Talking of roles, our feelings of inadequacy can come from a pressure we put ourselves under to measure up to what we or others’ expect – but for one thing, everyone has their own version or projection of us...
Talking of roles, our feelings of inadequacy can come from a pressure we put ourselves under to measure up to what we or others’ expect – but for one thing, everyone has their own version or 
projection of us and it’s not possible to know what this is, let alone live up to it. For another, in my observation, other people are not even really looking at what we’re doing or not doing most of the time because they are way too focused on all the things they are doing or not doing themselves. (Someone just left this Eleanor Roosevelt quote in the comments, lol):
You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.
Carrying on from this article: Overcoming mom guilt. There were some really helpful comments on this last article – maybe take a look if you haven’t already.
Also, the only opinions of us that really count (because they are realistic) are those of Buddhas – and they always think (a) we’re mere appearance not other than emptiness and (b) we’re great. Sometimes, to kick off rejoicing in our good qualities, I think it can be helpful to remember some praise you got at some stage from a friend you trust, who knows and loves you. Venerable Geshe Kelsang has said some kind things to me over the years, and I sometimes start with that. I’d be amazed if he wasn’t saying kind things to you, too. Always a good idea, if we feel stuck, to try and see ourselves through a Buddha’s loving eyes.
“Prayer is powerful, it fills the world with mercy”
Talking of Buddhas, while we are focusing on everyone’s needs – current, ongoing, and future – we can easily start to feel pulled in every direction and inadequate to the task. Everything that we can’t handle, however, we can also ask the Buddhas to take care of for us – in other words, we can pray.
Talking of prayer, here’s a slight side-track, like the side-track I made yesterday. Driving around, as I sometimes do, in the mountains of Colorado, I was drawn up one of them to the large statue of Sacred Heart Jesus entopping the shrine of Saint Francis Xavier Cabrini, which I have often spotted way up high blessing the Denver valley. It was almost closing time, so I found myself with this huge site to myself. I know nothing about Mother Cabrini – in fact I have just now Googled her for the first time – but aside from the fact that she must have been awesome and beloved to have this huge pilgrimage site dedicated to her, she also has in her name my favorite Saint (St Francis) and the name of the street I’m about to live on (Xavier). And I also felt, sitting in her darkened Grotto with all those candles – the Buddha nature of all her petitioners shining bright – that I was in the presence of a holy being.
Above her picture was Jesus on a crucifix – and indeed on the steep stairway to the Sacred Heart (Chakra) you ascend through all the Stations of the Cross. I had been thinking about this sentence from The New Eight Steps to Happiness:
Many Christians also believe that by allowing himself to be crucified, Jesus was taking on the sufferings of human beings. It is quite possible that Jesus was practicing taking while he was on the cross.
I got into a contemplation of how this Bodhisattva or Buddha was taking on the sufferings of all the world – so many – helped by the Tara emanation Mother Cabrini. Although I am a total Buddhist, I am generally not too fussy about where my Bodhisattvas come from or which tradition they’re in — Buddhist, Christian, other, or nother – and I felt immensely inspired in this place.
Anyway, in case you’re wondering why I mention this here, it is because I saw some of her prayers up there and really liked them. For example:
Fortify me with the grace of Your Holy Spirit and give Your peace to my soul that I may be free from all needless anxiety and worry. Help me to desire always that which is pleasing and acceptable to You so that Your will may be my will.
Easily adaptable, if you ask my opinion, to a Buddhist praying to our Spiritual G uide and other enlightened beings. And there is always the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi, the one starting with that profound request: 
Lord make me an instrument of thy peace …
I mentioned the other day on Facebook that I recited St Francis’s prayer every night as a kid, and a surprising number of Buddhists replied to say something similar. Before we met Buddhism, this seemed to be a prayer of choice.
Point being, prayer helps us overcome our worries, for sure, but also our guilt and feelings of inadequacy – if we are really tuning into all that enlightened power with a faithful mind, we immediately feel existentially supported and okay. And prayer helps not just us but anyone we are praying for, including all those currently terrified in Gaza, Israel, and Ukraine. As Mother Cabrini said:
Prayer is powerful! It fills the earth with mercy … right along the course of the centuries wonderful works have been achieved through prayer.
Put on your own oxygen mask first
I started this article on a plane to Spain, when they gave that famous modern instruction:
Put your own oxygen mask on first before attending to others.
We do need to take frequent times for ourselves, to meditate, as Geshe-la says in How to Transform Your Life:
Unless we make some time every day to meditate, we will find it very difficult to maintain peaceful and positive minds in our daily life, and our spiritual practice as a whole will suffer. Since the real purpose of meditation is to increase our capacity to help others, taking time each day to meditate is not selfish. We have to manage our time and energy in such a way that we can be of maximum benefit to others, and to do this effectively we need time alone to recover our strength, collect our thoughts, and see things in perspective.
This might be hard when we are thinking that everybody needs something from us, and we may have to content ourselves with precious snatches of time when we really have a lot going on. But it is not practical to try and put on others’ oxygen masks while we’re suffocating.
Rejoicing is not a hard practice so we can practice it even when we are exhausted or in situations from which we cannot rest or remove ourselves. Rejoicing helps to rest our mind, at which point we have more flexibility to mix our mind with Dharma.
Next time you notice these feelings of inadequacy or frustration arising, please take the next available 5 or 10 minutes (make the restroom live up to its name?!) to rejoice in yourself. We can first focus on our breath or turn the mind to wood, and disengage from that flight or fight mode. We can check in on our Buddha nature and precious human life. On that basis, we can drop identifying with being inadequate or exhausted. And then we can itemize and rejoice in all the things we’ve already done. At which point we are in the right space to develop a big heart of love and compassion that has room for everyone’s needs. Also, if you can remember that none of this is outside the mind, that everything is just a dream, that clearly stops the grasping too.
You have a precious human life
In Joyful Path of Good Fortune, there is an 18-part checklist of so-called “freedoms and endowments” to fill in to see if you have a precious human life. You probably do. The purpose of meditating on this is not to feel guilty because we’re not taking advantage of it but to remember that we are taking advantage of it already just by meditating on it and identifying with being a lucky person. If we feel happy about that, we will naturally want to make the most of this good fortune by doing more.
In Great Treasury of Merit, Geshe Kelsang says:
Besides rejoicing in the happiness and virtue of others, we should also rejoice in our own good fortune and its causes. For example, by meditating on the preciousness of this human life we will come to appreciate the virtues performed by our previous incarnation that have resulted in such a beneficial effect; and we will then decide to show a similar kindness to our next incarnation. Rejoicing in our won virtues uplifts the mind and encourages us to practice purely.
And it’s not just in previous lives that we have taken advantage of our precious human life – we can meditate on all the things we have done in this life that have brought us to this point that we have this opportunity, and all the ways we have already started to take advantage of it.
Think about how happy or relieved you have already made so many people in this life. All the things you have already done before and since you met Dharma. If you work for a Dharma Center or a hospital, for example, how many people has that organization helped this week? I am part of that. How many people have my activities directly or indirectly helped? Think about how pleased the Buddhas are that you are starting to identify with your precious human life.
There is this great section in the Sutra of the 35 Confession Buddhas where we itemize our roots of virtue so that we can dedicate them to enlightenment:
Whatever root of virtue there is in my giving to others, even in my giving a morsel of food to one born as an animal; whatever root of virtue there is in my maintaining moral discipline, whatever root of virtue there is in my actions conducive to great liberation; whatever root of virtue there is in my acting to fully ripen sentient beings; whatever root of virtue there is in my generating a supreme mind of enlightenment; and whatever root of virtue there is in my unsurpassed exalted wisdom …
We did all this, which is why we are here.
Pulling our weight
By the way, if we can learn to rejoice in our own virtues despite any perceived inadequacies, we can then apply this to others whom we feel are not pulling their weight too. If we appreciate them, it helps us get more out of them (especially if we’re not paying them any money, lol). Another consideration: if you knew this person was going to die soon, how would that change how you view them? Remember that we’re all going to be dead soon – so let’s appreciate each other while we still have each other.
On a related note, we don’t need to compare ourselves with anyone else. If someone else is doing great, we can just rejoice in them and get all their good qualities, as explained here: Happy for others: the practice of rejoicing.
But I haven’t done anything about my precious human life for years!
Even if we’ve dropped off the wagon and haven’t been doing much (or any) meditation or formal spiritual practice for a while, even years, we did it before. We can remember all the things we did then, in this and previous lives, as well as the umpteen ways we’ve helped people since; and feel very happy about it. That increases our merit and gives us a step back up. Life is full of changing karma, ups and downs. We are still in this precious human life if we believe we are; we need the long view of our path.
Tantra
Last but not least, in Tantra we identify with bringing the result into the path – we imagine that we’ve already done everything we need to do to attain enlightenment and benefit all living beings, and here we are! This really is a deep practice of feeling happy about ourselves. Now we have all the time and space in the world to help everyone. There is no panic, no tightness, no rush, no feelings of inadequacy. If you don’t have Tantric empowerments yet, a similar practice taught in Sutra is taking and giving – check that out in The New Eight Steps to Happiness.
Would love to read your comments.
