Self-Worth and Gratitude
By Swami Sivananda Radha

To overcome feelings of low self-worth, you need to confront spiritual greed and inferiority very strongly, and the sooner and the more intensely you confront them, the better and the sooner you will be helping yourself. Do not let feelings of inferiority grow into a complex.

The other antidote for lack of self-worth and emotional greed is to allow yourself to grow into a sense of gratitude. Don’t concentrate on what you have to complain about, what’s not one hundred per cent according to your hopes and expectations. Look at what you already have. Concentrate on that.

This doesn’t mean you cannot vent your complaints occasionally. That’s better than sweeping them under the carpet, but don’t make a big issue of them. Also, be careful where you vent your complaints. Talking a lot about com­plaints isn’t very inspirational. Other people need to learn to be­come grateful, too, and see the many good things that they have: most have their health, they aren’t starving, they’re not living on the street. They often just have some psychological quirks in their life that need to be straightened out a little bit. These people don’t need to hear your complaints.

And don’t let your complaints kill your sense of gratitude. Acknowledge immediately after you have voiced a complaint¾immediately¾how much you also have reason to be grateful for.

Gurudev Sivananda said to me about a young fellow that I took to India on one of my visits, “He’s not grateful for what he has. Why should I give him more?” That left a deep impression on me.

If you are not grateful for what you already have, don’t ask for more. And don’t com­plain, because nothing in life will ever go exactly as you want it. Why? Your imagination plays tricks on you. It embellishes things, and then you think they should be the way you imagine them. But life has some cruel facts that are contrary to your imaginings. Instead, when you do the Divine Light Invocation, use the power of imagination to visualize yourself filled with Light, clearly and intensely. Then sometime you will have the experience of your body as a mass of spiritual Light as the re­ward of your efforts. And I emphasize this—your efforts.

Your effort is very important. If you don’t make a good effort, you won’t get anything and then you will think the Divine is starving you, never giving you any­thing. But you have to look at how lukewarm and halfhearted your effort is. If somebody worked for you in a lukewarm way, you would say, “Well, that person is not doing well at all. Some of the work is almost thrown at me like a bone to a dog. Why should I be concerned about that individual?” So, be aware of your effort. Make it strong.

It is your daily practice that keeps your awareness alive and will eventually expand it. But when you are not doing your practice, what can grow? If you don’t water a plant, it will die. Your spiritual inner existence, your inner being, has to be carefully nourished and watered, too. Let it grow.

You may dream sometime that you have a baby. Men dream about this, too, even though they don’t give birth. This means that your spiritual baby has been born or is in the process of birth. You have to nourish it. You have to protect that inner spiritual being, particularly if it’s still very weak, very immature, and has no voice of its own yet. It can’t slap your face and say, “Come on, wake up. What are you doing?” If you are not nourishing your spiritual being, you are really starving your­self. And one day you will wonder what you have been doing all these years of your life. This is true whether you live in a city or in an ashram. Of course, it’s worse if you have lived in an ashram and have not nourished your spiritual being.

If you feel unworthy of divine grace, you can let a natural feeling of gratitude grow. Hold that feeling of unworthiness right in front of you, not to condemn yourself for being worthy or not worthy, but to say, “In spite of everything, I am committed to gratitude.” If you hold on to this, gratitude also demands a great deal of humility.

By Swami Sivananda Radha
Excerpt from Time to be Holy
Published by Timeless