Me, Me, Me.

A very old friend in both senses of the phrase recently sent me an article he had written about his time living with the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche in his home in the small Italian city of Formia. This brought back many memories for me because I too had lived in this flat for a short time after Norbu Rinpoche invited me to join him and his community right at the beginning of the 1980’s. The article contained several photos - there was the sofa I had slept on and on which Norbu Rinpoche took a nap in the afternoon, there was the balcony over looking the railway line and there was the narrow hallway with bookshelves that led into the tiny kitchen.

This then got me thinking about my own life and the succession of identities that I have either slipped into or intentionally created, my personal narratives. The first of these is almost the most vivid. Seeing the Indian kaftans with a string of beads in a shop window, that the Beatles had made fashionable, the desire to be a hippy flared up in me like a fire. Previous to this I had wanted to be like several older boys I admired but never had these longed for identities had such a definite form. Subsequently I became a hippy Buddhist icon painter, a psychotherapist, a more informed and committed Buddhist, the director of a psychotherapy training organisation, a mindfulness teacher, a Buddhism teacher and amateur Buddhist scholar and now … well, someone in their old age who lives a comfortable life in a Cotswold village.

The thing is though, when I drill down beneath the surface of any of these different experiences of my self, what I find is no more than a set of sensations that I interpret as, ‘Who I am’. Furthermore, these sensations for most of the time are not present. The time spent each day focusing on the feeling of ‘me’ is tiny. Hours and hours go by when I am focused on something else and this consumes my entire attention. I’ve also noticed that my time spent in ‘me’ thoughts has also lessened over the years - once a very fascinating subject, it has now become boring. And the sensations are intriguing. They are actually extremely subtle - I could say faint - a kind of contraction that only becomes strong when something threatens me. For instance, tell me what I’m feeling, what my motivations are or bully me and the sense of a powerfully enraged self is instantly constellated not far from the surface.

Buddhism describes these instances of defensiveness as the activity of ‘self-cherishing‘. A protective reflex that is all about the defensive maintenance of our personal story. It says in effect, this is who I am and any threat to this I will try to counter. This idea is closely linked to the psychotherapeutic notion of narcissism. Nearly all of us have a narcissistic element within our personality, particularly when our experience of early childhood is one where the mirroring back of who we are has in someway been distorted or is absent. The two-year old toddler who gets mixed messages about what is OK or not at some point begins to make up their own personality - which is a great way of surviving except the self they create is one of a me-centred toddler who has yet to learn that mutually benefitting relationships are the way to go. In some respects this deep impulse for personal survival is actually a healthy thing. Richard Dawkins has even floated the idea of selfish genes whose sole purpose is their continuation as part of the survival of our species. But, again as the Dharma observes, the defensive element in our self-cherishing, in overly focusing on ourselves and our needs, in being biologically bent on self-survival, causes suffering. Something that is immediately obvious in anyone who is more deeply committed to their personal narrative than is usual - think ‘celebrities’, ‘fashion icons’, ‘influencers’, ‘extremist politicians’, all people with fragile egos.

As a psychotherapist I have spent my entire professional life helping people create self-narratives - stories about themselves - that are functionally more healthy than those they came with. In this sense psychotherapy is in part about the creation of personal myths. I have no problem with this - I’m with the psychologist and insight mindfulness teacher, Jack Engler, who a long time ago coined the phrase, "You have to be a somebody before you can be a nobody”. That is, we have to have a healthy sense of self before we begin to dissolve it. Engler understood this as a process of psychological unfolding and maturation. First we establish ourselves as a healthy human being functioning well in the world and then as this develops we began to loosen our identification with the reified sense of self we have created. Put more plainly we are robust enough to fall out of love with ‘all about me’ and move towards a greater reality. This is really where the complex Buddhist notion of emptiness functions in a very practical way. Our personalities, as necessary and desirable as they are, are ephemeral things that under scrutiny are no more than a quickly passing series of sensations. Sometimes faint, sometimes a tight contraction, sometimes entirely absent. The personal narratives we weave out of these are a two bladed sword - all the wonderful things about being a human are spun out of almost nothing, but then also are all our horrors and cruelties. Cling to the narrative strongly and it will come back and bite you. Let it go and relax and things get better.

NW. 7 April 2026