Staying On Your Own Side

Honor yourself.

What does it really mean to honor yourself?

It is not loving yourself, or self-compassion. To love yourself, or to be compassionate with yourself, is a feeling and a mindset — warmth, kindness, a willingness to forgive and to be with yourself as with your dearest friend. To honor yourself is what that love looks like in action: keeping faith with what is true and important to you, keeping promises to yourself; being kind to the person you were — the one who acted in ways you would not now act, based on understandings you have grown out of. Self-compassion notices that your past self was trying hard to keep you safe; honoring is what you do with that knowledge. Even loving yourself, you can still betray yourself daily. Honoring yourself is the practice that keeps you on your own side.

It’s different again from trusting yourself. Trust is a form of self-belief — believing your own perceptions matter, that your judgments are worth paying attention to, that your intuitions are worth mentioning. Honoring commits you to some baseline of that trust, but it leaves room for doubt — for the times when you are vulnerable and prone to error, like everyone else.

So honoring asks two things of you: truth and loyalty. It asks for truth, because you cannot honor a person you refuse to see clearly and accept. And it asks for loyalty, because seeing yourself clearly and then abandoning yourself anyway is an affront. Loyalty without truth is delusion. Truth without loyalty is betrayal. Honoring is both at once, plus a promise: I will stand up for you, keep promises to you, understand and explain how you were feeling and thinking, have love and compassion for you, and tell you when you are misguided and can do better. Honoring yourself is committing to behave like the best friend you can imagine.

Here is what binds all of us who want very badly to do and be good: we spend our lives on the side of others — as workers, children, and parents — while abandoning ourselves in basic, critical ways. This can happen in small decisions. Taking other people’s views more seriously than our own. Prioritizing responsibility for others over responsibility for ourselves — not occasionally, but absolutely. The life of service can become a life of making yourself small, simply by not taking your own value to others and the world seriously enough. The opportunity of a life, for people trying to be good, is to stay on our own side, too.

That is the trap: the very decency that makes you especially good to others may keep you from being good to yourself.

Here is the comfort: although you are completely unique, you are not alone. Your uniqueness means there is no model for you. How to stay on your own side is yours alone to discover, and that part of the journey is solitary. But the fact that so many of us are in the same boat means we can witness and help each other — precisely because our challenges differ. We are not each caught in the same traps, but in different ones. By staying on our own side, we can embrace a fuller expression of ourselves. This is the beautiful possibility we can realize only together, with each other’s help, and with deep listening, humility, and honesty. It’s also a good reason to be skeptical of anyone who seems to have it all figured out.

We tend to fetishize achievement — money, fame, the appearance of confidence — because these things are valued and make survival easier in obvious ways. But achievement is not evidence of having figured it all out. You can arrive by every external measure and still never come into contact with yourself in any crucial way. Achievement can involve luck; it can come from raw determination to push through pain or fear. Or it can come from a state of total self-deception, or from an overpowering sense of responsibility, just as easily as it can come from self-understanding and enviable alignment. Achievement can offer status and safety, and those things are appealing, but they are not the same as wisdom. We talk as if they were, because we mistake achievement for a panacea. But achievement that is not in service to honoring ourselves — to becoming the fullest expression of who we are — is in service to something else: safety, status, quieting an old fear. And that can make the inner work even harder. Our admiration of external achievement can obscure the most important questions.

And we have only so much time to take up the most important questions. We live in a society that has reduced the risk of early death more than any in history. We have grown so good at it that we half-live as though death were not coming for us at all. But it is — and our fragility, our uniqueness, our impermanence are not the obstacles to staying on our own side; they are the reasons it matters so much. For those of us who are fortunate enough to reach mid-life and beyond, getting acquainted with what we are in service to is the work — this gives us the chance to honor our one unique expression and get right with ourselves and the people we love. What’s the biggest reason you can find to live your life well? What are you in service to? Freedom? God? Peace? This is the opportunity.

We often know this, deep down, but we get distracted. It is only when we have completed some of the business of life — raising kids, or creating some security for ourselves, in our forties, fifties, sixties, and beyond — that we have the luxury of turning to deeper existential questions. This seeking often comes after a crisis, a failure, or a success that left us empty. The hole where pride was supposed to be can open into a question: What was I looking for, and what did I actually find?

For those who find themselves at an early stage of this path, it is hard to map your own unique journey to honoring yourself, but easy to notice some pitfalls to avoid. The ways we honor ourselves are many and varied, but the ways we abandon ourselves are easy to see once we know what we are looking for.

The Ways We Abandon Ourselves

Taking the group’s side instead of your own. The easiest way never to be on your own side is to never consider your own opinions at all — to take your views, ready-made, from your community, your tribe, the majority. You may be rewarded for it. But you will never become yourself. The world will miss out on the one perspective only you could offer.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” — Mark Twain

To stay on your side, work to know your own mind.

Believing you are your failures — or your achievements. This is believing your own press, and it is wrong in several directions. None of us is all good or all bad, and none of us is fixed in amber by what we have done or failed to do. The story told about what you have accomplished is never the story you would tell, at your most honest, about who you actually are. Your true story is messier, less flattering, and far more tender. As long as you believe you are your achievements (or your failures), you will resist looking inside — where the actual being of you lives.

The same caution applies to other people’s press. What looks like effortless drive from the outside is often panic on the inside; what looks like clarity can be dissociation and blankness. Looking effective is entirely compatible with being unable to feel or name your own needs. We can change — but the key to change is self-acceptance. We have to see ourselves in our fragility and our smallness, as well as in our potential wholeness.

“It wasn’t until I accepted myself, just as I was, that I was free to change.” — Tara Brach

You are not your accomplishments, however proud of them you may be. You are not an object, a fixed thing you use for a purpose. You are a being, and your proper “mode” is becoming.

Living in fear. Fear is a normal part of being a mammal — a survival mechanism built on fast responses: fight, flee, fawn. It serves us less well now, because we mistake a threat to the ego for a threat to the body, and that makes us biased and unreliable. We become habituated early to one response, and the habit narrows what we can even perceive as possible. The child who hid or pleased when her parents fought becomes the adult who fawns. Knowing this, we can learn to pause when fear arrives and place a space between the feeling and the reaction — long enough to take care of the part of ourselves that fears. Long enough to sit with what the situation requires. Long enough to choose.

To stay on your side, remember that the old response is a habit, and habits can change.

Mistaking rumination for contact with what is. This one is hard, because it disguises itself as the very inner work I have been describing. The mind gets busy, and we mistake the busyness for progress. But spinning the same thoughts about what was, or might have been, or might yet be, is not the same as making honest contact with what is. Rumination is not moving anywhere; introspection is different. The test is whether it leads anywhere — toward a truer view, a quieter mind, or an actual experiment in doing something different. Almost nothing is clarified by thought alone; we have to try things and see. And settling the mind is itself a form of doing — which is why meditation, prayer, and introspection may be the most important actions there are: ways of proceeding from intention rather than reflex.

To stay on your side, don’t mistake the loop for the path.

Failing to govern your attention and energy. Losing your attention means squandering your energy. Focus is a gift, and the flow state — where energy is directed and self-awareness falls away entirely — may be the greatest gift of all. The irony is that we may be most ourselves when we are least conscious of ourselves. Honoring yourself includes directing your attention, on purpose, from one present moment to the next, however long the moments last. Time takes on a sense of unreality when you govern your attention.

In the end, staying on your own side is just this: inhabiting your own life so fully that you — your whole, complete self — are actually present in it.

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” — Oscar Wilde

It is a great gift indeed to have the chance to live.

Cindy