How No One Can Ever Affect Your Self-Worth Again | Eckhart Tolle

How to forgive if someone abused and harmed you, and after such trauma, how to feel worthy of love and kindness in your body and in your mind. Well, let's perhaps start with your sense of worthiness, because That is the foundation for forgiveness too. Now, this is an interesting thing, that sense of self-worth is apparently a problem for many people, and some people have an insufficient or damaged sense of self-worth or a negative sense of self. Now, question is, where does your sense of self-worth arise from? Where does it arise? What is it based on? Is it based on your achievements? Could be. Your successes? Is it based on your external appearance? It could be. For many people, it is. Is it based on your social status? For other people it is too, self-worth. Is this based on your possessions, how much you have? Could be. So those factors, or a combination of them, make up a person's sense of self-worth. What I have achieved, How I look. Oh, and what I know could be also, how knowledgeable am I? What you identify with that. I might be ugly and poor, but I know more than you, so I'm okay. So what you— your possessions, your social status, your knowledge, for physical appearance, etc. So those factors that make up your sense of self-worth. And for some people, they are not happy with— either they feel they haven't achieved anything. Until fairly late in my life, I hadn't achieved anything, at least not in the eyes of my mother. Up to the age of, let's say, 48 or 49, I hadn't achieved anything. Well, I had achieved something at university. I had a brief period of success, and then, according to the viewpoint of my mother, God bless her, I threw it all away. I could have had such a great academic career. I threw it all away. And then I became nobody up to the age of 49 or something like that. But what about my sense of self-worth? I did not share my mother's view of that my life had deteriorated. I didn't feel that. I didn't own much or anything. I didn't— my external appearance was not particularly great. So there wasn't much I could do there. My ego couldn't derive much sense of self-worth from that. My social status was not great, and I don't have a long history, family tree going back several centuries. In fact, my family tree ends with my grandparents, who who knows who was there before, and they didn't have any great achievements or possessions, so okay, can't derive my self-worth from that. What I had left was up to the awakening, I had some— I worked hard at becoming an intellectual, so I was focused on knowledge. That worked for a while, but then I became unhappy with that too. But after the Awakening, none of those factors had much to do with my sense of self-worth because it came from a deeper level. I could sense the being of myself, and that was the greatest and only real self-worth that there is. So, and this kind of self-worth is not comparative. All other self-worths are comparative. You need to, you feel good in this area because others are not as good. So these are all egoic senses of self-worth. They are all comparative. I look better than these people. I know more than these. I possess more. I have higher social status, whatever it may be. They're all comparative. They require you to consider other people inferior in order to have a better sense of self-worth. 'Ah, I'm really proud of myself because I'm so much better than these people.' Okay, that's not the real thing, and it doesn't last. This satisfaction doesn't last because the unease will creep back in, because in many other areas you will be inferior. You might be superior in one, but then you're inferior in another, etc. If you have suffered as a child, if you were not given love as a child, or not sufficient love as a child, if your parents didn't give you much attention because they didn't know, they couldn't help it, otherwise they would have, but then that can become a problem for you in later life because this lack of having been given recognition and love in childhood can lead to a damaged sense of self, but that still operates on the egoic level, but it is painful. So therefore, for this person, it is important to go deeper and not derive their sense of identity from memories of the past, or even certain emotions that still live in you from the past, painful emotions. You recognize them, and then you look back, memories. And so, if you go deeper, you become still, And what arises again, what we've been pointing to throughout here, is the being of you. The being of you is like a jewel. It's not surprisingly that in Tibetan Buddhism they have the image of the jewel, Om Mani Padme Hum. Om Mani Padme Hum, hail to the jewel in the lotus. That is, you have the, the self-worth is this incredible preciousness that lives within you that is inseparable from who or what you are, but it is not comparative. It's not precious because somebody else is less precious. And so that's the only true self-worth. So in order to transcend the negative self-worth, that is perhaps due to your upbringing and so on, or sufferings in childhood, in order to transcend that, yes, you could, to compensate for that, you could on the egoic level work hard and show them that you are better than them and you are the greatest. I will show the world what I'm— that is a way the ego could struggle to compensate for a deficient sense of self-worth, but it's not the real thing. That's not ultimately that satisfying. Dissatisfaction will remain. So I would suggest a better course of action, the only true course of action, is to go deeper, which isn't— not really action anymore. And find that dimension within yourself. And that does not compensate for deficient sense of self-worth. It goes to the true source of self-worth, the only true source. And then you sense the being of you.