Self Respect

"Self-Respect"

You cannot give yourself away until you have a self. That’s why the gospel was meant primarily for adults. The most we can do with children is love them and touch them; cuddle, hug and believe in them. You can’t preach a full-fledged, heavy gospel to children because everything in their psyche and soul is saying grow, experience, develop, run, prove myself, be ambitious. A child’s psyche cannot understand the way of the cross.

Only adults are ready for the gospel. And, in fact, if we aren’t ready for it around age thirty we haven’t grown up. Thirty years should teach us that life is both merging and also separating, loving and letting go, yes and no. Both are sacred and necessary. It seems to me the people who have the best sense of self, who don’t constantly need to have it affirmed or stroked, are people with self-respecting boundaries. They are always people who, in some way or another, know how to set limits to their lives and know, quite simply, how to say no to themselves. They have an appropriate sense of boundaries and an instinctive sense of their own center.

That is precisely the way the ego is formed: not by pandering to the self, but in fact by setting limits to its voracious appetites. That gives ego the boundaries and the center that it needs. You are something, it tells you, because there is something there you can say no to. The “sacred no” to the self, ironically, gives us a sense of self-respect. Continual yeses to the self are actually a humiliation to the ego.

from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction