There is something that you can do. Only you. Others may be able to do something similar, but not the way you do it. And the ‘doing’ might actually be a state of ‘being’. For instance, my personal goal in life is to just be joyful. If I’m joyful, then I’m fulfilling my mission in life. Everything else is gravy. And it is enough for me to simply strive to be joyful all the time.

It’s not that I ignore negative emotion – quite the opposite. At the first sign of negative emotion, I do my best to drop everything else and stare at it hard, to understand what brought it up, why I feel I need to experience it, what needs to change in my life, and when I can safely dissolve the emotion – because all negative emotion I treat as a red flag, or a flashing light on the dash of my car. Notice it as soon as possible, deal with what sponsored it as soon as possible, dissolve it as soon as possible. And that leaves a lot more space left over… to just be happy.

And for me, my inherent value comes from something deeper still – not the joy and how successful I am at embodying it. (Some days are not so easy.) And my inherent value comes not from how quicky I can notice a negative emotion and deal with it appropriately. (Some days are really not so easy.) My inherent value comes from something much deeper than all these things.

At the base of all things, I have inherent value. Its what makes the doing and the being possible, but it’s not contingent on the doing and being. That is to say, all my doing, and all my being, they all rest on the foundation of my inherent value, and I have built a strong structure on that base. The foundation is set on the bedrock on my inherent value: I AM good. I AM light. I AM worthy. And so everything I build on such a strong base is solid, even if it ends up looking some days like a tree house, and other days like a space station.

Conversely, when we try to build a structure to gain value and a sense of self-worth, then the foundation we’re building on is a toxic, unstable mix of fear and loathing, and the structure (no matter how pretty) isn’t going to withstand a storm. It may be a beautiful castle we’ve built full of good deeds and successful endeavors and a loving family and happy children, but if underneath the castle is just quicksand… then the castle fails; in particular, it fails to get us what we wanted to use it for – not to have a happy family, or to do kind things to others, because in such a case we’ve only used those deeds, those accomplishments as a means to an end, and our end was to prove that we were good people. 

But they won’t prove anything, because they weren’t built on the foundation of knowing we are good people. Nothing we can do will prove it to ourselves, if we don’t know it to begin with.

And if we don’t know it to begin with – we can start, now. Not because we have done kind things, or been a good person, or worked off a lot of karma.

We – YOU – are fundamentally good. You are fundamentally holy. You are, at the base of your being, a creature of the light. You just are. And you can chose to accept it (or start accepting it), right now.