Self-esteem is nothing more than the small self’s opinion of itself. It is a tale told by an idiot. Any education that prioritizes self-esteem is a course in unreality; it leads the student on a needless journey across an imaginary landscape of illusory meadows and false mountains.
When we fixate on self-esteem, we fall prey to the delusion that accomplishment only comes in one of two ways: either effortlessly or through dramatic struggle. Either your minimal effort and work are automatically sufficient, or only an achievement that comes after great struggle will earn you praise and love. So we have to either be careless or put on a display of strength in order to earn or get love. We are too good to work, or we overcome and triumph. We stroll through a meadow, or we scale a massive peak.
It is easy to recognize the game of someone whose self-esteem is based on refusing to test themselves. It is much harder to discern when someone is playing the self-esteem game by turning what should simply be hard work into a dramatic struggle designed to make them look heroic.
The notion that self-esteem is born only of dramatic struggle encourages a desire to fail at first, even if the task is easy, just to make the accomplishment appear heroic. If it is easy, we need to make it difficult and have things go wrong so that we can fail, and then snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. When skill and capability are already in place to complete an undertaking, we must either remove tools or add increased burdens in order to make it worthwhile. A worthless task becomes invaluable when completed through struggle, while an invaluable task is worthless if completed with ease.
So we believe we have to struggle. If we are not struggling, then we are not doing. We create a challenge in order to consider ourselves heroes when we overcome that challenge. The truth is, in most situations there is no need of the challenge, and the real hero is the one who acts with ease and accomplishes life without creating fake mountains to climb. We do not look heroic attacking what is not real.
Applying this to sādhana is easy. Good practice is not a fight. It is not denial or pretending; it is surrender to and acceptance of what truly Is. Misery does not make us spiritual. Overcoming a false challenge does not attain us anything.
We must not delude ourselves that sādhana has to be a struggle. That is part of why the Guru is so crucial to our practice: the Guru reveals our delusions, including the mistaken conviction that spiritual practice is inseparable from suffering. On the contrary, spiritual practice frees us from suffering. The Guru shines the light to bring us joy, not to make us struggle.
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