Inner Work

For the week of October 24, 2005

Character Matters

We usually think of good character in terms of honesty, responsibility, kindness, productivity, sobriety, and so on. These standard criteria certainly hold true and provide us with a beacon to guide our actions. But from a spiritual standpoint we also need to look more deeply into our own character defects. In particular, we pay attention to those aspects of our character that limit our inner work and impede our progress toward the sacred.

As we each have a unique pattern of character, our problems and their remedies must also be unique. Widely applicable spiritual practices such as body awareness, presence, and prayer, though fundamental to the path, generally do not address the subtleties of individual character issues. Perhaps non-clinging comes closest to being a general prescription for character-based limitations.

Consider the following partial list of character traits: passive, aggressive, stubborn, timid, shy, lazy, sad, fearful, selfish, inconsiderate, flippant, rude, mean, quarrelsome, self-pitying, withdrawn, vain, reticent, and loquacious. For each of us, no doubt, some of these do apply. The task is to come to know ourselves well enough to recognize our own character. Even more importantly, we need to understand which of our traits impede our spiritual development and keep our soul impoverished, compared to our spiritual possibilities.

Character traits stay with us as the ongoing shape of our interactions with the world. Some manifest daily, others rarely. More important than frequency, though, is the severity of the problems caused by our various traits. This offers us clues to which ones we need to address.

For purposes of our spiritual work, we take care not to select traits to try to change simply because we do not like them or to create a more attractive version of ourselves, because then we make our character work into an ego-centered project. In working on our character, we do so from a position of self-acceptance, not of rejecting parts of our makeup.

Changing one’s character is even more difficult than breaking a habit. The all-at-once approach may yield dramatic results, but tends to cause unproductive dislocations in other parts of us. You push the balloon in one spot and it bulges in others. Instead, we gradually and steadily take notice when the chosen trait manifests, inwardly or outwardly. Then we develop the ability to notice when it is about to manifest. Then we pull ourselves back from it, or step beyond it, a bit at a time, gently nudging ourselves toward freedom.

For this week, assess your own character to see what particular trait you might need to change to further your spiritual practice.

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