The Danger of Pride

It seems there’s always a missing piece of the puzzle for me. The one I’ve discovered most recently was pride. How it hid from me, worked all kinds of trouble behind the scenes, and what I’ve done about it since. Without further ado, here’s my take on pride.

After my experiment a few months ago, I felt more at peace than any other time in my life. Continuing to work through negativity kept me in that state almost constantly, regardless of what was going on around me. However, I started regressing about halfway through October. Despite continuing to let go, I’d find myself feeling upset, suspicious, or generally uncomfortable around other people. Situations that once seemed easy now felt difficult and difficult situations now seemed impossible. I felt as if everyone were secretly out to get me and I couldn’t do anything right. Why did I feel that way if I had all this newfound inner peace and strength?

Pride. I use “pride” interchangeably with “conceited”, “arrogant”, or “egotistical”. Looking down on others, thinking I’m more spiritually advanced than they are, and believing that I’ve overcome challenges that they haven’t yet are a few examples of pride that I notice in my life. Additionally, I now understand how pride is behind the feeling that I’m responsible for how everyone else feels, what they do in life, the quality of their day, etc. As if I know all the answers or I am supposed to make everything turn out in a particular way.

Pride also works in the other direction by making me think that other people are responsible for my feelings, making sure I have a good time, etc. This makes it easy to feel bad about myself whenever someone speaks negatively about me. If my sense of self is based on the opinions of others, then however I feel about myself is going to vary depending on who I’m around and what they think of me, even if it’s inaccurate. In contrast, if my sense of self is based on the deep knowledge of who I am, then I’ll feel secure enough in myself to remain unaffected by what anyone says, whether it’s positive or negative.

My experience aligns what David Hawkins says about pride in Letting Go. A particular quote from that book that resonated quite strongly with me was “Defensiveness invites attack.” This helped me realize how pride was keeping me feeling sensitive to nearly every seemingly negative word, action, and facial expression from those around me. I was constantly on guard for any sign of attack rather than being able to relax and find peace within myself. This was exacerbated by the fact that, for me, pride is closely connected to anger. The more pride I’m holding onto, the easier it is for me to feel angry and the harder it is for me to move past anger. As the pride goes out, so does the anger.

These realizations hit me like a ton of bricks. Since then, working through pride has given me back the deep inner peace I had in September after my initial experiment. One way around pride I’ve found is simply feeling good about myself (or anything else in my life) rather than feeling boastful, egotistical, or superior to anyone else. Another huge part of this process has been giving myself grace to be imperfect, accepting myself along with my flaws, forgiving myself for past mistakes, and going easy on myself for not having it all together. This has made it easier to relax and accept the fact that I’m not responsible for everything. Having less pride also makes it easier to communicate effectively since I’m more patient when listening to other people and I can avoid feeling upset if they disagree with me or respond differently than I had hoped they would. Those are the benefits I’ve found so far of releasing some pride. I look forward to seeing what else happens as I continue letting go of pride whenever it comes up.