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Innate Goodness

“Man's goodness is like a flame, that can be hidden, but never extinguished’”. – Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela

Once upon a time, there was a wise sage who lived in a small remote village. The sage was known for his wisdom and kindness, and people from miles around would come to seek his advice.


One day, a young man came to the sage and asked him, "How can I become a better person?" The sage replied, "You are already a good person. You just need to realise it."


The young man was confused and asked the sage to explain. So the sage led the young man to a nearby river and asked him to look into the water. "What do you see?" the sage asked. "I see my reflection," replied the young man. The sage then took a rock and threw it into the water, creating ripples that distorted the young man's reflection. "Now what do you see?" the sage asked. "I see a distorted version of myself," replied the young man.


The sage explained, "Just as the ripples in the water distort your reflection, the challenges and difficulties in life can distort your perception of your innate goodness. But just like your reflection is still there, your innate goodness is still within you, even when it may be distorted by life's challenges."


The young man realised that he had been taking his own innate goodness for granted, and he left the sage with a newfound appreciation for his own goodness.


I once had the pleasure of hearing a beautiful Irish lady read a poem called "The Patience of Ordinary Things" by Pat Schneider. I found myself drawn to the poem and have revisited it several times since. I’ve referred to it in a previous article on appreciation. In that article we looked at how we can learn to develop appreciation for things in the world, and things in our lives, that we easily overlook. As I revisit it, it has started to express a slightly deeper meaning.


It is a kind of love, is it not?

How the cup holds the tea,

How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,

How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes

Or toes. How soles of feet know

Where they're supposed to be.

I've been thinking about the patience

Of ordinary things, how clothes

Wait respectfully in closets

And soap dries quietly in the dish,

And towels drink the wet

From the skin of the back.

And the lovely repetition of stairs.

And what is more generous than a window?


This poem speaks to the innate goodness of things, that things don't have to try to be what they are - they just are. In this article will look at our motivation to cultivate goodness, and some of the obstacles to noticing it. We will play with different perspectives, and look at some of the benefits of living in such a way. We will finish with a look at our essential nature as awareness, and how awareness is good purely through its absence of any other characteristic.


1. Firstly, why cultivate Goodness?


In relation to mindfulness, it is helpful for us to learn to spot this goodness because this is an antidote to the evolutionary negativity bias, which is our tendency to be focussed on the negative. This inner negativity can cause us to recoil and turn away from parts of ourselves that may need our care and attention.


By recognising and nurturing the innate goodness in ourselves, we bring about a sense of goodness in our perceptions and behaviours and this helps us to recognise the goodness in the world.


This helps us to build a foundation of compassion and kindness which gives us the strength to face feelings of disconnection, isolation, separation.


So by cultivating the goodness that is here, we can learn to embrace our whole selves and in doing so we deepen our understanding of ourselves and awaken to our true sense of being


2. Secondly, what makes it hard to see?


It's not always easy to see the goodness within us because it's so obvious. We often overlook it because it's part of our default operating system. It's like how we don't notice the air we breathe because it's always there.


I've experienced this firsthand as I wrote this article. I found myself worrying about getting things perfect, feeling like if I get it wrong, I'll be inadequate. This search for perfection fills my mind with doubts and insecurity, causing me to overlook the innate goodness that's already within me, the goodness that motivates me to write this in the first place.


When we connect with that goodness, it changes how we approach life, others, and the world.


All humans have the capacity to pursue our needs in ways which are harmful and ways which are helpful. The thing to remember is, that in each of us, there’s good bits and not so good bits, pretty things and pretty ugly things, there’s things that make us proud and things that make us feel ashamed.


And although shame is the feeling that we alone are defective or unworthy due to some character trait, or some thought, feeling or behaviour - shame is an emotion that we all feel. We are all connected through these feelings of separation.


When we recognise that we’re not alone, we can start to see through the illusory walls that shame builds, we can see that we’re all living in same house of humanness, of humanity. Then we can approach our murkiness with kindness and understanding.



3. Thirdly, we can choose to view things differently.


What happens when we view ourselves as innately good? If we see the goodness in ourselves then we can start to see all of the parts of our experience in the same light. All of these difficult emotional experiences have goodness too - they’re arising from goodness and they’re turning us in the direction of goodness, if we choose to view them that way.


We often seem to make pain or difficulties wrong or bad, we add layers of resistance to reality based on individual beliefs and in that we increase their potency. How we think about them is often the source of our pain.


How can we see the goodness in difficulties? What is good about pain? Physical pain is a message to the body that something isn’t right. It’s telling us something hurts. A hand over a flame will tell us quite clearly that this isn’t good for the skin. So in this case it has our best interests at heart. Pain is protecting us.


There are cases of chronic pain where the body is damaged in a way that the pain persists for a long time due to long term injury – or where the body may be damaged in the pain system. This is very difficult for sufferers of chronic pain and requires patience, care, attention, and treatment.


So in the same way physical pain is a message to the body, mental pain, or suffering, is a message to the mind that something isn’t right with this moment. It’s often camouflaged as something that is wrong with the world, but if we look closer, we will find it’s often how we’re looking at the world.


The world is neither right nor wrong, it just is.


So suffering is highlighting to us where we’re not free, where we’ve built walls around us, or written rules about reality that aren’t accurate.


Trauma can affect the mind in a similar way as chronic pain affects the body, so we need the same patience, care and attention to work our way through it. But ultimately there is a key to freedom here – if in the midst of our suffering we are conscious enough to ask the question;


How am I treating this moment? Whether this moment manifests as joy, pain, anger, or suffering - with a developing awareness we can change our relationship to it. Is it as gift or a punishment. Is the world happening to me or for me?


There will be times when the suffering takes over, we lose conscious connection with our awareness and are over powered by difficult emotions or habits. This is part of the journey. As soon as we are aware, we come home – how am I treating this moment now.


It’s like in a meditation where we can lose ourselves for seconds, or minutes at a time. We may lose ourselves for days at a time, on auto-pilot. But we come home, we come back and ask the question: How am I treating this moment – is it a friend or an enemy.


Life will respond in the same way that we view it.


4. Lastly, stepping back into our essential nature.


If we step back beyond the mental labels of experience, we may recognise that our awareness is always here - that we are that awareness. We see that we can strip away all the details about our experience and yet as long as we have awareness we still remain. Reality is made of awareness, awareness is the essential ingredient in all of experience.


When we become familiar with this, there is a natural appreciation – Pat Schneider asks 'what is more generous than a window?'. If she was to answer that she may even point to Awareness. Awareness is a window into presence. The generosity of Awareness gives rise to all that we know, without hesitation, without judgment and without preference. At our most essential level, what we are is the very awareness that lights up the universe, our consciousness is the light by which the universe a can view itself.



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