How To Stop Believing You Are Not Enough

The loudest voice in your head might not be telling the truth. When the world feels more divided and more cruel, it gets easier to assume other people are bad and to quietly suspect the same about ourselves. 

I sit down with Buddhist teacher and author Lodro Rinzler to challenge that reflex with a grounded idea that’s both ancient and deeply practical: basic goodness. Not as a slogan, but as something you can recognise in real time, in your body, and in the most ordinary moments of your day.

We get specific about how shame and “not enoughness” take over, and why the stories we repeat can become a cocoon that blocks intimacy, courage, and joy. 

Lodro shares simple mindfulness and meditation practices for seeing thoughts as thoughts, loosening identity labels like “I’m an anxious person”, and returning to what’s actually happening right now. We also explore a helpful bridge to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: acceptance is not giving up. When we meet the present clearly, we become more skilful, more honest, and more able to take action without burning ourselves out.

Then we zoom out to the culture we’re swimming in: subtle advertising, status pressure, and consumerism that profit from insecurity. We talk about why deeper practice and meditation retreats can “reveal the water” and restore perspective, compassion, and agency. If you’re searching for self-worth, emotional resilience, and practical tools for mindfulness, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs it, and leave a review with the moment that hit you hardest.

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Transcript

Welcome And Introducing Lodro

SPEAKER_01 0:00

All right. Welcome everyone. My name is Sean Fargo. Welcome to the Mindfulness Exercises podcast. Today I have the honor of speaking with Lodro Rinsler, someone who I've been a fan of for, I'm guessing, about 15 years now, maybe more. I discovered Lodro in a bookstore. It might have been a spirit rock meditation center or a Bayagiri monastery. But he wrote a book that really caught my eye called The Buddha Walks Into a Bar. When I saw the title, I thought, oh, that seems a little different. And I opened it up and learned about Lodro and discovered that he is a very deep mindfulness practitioner and esteemed Buddhist teacher. So Lodro, with your new book, You Are Good. What led you to write this book now? Was there something that you were seeing in people or in yourself that felt especially important to address at this time?

SPEAKER_00 1:10

It's always funny because, particularly in traditional publishing, there's this long tale. So this is a book that I wrote before my daughter was even born. As you noted, she's almost three now. I don't think a lot has changed in these few years. I think the reasons may have intensified. Namely, two things really. A lot of divisiveness within society, people really finding new stamina to be really cruel to each other now that we have all these ways of commenting on Facebook posts or doing just like nasty things to people online. And just the level of divisiveness, I think it's really got going around at this point almost a decade ago, with some big political shifts, but then it got intense in the pandemic and people saying, No, you're not doing what I think you should be doing. And I think the various forms of forgive the term fundamentalism in people's rigidity of thinking is only intensified. And we're starting to approach this time where we're saying, well, anyone who doesn't agree with me is fundamentally wrong or bad. Whereas, of course, as you noted, I was raised within the Buddhist tradition that says, actually, we're fundamentally good. That's who we are. And to recognize that in each other, I think is something that we really need to begin doing more of as individuals. And then the second reason is that sense that a lot of the people I work with in the last bazillion years have been teaching. I'm noticing an increasing trend in people starting to doubt their own goodness. People are giving in more and more to that little insidious voice in their own head saying, actually, you know, if Loder really knew me, he wouldn't say that about me. Whatever people's version of that may be. And some people, it is people, once they get to know me, they don't actually want to date me anymore. Or for some people, it's no one's going to want to hire me because they don't understand that sometimes I slack off. Sometimes it's this person wouldn't want to be friends with me if they knew what I was really like. Whatever our version of not enoughness is, we reify that into such a strong identity that ultimately we end up making our life very small. So the fundamental shift that this book, You Are Good, You Are Enough, is approaching is saying, what if we shifted the perspective from not enoughness to working with the techniques about how we settle into recognizing that our basic state is not messed up. Our basic state is good, it's whole, it's complete. If we shift our perspective from I'm basically broken to I'm not messed up at all, there's I'm not in need of fixing, I'm okay as I am. Then we actually start to view our whole life and everyone we encounter through that lens. And that can be really transformative for us, and I'll go so far as to say for society.

Naming Basic Goodness Like Blue

SPEAKER_01 3:46

Well, that's a pretty big shift for a lot of people in the world right now who have this ingrained perception of themselves as being not good enough or fundamentally flawed or even bad? So I'm curious when people hear this, that we are all inherently good and enough, how might you address the skepticism that may come? Like, are there certain teachings or evidence that you can point to or practices that you can lead them through to kind of unpack levels of either shame or not enoughness?

SPEAKER_00 4:28

Yeah, it is interesting. I imagine you find this in your teaching as well, that it's just different levels of the same thing. So for some people, I can just say, hey, there's this thing you may not know, which is this term basic goodness, but you've probably already experienced little moments of it. Let me continue to highlight it for you. And sometimes that's all it takes. But he used the example in the book about how the word blue didn't exist in language until about 4,500 years ago, which is not that long ago in the grand scheme of it. But if you look at some of these ancient ch texts in Hebrew, Chinese, Greek, there's nothing there that says blue, which is crazy. But then it gradually made its way into our language. And now, when I look up at the sky, someone must have told me that's blue. I did this with my daughter once I learned about this. That I said, you know, I'm just gonna take you outside real quick. You see that? That's blue. And now she knows blue is everywhere. The same thing can be said for basic goodness. Sometimes it's something we may have experienced, but we don't even have a name for it. But by putting a name on it, just pointing at the experience itself, that can be transformative. And it is as simple as now that I've recognized it once, I recognize it everywhere. Same thing as if someone pointed out blue. For us, that could be all it takes. But a lot of times, as you noted, there are a lot of layers of shame, mistakes, guilt that cover over that realization. So we might even, to give a specific example, be meditating, doing mindfulness with a breath practice. And there's a moment where we notice we're not spiraling in anxiety or fear, and we're just present. And we say, Oh, this feels basically good. Is this what they're talking about? And then we start second guessing it and then we go back. But that's it. It's a simple, very ordinary experience. It's not transcendental, it's not something you need to work toward. It is very ordinary and very common. But the more I notice it on the cushion, then when I, you know, I went for a run earlier. I got at home, I went and took a shower, and the warm water hit my back, and my shoulders dropped, and I was present for that experience. And I noticed, oh, this is basic goodness too. Before I got on the line, I hugged my daughter, she's a big hug. And they're 100% with her, basic goodness. So there's these moments, and we start to string these moments together to a continuity of basic goodness. It's very helpful we start recognize them on the meditation cushion itself. But to the shame and guilt of it all, it does take a lot of us letting go of the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves that are not helping in any way, shape, or form in order to remember that experience. Because those stories wrap us up. A common term that I use in this book is that of a cocoon. It's like we have these little threads of this story about myself, that story about myself, and they spiral around us to the point that we can't even interact with the world around us. We are cocooned off from it. Meditation is a really good tool for acknowledging those thoughts, cutting through, coming back. And like that is a way of slowly spreading open that cocoon and peering out that the world around us so that we actually are fully present with it in ourselves in a way that the experience of basic goodness becomes not a philosophy or dogma in any way, but our own genuine experience. It's our personal experience, and that's what I'm really hoping for for everyone.

Breaking The Cocoon Of Stories

SPEAKER_01 7:37

That's a cocoon spiraling of stories, as you mentioned, can wrap around us pretty tightly sometimes. I'm wondering if you can speak to the fear that some of us have of even acknowledging those stories or that cocoon that's wrapped around us. And how do we approach that cocoon or those stories in order to be released from it?

SPEAKER_00 8:06

Similar to the color blue and basic goodness, I think it's one of those things that first we just need to acknowledge it. And then we start to see it for real. The cocoon might look like I use the example of anxiety a moment ago, it might be the distinction between I'm currently feeling anxiety and I'm an anxious person. This is who I am. And I'm guessing someone listening to this is like, yes, that is me. I am an anxious person. I've been anxious all my life. Now I don't want to come off as judgmental or too pushy, but I think it's worth examining those stories and saying, is that necessarily who I am all the time? No, of course not. There are moments where there's relaxation, there's moments where there's relief or release. So if that's not our 100% experience all the time, then we can start to let go of the story of I am this person, I'm an angry person, I'm an anxious person, I am an overwhelmed person, and start to notice that is part of what's happening. So that slight shift from this is who I am to this is one of the things happening right now is really powerful because it moves us from that place of this is a cocoon that's happening to me versus this is something that I am sort of reinforcing moment by moment. So the Buddha, a bazillion years ago, said anger is not one thing. It is an experience that we then keep adding to. It is a moment by moment experience. I think that is a good example, actually, because if let's say I get angry about something, I could read the news and say, oh, that politician or a jerk or whatever, I could tell myself that story and then I can come back to what's happening. Or I could tell myself that story all day long. And every time I tell myself that story, I am extending that experience of anger. I'm intentionally reifying it. Sometimes it feels good to be self-righteous. Oh, I'm right in this pursuit. Right. And then what happens though is we exhaust ourselves. Like, why am I so tired at the end of my day? Why do I feel so emotionally exhausted? It's because I've been holding myself in a state of tension. So ultimately, long term, we realize this is not actually serving me. And it didn't help shift the needle in terms of what that politician's doing or any of it. So if I'm only hurting myself, another analogy that's commonly used from the time of the Buddha, it's like holding onto a hot coal that it's only going to burn ourselves. With all of that in mind, we have to start noticing the things that we do in the comfort of our own mind that are not actually helpful. And it could be telling ourselves stories about how we're not good enough to ask that person out or ask for a promotion or whatever. It could be stories around anxiety and what if this happens, what if that happens? It could be something else entirely. But once we start to recognize those stories, then we say, well, now I realize I actually have a choice around how I spend my mental energy, whether I continue to perpetuate them or whether I actually just come back to the present moment. Again, this is where meditation comes so helpful because it creates these new neural pathways that allow us to do that more readily. So a little bit of meditation training goes a long way in the post-meditation experience of acknowledging stories that aren't serving us, coming back to the present moment. And again, as you said, starting to unweave that cuckoo.

Acceptance And Commitment Work Together

SPEAKER_01 10:58

Thank you. I've been exploring acceptance and commitment therapy lately as a paradigm of healing and growth. I really like that combination of acceptance and commitment. I think that a lot of your book speaks to the acceptance piece of accepting ourselves, accepting our experience with this sense of care and warmth and love. I think that so much of our Western culture gets wrapped up in, say, the commitment part of life where we are committed to changing the world, helping others, providing for our families, growing internally, but often out of a sense of not accepting ourselves. I think your book is speaking largely to the acceptance part, which is so important. I imagine a lot of people being afraid of, say, reading your book and practicing the acceptance part, thinking that they need to then drop the commitment part or the change or action part, thinking that we have to do one or the other, that it's hard to do both. Can you speak to the importance of both and how you reconcile deepening, say, the acceptance part while also holding, say, intention to also grow and change?

SPEAKER_00 12:36

Accepting ourselves as we are essentially, and also how do we grow at the same time? Absolutely. It almost sounds like these things would be in conflict. Sometimes I get a question of like, hey, if we're present all of the time, how do we think about the future? Which is a similar question, perhaps not as nuanced as the one you just asked. For whatever reason, I always flash back to this moment on the television show Friends, where Chandler Bing asks some sort of question, and he says, Yeah, that's a problem that is about the same as me having diamond shoes being too tight and my wallet is too small for my 50s. And I think that's about right, which is like if we really accepted ourselves as we are, how would we ever grow as people? How would we commit to positive action? My experience of this, and this is something that I tested the metal of because all of my teachers kept saying, This is a thing, this is how this goes. And I go, let me see, let me see. It's been my experience too, which is when we are actually 100% present, we learn how to be skillful. We learn how to meet the moment as it is and act in the most accordance with what is needed of us and the best way that we can grow. If we are not 100% present, we are not reading the situation clearly, and we are starting to act in ways that are perhaps going to cause harm to ourselves or others. So there is this sense of really trying to meet the present moment 100%, which is that sense of acceptance. Both self-acceptance, as you said, you know, actually accepting ourselves as we are, the quote unquote good, bad, and ugly, but also meeting the moment as it is, this world we're in, and saying, I'm here for all of it, not trying to edit out some of our experience and say, Oh, I'm here for all of it, except for that beeping noise in the background or whatever it might be. Right. It's like I'm here for all of it, is the point. And then out of that, when I'm fully present, I say, Well, this is a great experience for me to be really patient with this person, or this is really a good experience for me to be very generous with this person, or this is a good experience for me to practice boundaries with this person, whatever it might be, that is the most appropriate thing. But if I'm not seeing the situation clearly, I'm not going to do it. So I think those go hand in hand, not to make it too chicken and egg, but I would say the more we accept ourselves as we are, the more we accept this moment and meet it for what it is, the more we see the change that needs to happen. So it's not just, and again, I'll come back to sort of world events. Oh, the world's on fire and I accepted it, everything's great. That's not what I do. With a book like You're Good, You're Enough, you think it'd be Pollyanna. It is not. I pride myself in being a practical human being that actually really says, no, there's a lot of effing suffering out there. Let's look at that through this lens and see how that transforms our experience of what we experience, our personal suffering, our interpersonal suffering, the suffering of society. What we're really looking at here is this sense of when I look 100% at my own suffering, the suffering within my relationships, within the society around me, how can I show up most skillfully? I went through an obnoxious activism phase in my late teens, early twenties. I got arrested and did like these sort of big protest arrests. And it was basically me not knowing how to work with what I saw as injustice in the world and just yelling constantly at anyone that came across me. One particular big protest arrest really sort of shook me by the shoulders. I said, This isn't effective for me, which is not to negate anyone who's doing that. But for me personally, I was saying, this isn't the best way for me to help. I still go to protest. I took my daughter to one not that long ago. But it was more of a peaceful situation than what I used to do in my late teens, early twenties. It wasn't coming from a place of I'm angry and I need to yell at everyone. It was a different intention. So I think that there's something here of like when we slow down, we say, Well, how do I help? I happen to be a meditation teacher. I'm just trying to do as much good work as I can from that lens of offering tools that I think bring peace to individuals. Something that TikN has taught extensively about is in a lot of his writings, is the fact that we could look at warfare, for example, as a massive topic out there. But then when we look at it as an internal topic, how do I create warfare in my own mind, in my own life? Then it becomes very personal. And then it becomes something that we can do something about. And from there, everything that we do is like a stone thrown in a pool of water. First, when we throw this stone, we see an initial splash, but we actually don't ever really see how far those ripples will go. We forget the truth of interdependence that the Buddha taught so extensively. It means that whatever goodness we're putting into the world has an effect on society overall. So I know I took this very large from acceptance and commitment, rather, but I do think that those two go hand in hand, and that the stepping stone of acceptance can lead to us committing to really positive activity that can have really deep impact. But a lot of it is us seeing things clearly as a result of that acceptance.

Culture That Trains Not Enoughness

SPEAKER_01 17:17

Yeah, beautiful. You brought up the image of you hugging your three-year-old daughter before we spoke, and you were very present with her. I just imagine you telling her and conveying to her that you are good, you are enough. And I think that's the kind of message that we all crave as kids and also as adults. As a dad myself, I certainly try to convey that to my six-year-old daughter as much as possible. As kids, if we are so fortunate to receive those messages explicitly or implicitly, life happens over the decades, and we come across many different kinds of messages in our culture, from our schooling, from our friends, from the internet now. I'm wondering if you can speak to some of those, say, unhelpful messages that we may come across in our culture. If there's any nuance messages that you think we could bring more awareness to that may undermine our sense of goodness and enoughness. Television commercials and billboards are a more obvious form of messaging of not enoughness, not being good enough, like we need to buy the makeup or the widget at Walmart. Can you speak to some of the more nuanced, subtle messaging that we receive in our culture that helps reinforce this sense of not enoughness or not good enoughness?

SPEAKER_00 19:03

Oh, yeah. I mean, hey, if you want a rant against capitalism, I've got 10. It is the water that we swim in. So I think it is very easy for many of us to say, I blame my parents. They raised me to believe that I'm wrong or bad. And maybe that is the case. And if so, I'm extremely sorry. But I think a lot of parents really do try their best to communicate some sense of, oh no, you're good. I feel very fortunate that it was sort of like a conscious guiding principle when I was growing up. I was raised Buddhist and my parents had been practicing before I was born. So it really was the sort of speaking in the water, you swim in like that was the experience. When something goes wrong for a kid, a kid might say, I'm bad. But basic goodness is I'm human and humans make mistakes. And that was the culture I was raised in, was the sense of like if something went wrong, it's that you're human in your learning as opposed to, you know, you're a bad kid or something. I do think that maybe I'm downplaying how often people might have heard that in their household. So I apologize for that experience for you, but it's often transcends that. It's schooling, it's the playground bully, it's the, as you said, just the ubiquitous advertising. My wife has a story. She came home one day when we were living in New York City. This is long before we were married or had a kid. There was an ad that I never thought much about, but it was just sort of like tasteless. And it was a woman, two photos of her side by side, and one of them had her holding lemons up by her chest. And in the next photo, she had cantaloupes in her hands. And it was for breast augmentation surgery. There was this young girl, probably about your daughter's age, actually, with her father. And she said, Daddy, why is that woman sad in that photo and then she's happy in the other photo? And to his credit, this guy was like, Oh, yeah, okay. Well, maybe she doesn't like lemons. Lemons don't taste very good. Cantaloupes taste great. What sort of fruit do you like? And so I'm like, I was just, oh my gosh, that is drilling a particular message into the minds of young beings. I feel like it's everywhere. It is. It's the Subway ad, it's the playground bully, it's anything. I hate that this small insidious voice of not enoughness is starting to seep into my own child despite my best intentions. What if that kid doesn't want to play with me? It just breaks my heart when I see it. There's this sense of like, oof, maybe not everyone's gonna be friendly. That is the world we live in. To approach that world through that lens feels very monstrous to me. I just feel very passionate about this. It's really hard. So these messages, if we believe we're broken, we're gonna treat others as broken too. So it goes beyond just as individuals internalizing, it's also how we outly treat each other. You are not the worst thought about yourself, but many of us cling to it so tightly. I think if Sharon Salzberg frequently will refer to a previous guest on your show, I know, will frequently say that if we saw someone saying some of the things we say in our own head to our best friend, just some of the mean stuff, we would get right in their face and we go, You can't say that about my friend. How dare you? That is horrible. But we do it to ourselves all the time. So it is that voice that we're talking about today, that insidious voice, what is often referred to in Buddhist circles as the trap of doubt, not doubt like, oh, I doubt I look good in yellow. More of a deep-rooted doubt, a doubt in not enoughness, because we have heard so many of these stories through family, maybe our school, maybe our religious institution, any number of it, that just got under the skin just enough to make us doubt that we're basically good. So it is insidious, it is all over the place, and it is the water we swim in because capitalism needs us to actually believe that we are not okay. Because if we believe we're not okay, then we're gonna try and get something that'll fix us. I don't think I'm skinny enough. I'm going to go on all of the types of new medicine that they have to sort of do weight modulation and stuff like that. I apologize, I don't know much about that, but that's everywhere now too, right? If I don't feel good about my skin, I can get makeup and cover up my skin. So if we actually just felt okay about ourselves, going back to acceptance, if we accepted ourselves as we are, those industries would just fall into the ocean. They rely on us doubting that we're okay as we are to sell us things. But I think for anyone who's listening to this, they probably have tried some of those things and said that didn't work. I still am not feeling a sense of contentment or okay as I am. So maybe I need to look internally. And I think that's why I love doing these conversations, because if that's you listening to this right now, please check out the book, You Are Good, You Are Enough. It's meant for you. It's for people that actually understand that they can make different choices with their minds to actually focus on the goodness that's underlying all of these stories that are not serving us and to live their life through that lens.

Retreats That Reveal The Water

SPEAKER_01 23:38

Yeah. And for those listening and watching, we'll have a link to you are good, you are enough in the show notes and the description below. When you talk about the water that we swim in, this insidious trap of doubt that can seem like it's all around us and it's hard for us to have perspective of because we're in it. And it just reminds me of these times, say, after a meditation retreat, where we effectively like sensitize ourselves to the water where we're able to see the water for what it is a little bit more clearly because we've settled our own mind and heart, and then we see these stories and the messages more clearly. So this is just a plug for just meditation in general.

SPEAKER_00 24:30

But also deep meditation is what you're referring to, which is so important. No shame to anyone who is doing 10 minutes a day. That's really wonderful. But I find that when people push themselves a little bit beyond that comfort level, either to do longer sits, 20, 30 minutes, or to do a half day or a full-day retreat, or to go away for a week. They find that the equation of how much distraction they're allowing into their life versus how much time they're present just starts to shift slightly. And they say, oh, sort of like supercharging my practice. I'm feeling more connected to these qualities within myself that I want to cultivate.

SPEAKER_01 25:03

Absolutely. Yeah, even just a few days can dramatically shift our perspective. And sometimes it can feel jolting to then re-enter our society or watch the news feeds and kind of get a sense for what we were swimming in before. I remember after my time as a monastic going to my parents' house and they had the news on. And between the news itself and the commercials in between, it was huge shock to the system to see oh wow, this is the water that many people are swimming in, and my heart just opened to them. So I do highly recommend people to take retreats, schedule retreats.