Feeling Down, Loneliness and Low Self-Esteem

To feel down, lonely and low, is to be suffering the disappointment of not having tapped into what it means to be fully alive. This can come about for many reasons. Traumatic experiences can be one of them. Being at the mercy of one’s inner critic can be another. To feel the consequences of the failure of those dreams and expectations that are peddled by society and our conditioning, can be another. We have all been taught to aspire to ideas and ideals that we can never reach. To be caught in the trap of these ideas and ideals, that have nothing to do with our true nature, leads inevitably to the low points we have all experienced in our lives.

Contemporary culture doesn’t factor in the option of throwing all these ideals and dreams out the window, and instead exploring who we are, free from such illusions. This process does. What if we were to get off our own case, let go of other people’s ideas of who we should be, and learn to esteem ourselves according to our own intrinsic sense of self-worth? What would happen if we dropped the illusion that another, or others, are going to somehow fulfil us, and instead discovered the self-illuminated wonder that is our aloneness? It would be a revolution.

This journey is what meditation is really all about. It is about taking the negative emptiness that is the failure of the ego, and instead turning towards the shining emptiness that is no-mind, meditation, awareness.