“Confidence in the goodness of another is good proof of one’s own goodness.” -Michel de Montaigne

Many relationships suffer from a lack of self-esteem. A relationship’s self-esteem is connected to that of the partner’s but it also has a life of its own. Genuine esteem is founded in the courage to see oneself truly, both the positive and negative aspects of who we are and how we function and malfunction in the world. This path, which the Buddhists have called the path of the warrior, instructs that even through struggle and difficulty, we thrive in the openness of true knowing and seeing. The courage to confront the brittle edges and the messy corners of our own life and how we relate to others offers its own reward: acknowledging our brokenness is also the gateway to our ability to bear witness to our own basic goodness.

“Whenever you see a bright and beautiful color, you are witnessing your own inherent goodness. Whenever you hear a sweet and beautiful sound, you are hearing your own basic goodness. Whenever you taste something sweet or sour, you are experiencing your own basic goodness…. Things like that are always happening to you, but you have been ignoring them, thinking that they are mundane and unimportant, purely coincidences of an ordinary nature…. Slowly, you begin to realize that you are able to feel the freshness of realizing your own goodness, again and again.”  -Chögyam Trungpa

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