During a conversation with a good friend last week, we were musing over the similarity between the words humility and humiliation.
Think back to a really embarrassing moment in your life. You may realize that when it happened, it stripped away the well-constructed mask you had created for yourself. In hindsight it may be laughable, but in the moment you may have been in a lot of pain, really freaked out, thinking, “I don’t want anyone to see this side of me! I don’t want them to see my imperfections, or not like me!” That’s how masks work: they cover up what’s underneath.
But that ripping away of the mask is actually beautiful and good. Because if there is a mask, it means that somewhere along the line, while our glamorous costume was being designed with all the right responses, looks and actions, we were also building a hefty pedestal to carry the weight of our false identity.
Life on a pedestal
When we put ourselves on a pedestal, the whole world is for me. We develop a sense of entitlement. If someone is driving too slowly in front of me, I get angry! Why is this person driving so slowly? Don’t they know I have somewhere to be? If someone doesn’t smile back at me, my first thought is, “What a jerk. How could they be so rude to me?” Never thinking that this person may have had a death in the family or a breakup that day. Without humility, everything is about me, my and I: all the masks we create to try to control the world around us.
The gift of our lowest points
The beautiful thing my friend and I talked about was what a magnificent gift our lowest points in life had been. When we were so humiliated that we finally found our humility. When our masks got ripped off and our pedestals toppled over, we finally took ourselves out of the center so we could be of service. Things suddenly got very quiet in our heads, so we could really listen to others. And things suddenly got very real, so we could see more clearly the world around us and the world inside us.
Nischala Joy Devi said it well: “You have to have integrity and humility to realize that the truth may be bigger than you.”
The path toward self-realization unfolds for saints and sages in a very similar way. It all has to fall apart before it can be put back together. It’s not until we are completely finished with the old way of doing things, until those patterns and habits have beaten us down to the point of no return, that we can finally turn away from them and look for a better way.
Gratitude for the fall
Maybe it was accidentally mooning the entire fifth grade that made me stop caring what others thought of me. Maybe for you it was losing love and realizing love comes from within you, not from other people. Maybe it was having your possessions destroyed, stolen or taken away, and realizing we are not our things.
Whatever brought you to where you are, especially those spaces of deep humiliation, the yogi gives thanks. It is the path of humility that leads us to the light of truth.
