How Compassionate Awareness can Help Improve your Self Worth

“You look terrible.” I said to myself in the mirror. “Your face is covered in acne and you are losing your strength and gaining weight.” A moment earlier, I had felt so good about myself and now staring into the mirror, all that supposed self esteem I thought I had plummeted. I was hit with feelings of shame and the old familiar mental critique–”If you look like this you aren’t good enough.”

These thoughts and their corresponding feelings sometimes preoccupy my life. I’ve spent hours, days and even years (I had an eating disorder in college) acting under the assumption my worth was conditional on what I did or did not do. I have believed the lies learned over my lifetime that what made me loveable or unloveable, enough, too little or too much was determined by others opinions. I have sought external validation by placing a critical lens to who I am, cutting away at the parts that didn’t “fit”. I’ve done all this, believed all this and sometimes if I am not paying attention still do.

I am sure we all have had these feelings. I am sure deep down we all hold in some area of our lives the belief that we are only worthy when we are validated by some measure of agency or success. We have all tried to make ourselves fit inside a box too small just to prove we are worth it.

This is all a lie. We are always already worth it. You are always already worthy–and so am I.

Whether or not I stand in front of the mirror filled with critical thoughts and painful feelings about who I am is not the problem. The problem is that we take these thoughts and feelings as truth and then act on them.

Conditional Self Worth Keeps You in a Box

For most of us self esteem is conditional. It is derived from beliefs about who we think we are and what we identify within ourselves as having value. Self esteem relies on comparison, of placing ourselves within a hierarchy. Someone is always better than us and someone else inferior. Think of the culture and systems we are part of. Whether or not you hold certain privileges of skin tone, gender identity or economic freedom determines the ways in which you are seen and valued in society.

On a more micro scale, think of the ways in which you were dismissed or acknowledged in your family or community. Think of what was valued. All of these interwoven aspects of your experience influence what you perceive as good or bad about yourself. At any given moment, you either meet these ideals set out before you or fail to meet them. Conditional self esteem is conditional self worth. Believing that we are only enough when we meet some sort of quantitative measure of enoughness, keeps us preoccupied with trying to act in ways that fulfill the quota.

I don’t know about you but in spending so much of my life tied to conditional self worth, I have missed out on the inherent beauty and mess and authenticity that is my life. Yet, it is not possible to live in a vacuum. You can’t go back and rewrite your past or change a culture in a day (that takes collective long term work). What you can do though, is acknowledge that conditional self worth is not the whole picture and then choose to show up to critical thoughts and painful feelings with love.

Unconditional Self Worth is Inherent

Unconditional self worth is inherent. It is the version of ourselves in the macro. It is the space we take up when we zoom out and look at ourselves as part of and inseparable from everything else. Who we are as an individual is a small subsegment of Life, a beautiful and chaotic, expansive thing. We are worthy because we exist. Period.

As Domyo Burke, Soto Zen priest writes:

“This life itself is precious. So precious, in fact, that all of my shortcomings and foibles can’t detract from it. I’ve actually come to regard with a certain affection the imperfect individual I am – unique, with a flavor and a path all my own. I can recognize how even my faults and mistakes arise, deep down, from a life force that seeks to survive, experience love and belonging, learn and grow, and deepen my conviction that I’m ultimately not separate from the universe” (Domyo).

Unconditional worth speaks to the ways in which we are connected rather than the ways in which we are distinct. No one is better or worse than anyone else. Jeremy Dutcher of the Wabanaki tribe, a tribe where humility is a central focus states that “Hierarchical ways of structuring better or worse is not artistic or true” (9:21). There are other ways of looking at your self worth that do not tie it to external or internal measures of validation.

The Importance of Nonjudgmental Awareness and Compassion

In my own life and my own practice of cultivating self worth, I have found that it is not so much about trying to think less critically or feel differently about myself in any given moment. Instead I have found that showing up in these moments with nonjudgmental awareness and acting from that compassionate space can help me to shift from a state of conditional worth to one in which I am more present to my inherent worth. Such a mindfulness practice, helps me to notice the present moment, the feelings of not stacking up, of low self esteem that lie there. I can be non-judgmentally, lovingly, aware of these thoughts and feelings without giving them weight.

When it comes to recognizing your inherent self worth, nonjudgmental awareness can be so integral because it is allowing you to distinguish between what is conditional and unconditional. Nonjudgmental awareness holds the everyday fluctuations of your self worth in perspective. From this space of nonjudgmental awareness you can choose to respond to these feelings of low self esteem with compassion.

Compassion is the intentional action behind nonjudgmental awareness. It accepts whole heartedly your humanness. It does not rely on comparison or conditional opinions of yourself to say you are enough. Self compassion acknowledges your common humanity while also being aware of your moment by moment experience in a loving and kind way. Furthermore, it has been shown to be associated with more stable feelings of self worth (Neff).

Noticing, Noting and Letting Go

In my life the interplay between nonjudgmental awareness and compassion involves first being present to my experience and then noticing what shows up in my body and mind when I am acting out of conditional self worth. From experience, I have noticed that I tend start to be very critical of myself and want to do something immediate and impulsive. For example, when I feel negative about my body I immediately want to work out or change my clothes to something that “looks better.” I also will tend to hyper-focus on one area of my body and narrow my focus in on its supposed flaws. While I am doing this I tend to feel an anxious pressure in my chest and am more irritated.

Noticing these thoughts and feelings, I can then note them. Noting is a meditation technique in which you gently but objectively identify your experience as either thinking or feeling. To me noting sounds like, “Okay that was a thought, or okay, that was a feeling.” Noting helps me to differentiate my thoughts and feelings from truth.

Once I recognize that I am tying my worth to external opinions of myself, I can choose to be kinder to myself about it. Usually for me that means engaging in loving self talk of “Hey, I love you” or moving my body in a way that feels nourishing not punitive. It is important to remember that employing compassion is not necessarily trying to change how you feel or what you are thinking, it is there to help you move through what you are thinking and feeling with love. You are already worthy, you don’t have to do something to be worthy and the thoughts and feelings that say otherwise will change on their own, all you have to do is kindly let them go.

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Works Cited

Domyo. “129 – Why Is Self-Esteem Essential When the Self Is Empty?” The Zen Studies Podcast, 29 Feb. 2020, zenstudiespodcast.com/self-esteem/.

Neff, Kristin. “Compassion Is Healthier than Self-Esteem.” Self, 22 Feb. 2015, self-compassion.org/why-self-compassion-is-healthier-than-self-esteem/.

Sallee, Alexis. “Episode 8: Jeremy Dutcher.” Native Artist. INDIGEFI. 26, Jul. 2020. https://www.indigefi.org/native-artist/.