Do You Want to Follow the Golden Buddha Path to Self-Love?
Shed Shame Layers. There’s Nothing Wrong With You!
Dear friends,
How do the stories of a Smurfs lunch box and the golden Buddha of Thailand reveal a path to self-love?
Keep reading to get a peek at how I stopped believing that there is something wrong with me.
The Story About My Smurfs Lunch Box:
Sweaty from running around during recess, I dashed into the carpeted hallway outside my classroom and hunched over the pile of lunch boxes. I stopped my hand from reaching inside the heap, because one image peered out at me.
It was a scene on a lunch box sticker that made me smile: Smurfette posing on a yellow-orange mushroom, donning her gold crown and fur-trimmed pink robe, and Smurfs standing below her, holding gifts of cake, root beer, and ribbon-tied boxes. Over the years, the sticker image lost its glossy finish and the edges peeled away from the blue plastic lunch box surface. But even in its faded state, the picture still made me stop whatever I was doing to just gaze at it.
My mom used to pack my lunch in a crinkled brown paper bag, reusing it every day until holes formed in the bottom. But one day, when we were at the Hills discount department store, I caught a glimpse of the Smurfs lunch box. Seeing it for the first time was like seeing sun rays shooting out of it in all directions. I tugged on my mom’s shirt sleeve and pointed at the Smurfette image. My mom touched the price tag, looked at my three younger siblings and stared back at me, soaking in my wide-eyed awaiting face. She said, “I can’t buy you a new lunch box every year. Use this for a few years until it breaks.” I shook my head up and down, scooped up my new possession, and pranced around the store with my tiny fingers wrapped around the blue plastic handle of my brand-new Smurf lunch box.
My flashback vanished when my teacher called out, “Recess is over.” I bent over and picked up my lunch box. But the weight surprised me. It was heavier than I expected, heavier than an empty lunch box should be, and certainly heavier than when it housed my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, banana, and apple juice an hour ago.
For a moment, I wondered, “Is this someone else’s lunch box?” But I knew it was mine. I was the only student with a faded blue plastic Smurfs lunch box. All the other students had shiny tin lunch boxes with E.T., The A- Team, The Muppets, Scooby-Doo, or Knight Rider on them.
When I opened the lid, I noticed that someone had put something inside.
I saw the chocolate-colored pile of mush that looked like brown lumpy mashed potatoes. From the stench, I knew exactly what it was.
Reflecting On My Experience:
When this happened, it reminded me how much I hated being a Vietnamese-American girl, how much I hated being one of three Asians in my one-hundred-student fourth grade class, and how much I hated being me.
For decades, I was ashamed of being Asian.
Every “Chink!” racial slur, every suspicious downward glance at me, and every motion that imitated my slanted Asian eyes made me feel inferior.
At the time, I blamed the lunch box situation on how I was an Asian in a predominantly white school. But looking back on the situation as an adult, I realize that anyone could have been a victim of a poop gift. It could have been the kid who had holes in the top of his sneakers, the kid who stuttered, the kid who couldn’t make eye contact with anyone, or the kid who couldn’t walk in a straight line.
Shame is a form of fear. Both create self-fulfilling prophecies in me, because I subconsciously look for evidence to confirm the very thing that I’m afraid that people will think of me.
Because I subconsciously believed that there was something wrong with me, it drained me whenever I emailed, talked to, or hung out with other people. Every human interaction triggered worries, “What if she judges what I say or do? What if she discovers that there is something wrong with me?”
One day, a friend told me about the movie, Finding Joe, and the movie changed my life. The movie illustrated the story of the golden Buddha and gave me a roadmap to self-love.
The Story of the Golden Buddha:
In 1955, Thai monks moved their Buddha statue across their monastery grounds, into a new temple built specifically to house the statue. But during the pulley-moving process, one of the ropes snapped.
The Buddha fell to the earth.
And a crack formed in the surface.
When the monks examined the crack, they saw a glimmer of gold. In that moment, they realized that their statue was not a clay Buddha, but a golden Buddha covered with clay.
As the monks chiseled away at the clay, more of the Buddha statue’s golden brilliance was revealed.
After the monks finished, they realized that their Buddha was a ten-foot high, ten-foot wide statue made of pure gold! (1)
A Glimpse of My Value, Which Lead to My Book:
In the movie, Finding Joe, the golden Buddha statue is played by a nine-year-old African-American boy who is painted gold. To hide his worth, his body is covered with debris. Later, orange-robed child monks dance around him, peeling trash off the Buddha boy’s body. After the last piece of garbage is removed, all their hands burst into the sky like fireworks. Smiles spread across faces, and eyes shine in celebration.
I wanted that feeling, that feeling that everyone was experiencing when they revealed the Buddha boy’s brilliance, when they revealed his true nature.
I wanted to recapture that feeling when I first saw my blue Smurfs lunch box sitting on the department store shelf, that feeling of seeing happy light beams radiating out in all directions from the Smurfette sticker image.
I wanted to know what it felt like to feel like a golden Buddha.
Wanting these feelings make me realize, “Wait! What if all the things that I hate about myself are not true? What if they are just thoughts that have been obscuring my value from myself? What if the different kinds of shame that I feel are shame labels, like clay covering my golden Buddha brilliance?”
Since I wanted to see myself as a golden Buddha, I began working on how to identify and discard my shame labels. When I felt self-conscious or inadequate around other people, I asked myself, “What am I afraid of?” Common worries were these shame labels: “Will they think I’m stupid? Selfish? Inconsiderate? Untrustworthy? Needy?”
I started to retrain my mind to view myself differently. I identified the source, such as a past experience that created the shame label. If the memory had an associated image, such as in my Smurfs lunch box story, the image became a handle for me to pull the suppressed memory out of my subconscious into my conscious mind.
After I analyzed and dismantled the beliefs associated with the current or past situation, I developed this visualization that I still follow today:
When I find myself worrying, for example, that someone thinks I am rude or inconsiderate, I repeat the shame labels, and I imagine them falling off of my body. “I am not a rude or inconsiderate person. I am not a rude or inconsiderate person. I am not a rude or inconsiderate person.”
After I recognize and reject my shame labels, I repeat a self-affirming mantra, such as “I am an attentive and mindful person. I am an attentive and mindful person. I am an attentive and mindful person.” With each mantra, I imagine myself absorbing the words into my identity and seeing the words coat the space where the shame label used to cover.
I also picture each mantra as a polish that highlights the brilliance of my inherent golden Buddha self. This way, each mantra is a reminder that I am a golden Buddha.
I repeat to myself, “I am a golden Buddha. I am a golden Buddha. I am a golden Buddha.”
The process of rejecting shame labels and adopting custom affirmations is how I learned to love and appreciate myself and to stop believing that there is something wrong with me.
My book, I am a Golden Buddha: A Journey from Self-Criticism to Inner Peace, shares examples of how I shed eight shame labels by following the above process.
My Invitation to You:
Would you like to:
Learn how to have less self-criticism and more inner peace in your life?
Learn how to love yourself more?
Learn how to see yourself as a golden Buddha?
Did you answer “yes?”
If yes, you can learn more by reading my golden Buddha wisdom first-hand. Copies are available here.
Warm wishes,
Jenny
Source:
(1) Solomon, P. (2011). Finding Joe, directed by Solomon, P. A Pat and Pat Production. (More sources for the golden Buddha cited in my book.)
Beautiful essay Jenny!