In this post I want to continue the theme of cultivating self esteem by developing habits that affirm the self. One of the most powerful self-affirming habits is the practice of meditation. There are many different styles of meditation – the kind of meditation you do is less important than that you do it!

The most basic form of meditation is to simply pay attention to your breath. Breathing naturally, with eyes closed, just notice the physical sensations of the air moving into your nostrils, filling your lungs, and then flowing out of your body. Continue to focus on your breath, and repeat through several cycles of inhalation and exhalation.

An important side effect of this practice is relaxation. As you pay attention to your breath, you are activating the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of your nervous system that calms you and cools things down. This is why anger management advice often includes: “take a deep breath.”

How does the practice of meditation build healthy self esteem? When meditating you get a powerful self esteem boost as a result of several interacting factors:

• As you pay attention to the bodily sensations of breathing, you are not using your brain to think. Thinking with low self esteem often leads to self-critical thoughts, which only confirm the feeling of self-loathing.

• It is pleasant to relax. Calmness and relaxation contribute to a feeling of well-being which adds to self esteem.

• Meditation ameliorates the impact of stress on your body. With reduced stress, it is easier to be confident and optimistic.

You don’t have to meditate for long periods to get significant benefit. Begin by focusing on your breath for a minute. After a few relaxed, easy breaths open your eyes and go on with what you were doing. Later, focus on your breath for another minute. As you do this over a few days, build up to a couple of minutes at a sitting. There is no need to force this. Even if you can only manage a minute at a time, that’s great. Several minutes’ cumulative meditation per day will soon begin to have a noticeable positive effect.

Self esteem is more than a feeling – it’s a habit. It is possible to systematically build healthy self esteem. Like most habits, it takes a commitment and some practice. I remember visiting my dentist who told me I needed to change my brushing practices in order to keep my gums healthy. It feels odd to change something you do the same way every day. But, for several weeks, I took care to brush my teeth in this new way as my dentist instructed. Now the new way has come to be habitual, and I do it without a lot of conscious thought. Now it would feel odd to do it the old way!

Self esteem results from treating yourself well. Taking care of yourself is a way of showing yourself compassion, treating yourself as you would treat a valued friend. How often do you say critical and insulting things to yourself? How often do you beat yourself up for making a mistake or missing an opportunity? Compare this to how you treat a close friend or beloved child. It’s often easier to show compassion to others than to give yourself a break.

Low self esteem is the result of treating yourself badly. We’ll talk more in upcoming posts about components of the habit of healthy self esteem, with tips for concrete steps you can take to build self esteem, starting TODAY.

I’ve noticed accumulating fears about my Novel Writing Workshop, that begins in about a month. When I signed up for the workshop I was excited about finally getting the guidance I need for my fiction writing.

The creeping fears since then come from the scary questions the evil elf persists in whispering into my ear: “What if you have no talent? What if you just can’t write? I don’t think you know how to tell a story. You just pull together a list of ‘interesting’ fragments and put it out there and leave it to the reader to piece together. You can’t close the deal!!!”

The ugly munchkin is shouting by now. And he’s traded the questions for accusations.  “You’re stuck trying to write complex sentences. You’re so damn ambivalent about everything. Why can’t you just spin a tale and let ‘er rip?”

Good question. I don’t know why. Maybe I can, and just need to get on about doing it. Maybe my characters will guide me wherever they need to go, and all I have to do is take some notes. Edit later.

“You’ve started too late. You’re over the hill,” he whispered. I never noticed this before, but the malignant elf has a lisp, like that character in Runaway Bride.

“Teasing and humiliation won’t work! You can’t distract me from telling the DISMAL TRUTH about you!” Louder now. Dith-tract and dith-mal dissolve some of the elf’s authority, as I listen more closely.

“Go to hell,” I reply and return to my typing.

“Oh, you think cursing makes your writing interesting?” (cur-thing; intereth-ting)

I am trying to distract myself from the elf’s observations. Why do I listen to him at all?

“You listen because you know I’m right. I’m the only one who’ll tell you the truth about yourself,” he opined.

“Yeah? Then why is that so-called truth you’re telling me always blistering and negative? Why is the truth only about my faults and imperfections?” I demand.

“I tell you the negative stuff because you’d get a swell head if you just listened to the positive stuff about you all the time. You’ll try to get above yourself. I’m just trying to save you from disappointment. You used to think you were the smartest person in the world, remember?”

“I did think that once, but I was 8 or 9 years old. I have a bit more perspective now.” At the time I also wore red cowboy boots, a white Roy Rogers hat, and a hand-tooled holster with my toy Colt when my dog Brownie and I went to explore the fields and woods near my childhood home in east Texas.

The elf jumps onto my desk and turns to face me, sneering. His twisted face and oily hair are the stuff of nightmares. His breath at close range is foul. “You know what I really think? You’re just a smartass. You’ve always been a smartass. Smart aleck. Too smart for your own good. You think you can beat the odds every time. You think you know better, and that bad outcomes won’t happen to you. Well, now. You flunked out of college. You’re divorced. You tried a business, and it failed. You tried another business and it failed, too. God knows what you’ll do next!” He paused to take a breath.

“And your point is?” I ask.

“YOU HAVE TO BE MORE CAREFUL!” he shouted. “You’re never careful, you’re always launching yourself out into something new, like a kid doing hang gliding off a cliff. Don’t you ever look down?”

Okay, that’s a point. In fact, much of what this mucky elf is saying is true. I choose to believe it’s not the whole truth about myself. I don’t think the story is over yet. I have learned from my mistakes.

“Yes, but have you learned ENOUGH from those mistakes? That is the question,” he shouted in triumph.

“Perhaps not. But here’s the deal.” I fumble in the drawer of my old rolltop and pull out a broken piece of chalk. With it I draw a heavy line on the floor, a wide circle around my writing desk. “I’m going to write. I’m scared about it, I don’t even know why anymore. But I’m choosing not to listen to this river of crap. I’ll take your observations into consideration, JUST NOT WHILE I’M TRYING TO WRITE, OK?”

The elf scrambled down off his perch on my desk. He stomped across the floor behind my chair and went out into the hall. From where I sit I can just make him out in the shadows, standing with his shoulders hunched and his arms crossed over his sunken chest. I’m sure he’s scowling, but at least he’s not yelling anymore.

“Turn around,” I snarl. “No looking!” I hear him shuffle his gnarly feet on the floor.

Now where was I?

Returning to Alex’s comment, I want to address the question of high self esteem/low self love.

“How similar is self-esteem to self-love? As I ponder this, the more I think about the construct of self-esteem the more I see it aligning with the ego. I’m not suggesting this is a bad thing but I can see how high self-esteem could hide some of the symptoms of low self-love. Perhaps there’s a difference between high self-esteem and healthy self-esteem.”

The “high self-esteem” Alex is referring to I would characterize as an expression of the false Self. This is the act you put on, hoping to have a desired effect on others – and usually it is based upon not feeling good about yourself, as you are. So, yes, “high self esteem” (note the quotation marks) is an attempt to hide low self love.

One way to know if the person you are with is putting on such an act is to pay attention to how you feel with them. If, while they are feeling so “good” you become aware that you are feeling somewhat badly about yourself in comparison, then their “high self-esteem” is probably not genuine. This kind of self-presentation usually is not relaxed or calm, and has an edge that can leave you feeling a bit unsettled.

Real self esteem (no quotation marks!) is not an act. It doesn’t take effort or strategy or secret techniques. It grows from within you, based upon the genuine acceptance you have for yourself. Emphasis on the word genuine: you can’t fake self-acceptance. If there are parts of yourself that are difficult to like, try to have compassion in those areas.

In a recent comment, Alex asks:

“How similar is self-esteem to self-love? As I ponder this, the more I think about the construct of self-esteem the more I see it aligning with the ego. I’m not suggesting this is a bad thing but I can see how high self-esteem could hide some of the symptoms of low self-love. Perhaps there’s a difference between high self-esteem and healthy self-esteem.”

These are great questions! To me, self-esteem is a synonym for self-love, meaning having a positive connection to the Self. Part of the complexity of being human is our ability to be both Subject and Object. You have a relationship with yourself. We talk to ourselves all the time, in a running interior dialogue.

Just as we have positive and negative feelings (we like or we do not like) towards others, we have varying feelings towards ourselves. At times we like ourselves; at other times we do not like ourselves. The summation or average of these fluctuating feelings we call self-esteem, or sometimes self-love.

What does it mean to “like yourself?” Being so concerned about “liking” may seem a bit like middle school. Perhaps the term “acceptance” more accurately conveys the sense of welcome embrace that healthy self esteem implies. When you accept yourself (or someone else), it’s not an uncritical embrace of everything about that person. Rather, it’s a genuine fondness tempered with compassion for one’s ever-present human frailties.

High or healthy self-esteem does not imply perfection or the pretense of perfection. It’s much more about feeling comfortable with yourself, appreciating your strengths while having compassion for your weaknesses. Often it’s easier to imagine feeling this way about someone else – a friend, family member, or a lover – than about yourself. We’re often our own worst critic!

What would it be like to not worry about what others think of you? Or to no longer compare yourself to others, whether it’s about the clothes they wear, the car they drive, their job, career success, or their marital status?

What would it be like not to worry if you are making the “wrong” choice? What if you could live without self-doubt? What if you no longer had that persistent feeling of not liking yourself?

What if you could let go of nagging self-criticism — those voices in your head that clamor about how worthless or disorganized or stupid you are?

These hypothetical possibilities “come true” when you move from low self esteem to healthy self esteem. Healthy self esteem means you treat yourself as well as you treat your friends: when you make a mistake, you have compassion for yourself, rather than beating yourself up or calling yourself names.

Healthy self esteem means that when you express yourself – whether the words you say, the project you create, or the clothes you wear — you enjoy expressing what is true for you, and there is no inner comparison with imagined others, or an imagined ideal of perfection.

Healthy self esteem means you care for yourself. You cut yourself a break if you are tired, or if you’ve had a bad day. If you’re tired, you might take a nap. When you are hungry you feed yourself healthy food. If a situation or an environment is toxic to you, you find something else that can work better.

When you have healthy self esteem, you’re able to focus on the task at hand without being distracted by comparing yourself to others or thinking that what you are doing is all wrong.

Welcome to healthy self esteem!  It’s a beautiful world!