The Root of Apathy Exercise

The Root of Apathy Exercise 

This exercise is meant to help you discover what is at the root of any apathy you have towards self-care, self-compassion, self-love, and/or self-acceptance. 

From the list below, put a check by the statements that most relate to you. You can also write down additional statements.

• I just don’t care enough about my own welfare to regularly avoid doing things that are not good for my spiritual and material life and/or to regularly do things that are good for my material and spiritual life. (Note that some people exhibit a high level of material self-care and a low level of spiritual self-care, or vice-versa.) 
• I feel I don’t deserve to be happy, or that I even deserve to suffer and thus I sometimes engage in self-sabotaging behavior and often in self-sabotaging thinking. 
• I feel I am not good enough, worthy enough, etc. so I just don’t take care of myself as well as I should. 
• My identity is that I am a loser. Being self-caring is thus a contradiction. 
• I don’t have the patience to work on myself. This could also be because I feel I am a hopeless case, having tried to improve many times before. 
• I repress or suppress my emotions so I don’t feel the pain of not caring for myself. 
• I am addicted to instant gratification and am not motivated to do anything about it.  
• I have low self-esteem. I don’t feel worthy to be happy or to have a good life. 
• I lack willpower (being strongly influenced by ignorance), making it difficult for me to want to change/improve.
• I am imperfect and will never be perfect, so why try (all or nothing mentality). 
• I don’t feel good enough about myself or worthy enough, to be very self-caring.
• I am not happy with myself.
• I don’t like myself.
• I hate myself. 
• I am emotionally numb, perhaps to protect myself from feeling bad about myself.
• I find it difficult to improve myself because it is too painful for me to acknowledge my own faults.
• Self-care has never been something I thought much about or was taught to be important. 
• My expectations are so high that I can never fulfill them. Thus, I always feel like a failure. 
• Change is too hard – it takes too long and is too much work.
• I fear self-care will change who I am and then I’ll never be the same again. I don’t know what kinds of things it may bring up. 
• I feel loving myself is wrong; it is not Krishna conscious, and thus it makes me feel uncomfortable. 
• Loving myself is uncomfortable because I have lots of reasons not to love myself.  
• I am scared of being vulnerable. 
• I’m afraid I won’t do it ‘right’ (fear of failure).
• Are there other reasons?

Below, we have listed some possible reasons for the above. Put a check by the reasons that relate to you.  You can also write down additional reasons not listed or add more to the existing reasons.

1. It stems from my upbringing: the way I was treated/raised as a child, the culture I was  raised in, how the elders, caregivers, and/or teachers treated me, how my peers treated me, thus causing me to feel there is something wrong with me, or that I am bad, not enough, unworthy of love, or need to be perfect. 
2. It stems from the way I understand sastra: I use verses and purports as weapon against myself to make me feel guilty, useless, like a failure, etc. because I can’t live up to the high ideals of sastra. 
3. I feel that because I am not a perfect devotee, perfect disciple, perfect follower of Prabhupada, or even a good devotee, I deserve/expect to suffer. 
4. I believe I have treated others in a way that I deserve to suffer (or at least don’t deserve a great life). 
5. I believe that I have done so many bad things in my pre-Krishna conscious life that I deserve to suffer (or at least don’t deserve a good life). 
6. I don’t think Krishna loves me. I can give many reasons why I believe this. 
7. I have a guilty conscience and tend to feel everything I do is not good enough – or is even bad. 
8. I tend to focus more on what is wrong with me than what is right with me.
9. I am competitive or very insecure, so it makes me feel bad – or even sad – when I see others doing better than me. 
10. I am predisposed to do unhealthy things so I can numb painful emotions. 
11. I never thought self-care was important. I never learned to do it. There was never any preaching about self-care, but preaching about sacrificing, surrendering, giving up everything, etc. for the welfare of others. 
12. I fear not being enough for my superiors.
13. I am too hard on myself because I think it will motivate me. 
14. I feel guilty when I make mistakes because I think that it’s morally correct to feel this way.
15. I have low self-esteem or other emotional dysfunctions. 
16. I never learned to value myself but only to value others. 
17. I’m a perfectionist by nature. Sometimes my need to do things perfectly is to draw attention to myself or to or avoid being criticized. 
18. I think self-care is selfish. 
19. I think humility is to beat myself up or allow others to abuse me.
20. Because I don’t feel good about myself, or think a bad person like me should not feel good about oneself, self-care is incongruous with my mentality. 
21. Are there other reasons?

What needs to change for you to become more self-caring? 

What realizations did you get by doing this exercise?