BACK IN the day, the Christian Brothers were keen on the idea of mortifying the flesh, as was the Catholic Church in general.
Being mortified is – and is meant to be – an unpleasant experience. That much we knew when we were being taught Christian Doctrine in school. We weren’t sure how you actually went about mortifying the flesh and we were in no hurry to find out.
The decade which saw the emergence of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Dubliners and close dancing did not provide fertile ground for mortification except of the emotional variety, ie making a fool of yourself.
Self-mortification was based on a deeply pessimistic view of human nature. Many of us share that pessimistic view now but we think we reject all this mortification.
Do we, really? If you translate mortification into self-hatred, I think you’d have to say it’s alive and well.
We never trumpeted more about self-esteem than we do now.
But the suicide statistics, non-suicidal self-harming and depression tell a different story. They tell us that self-hatred is a strong feature of human experience even if it isn’t dressed up in religious garb anymore.
The Buddhists have a story about four horses. The best horse obeys its master on seeing the mere shadow of the whip. The next horse just needs a flick of the whip. The third horse needs to be cut by the whip. But the fourth horse – the worst horse – needs to be lashed repeatedly to make it perform satisfactorily.
This reads to me like a parable of our own view of our self. We think we ought to be the best horse – self-belief and discipline should do the trick – but all too often we default to worst horse mode.
And what happens to the worst horse? Why, the unsatisfactory animal gets lashed repeatedly.
And who does the lashing? Oh, we do it ourselves. No need to outsource that particular job.
We used to be encouraged to venerate people, like poor old Matt Talbot, who went in for this sort of thing on an industrial scale. Now we think these martyrs would have been better off had they got psychological treatment.
Yet we say things to ourselves that we would never allow anyone else to say. And we regularly fail to meet our own expectations almost as though we were actively working against ourselves.
And there’s the clue. We are, indeed, working against change. The worst horse knows at some level that to become the best horse is to face the annihilation of his old self.
Your self may be somewhat accidental – made up of your genetic inheritance plus what went on in your family and in the wider society as you grew up. In other words, the self is a mixture of nature and nurture and quite a hodge podge it is sometimes too. Different nurture would have produced a different self.
Once formed, though, the self fights for survival. It will not be set aside and it will not be replaced. So all the habits that make up the self continually reassert themselves to keep the old, familiar show on the road.
Insofar as we manage to break free from old habits I think we should see ourselves in the same way people who have dropped an addictive behaviour see themselves: in recovery. The former addict knows that he or she is no more than half an hour, if that, away from relapse.
And if we have managed to break away from some old habits of the self we are probably a lot less than half an hour away from relapse: seconds will do.
In the era of endless self-improvement – which I suspect is a Victorian invention – what are we to do?
Forget endless self-improvement, I would suggest and aim for as much self-acceptance as is possible.
For the worst horse, self-acceptance would come as a blessed relief.
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.
His book, Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas.
His monthly mindfulness newsletter is available free by email.