each other photos on our phones and tell each other stories in Spanish". It was the best "class" ever. 

18 hours ago, tatsumaru said:

I often feel like I can't give myself permission to accept myself unless I know all the answers first or in other words I can't accept myself as being worthy unless I am enlightened. This often makes me feel quite sad, timid and insecure but at the same time if I were to simply be confident without really knowing what I am and why I am here I would feel like a fraud or an impostor. Any advice?

That is the balance. I would first realize that you will never know all the answers. That time will never come. Learning and growth is infinite. . . I'm a native English speaker and out of curiosity, I took a "C2" level exam for foreign speakers. C2 is the highest level to test one's English abilities. Some of the questions were hard! Some questions, I wasn't quite sure, yet I had a feeling of how best to say it. Yet I didn't know technically why, it was more intuition. I realized I still have room for improvement in speaking English!

Being overly insecure inhibits learning and growth. I teach biology and I see this in some students. They are overly insecure, timid and second guess themselves. They aren't able to tap into their potential. At extremes, it can be paralyzing. Yet at the other extreme, I've had students that are overly confident and grossly overestimate their current knowledge and skill set. Last year there was a student that often challenged me on genetics concepts. I thought he knew more than I did, that he knew it all. Yet he wasn't coming to me for discussion, an exchange of ideas and clarity. He was coming to me looking for a fight to prove himself and establish himself at being at a higher level than he was. I've also seen students that are so confident, they are oblivious to the mistakes they are making. They don't have the awareness or intuition sensor that they are missing something.

This semester, there is a student in lab that zooms through the lab exercise without any awareness in how things are going. He is overly confident and it doesn't even occur to him he might not know how to do something or that he is doing something wrong. By the end of the lab, his experiment is a mess. He makes major boneheaded mistakes and I'm thinking "My god, when the spectrophotometer was giving you a zero reading for every sample, didn't it occur to you that something was going wrong?". . . On the flip side, there are students so insecure in lab that they lack confidence to make any decision. They continuously think something is going wrong and it's their fault.  I have to constantly tell them they are doing each step correctly. Or they just check out and let other students do the work. This is also counter-productive for learning and developing skills.