The Buddhist Olympics

This time around, I'm finding the Olympics painful to watch. The competition just seems completely over-the-top and very harmful: way too much discipline and pressure for a human. All of these poor people are forced into sports at a very young age (younger and younger), and it seems unlikely that they'll ever get themselves sorted out: they'll forever feel deeply inadequate, unconsciously convinced that their self-worth is entirely dependent on what they do (which is never good enough), not who they are (which is always good enough). And, they'll pass the whole burden onto their children, ad infinitum. Humans just aren't made (evolved) to be content with this sort of life.

So, I'm thinking of The Buddhist Olympics as an alternative:

http://www.buddhistolympics.org/

What You Do Isn't Who You Are

One thing that occurred to me: your sense of yourself seems really tied up with how other people at work treat you. I think I’m basically the same way, and more generally, I really take it hard if I get the sense that _anyone_ doesn’t like or respect me.

To look at this from a psychological/developmental perspective, in my case, I learned at a very young age that I would get what I needed by making other people like me. Both my mom and dad were very responsive to my “performance”, and their love was conditional (not always, but often enough): I felt that they loved me (most, best) when I did things they liked. And again, I was, by design, extremely self-centered, so that, when they didn’t “love” me, I _felt_ it was my fault.

Through these processes, and over time, I ended up with this: if someone doesn’t “like” what I do, I am (feel at the deepest levels) “wrong” (bad, flawed, horrible, fucked up, shit, etc.). In “real life” now, this means that when my boss criticizes my work, I feel incredibly bad, I lose track of myself, I “panic”, I freak out. My boss did nothing wrong at all. I’m doing this to myself, again, through no fault of my own.

What you do isn’t who you are.
What people think of you and say about you has nothing to do with who you are. It _might_ have something to do with what you’ve done. It definitely has to do with them and their own internal reactions, processes, stuff.

Self's View of the Self

I’ve been trying to understand this about me. There’s this idea I was talking about, where people develop a powerful, mostly-hidden-from-awareness, emotional sense that they are crap. I mean, really crap: fundamentally and seriously flawed beyond hope.

I’m sure that I have these things inside me, and that they’re frequently causing me a lot of trouble. At different times, they can invoke a variety of different senses of shame, self-doubt, depression, fear, etc. And, they’re self-referencing, feeding off themselves and each other, at times making for a serious tidal wave, maelstrom, of internal emotional turmoil, some of which gets so bad as to effect my consciousness mind and body, but most of which just roils below the surface, still affecting me, but in ways I don’t obviously recognize….

Something like this. It’s complicated, dynamic, and deeply emotional—so, it’s _very_ hard to understand with critical, conscious reason. It’s easier to feel, and easier to “understand” (sense) using an emotional sensitivity, an awareness, an openness.