Question: “I have recently started studying Buddhism and decided to take my life in a new, exciting direction. Some tragedy and heartbreak struck earlier this year, and I really want to improve my relationship with myself/thoughts. What are the best ways to start developing a good, healthy relationship with yourself? :)”
Find yourself! 🙂 As individuals, we assume no one knows us better than ourselves. Our biggest fan and critic is ourselves. We know exactly what we want, don’t want. What we like and don’t like, etc etc. The list is endless. But from a spiritual sense, especially in Buddhism, what we know of ourselves is not true. “This” is not us. This person, this body, this name, these likes and dislikes, all this is not really us. It is a temporary shell protecting us from the precious jewel that is us.
So what do we do to find this precious jewel? Well, that’s Buddhism’s goal, right? To find our trueness, our Buddha Nature. To do that, we have five handfuls of ways! Which are basically the different schools and traditions of Buddhism, each have the same goal, just a different means of getting to it. But the common practice between all those different ways is meditation. In Zen Buddhism, you would meditate on the koan “Who am I?” You constantly ask yourself, “Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?” This can take years, but that is our goal, to see our precious jewel and to cash it in (finding our Buddha Nature and becoming a Buddha).
With meditation, we have other means of practice, studying and chanting. The more we know, understand and contemplate, the more tools we have to apply to accomplishing our goal. So when we sit down and ask ourselves “Who am I?” we might not always find that precious jewel, but we can find some deeper feelings, thoughts, emotions, opinions, etc about ourselves. Sometimes we compress certain thoughts or feelings about things or people and just ignore them and move on, but meditation forces us to confront those compressed ideas and feelings and they might be able to help you understand more or see the truth about things or people.
Smile and be well!