Everyone should undergo an entitlement detox and cleanse their spirit to cultivate gratitude and compassion.
The Mahayana path in Buddhism focuses a practitioner on developing compassion so that when enlightenment is achieved, the practitioner will not be trapped in personal bliss and instead work to benefit other beings. Without this compassion training, many who find inner peace spend their lives in solitude and do little to improve the world.
With extensive training in compassion, enlightened beings become a powerful force for good, enriching all beings they come in contact with.
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The Mahayana path is a step-by-step process of building compassion from the basis of affectionate love for mother and family and extending that love to all living beings. Each step on the path is essential to arrive at the proper destination, full enlightenment.
People all have a unique Karma and life experience. Often these factors can contribute to spiritual growth, even if the choices were unwise and the experiences negative and painful.
However, sometimes, people can develop barriers to personal growth caused by faulty beliefs that prevent them from taking the proper steps forward.
The Path to Enlightenment
The Mahayana path can be conceived as many related steps as follows:
- Remembering the affectionate love of your mother or close family member. Traditionally, Buddhists focus on a mother’s love, but for those with a poor mother relationship, a grandparent, extended family member, or even a close friend can serve as this basis. The important point is to vividly remember the feelings of mutual affectionate love, preferably not sexual love which is often laden with attachment.
Tibetan Buddhist Lamrim: Recognizing That all Living Beings Are Our Mothers
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- Recognizing the kindness of your mother or special person, and imagining that every person you meet was special to you in a previous life. Just because you don’t remember their kindness doesn’t mean you were not the recipient of their affectionate love and kindness at some point in the past. This allows you to extend the love of your mother to other people.
Tibetan Buddhist Lamrim: Remembering the Kindness of All Living Beings
- Once you recognize the kindness you received from others, feelings of gratitude and the desire to repay that kindness will naturally arise. Some people feel blocked here by feelings of lack or jealousy. Those people will need more work on applying the opponents of giving and rejoicing.
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- Once you feel the wish to repay the kindness of others, and you’ve extended that wish to all living beings, you feel universal love.
- From universal love springs compassion, the desire to see all beings be freed from pain and suffering.
- From compassion springs wholehearted resolve to alleviate the pain and suffering all all living beings.
- The only known method for alleviating suffering of all beings is to obtain enlightenment. Therefore, the wholehearted resolve to liberate all beings becomes the wholehearted resolve to obtain enlightenment. Buddhists call this feeling Bodhicitta, the key element of the Mahayana path.
- Enlightenment is only achieved when you have the wholehearted desire to achieve it.
The Barrier Built by a Sense of Emotional Entitlement
An emotional sense of entitlement refers to a pervasive belief that one deserves more or is inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment, without regard to others’ needs or efforts.
This mindset is often characterized by unrealistic expectations for favorable treatment and an excessive focus on one’s own desires and rights, at the expense of consideration, empathy, and reciprocity towards others.
Individuals with a strong sense of entitlement may exhibit frustration, anger, or disappointment when their expectations are not met, and they may struggle to acknowledge or appreciate the contributions and needs of others.
This attitude can hinder personal relationships, professional environments, and personal growth, as it opposes the development of virtues like gratitude, compassion, and humility, which are essential for healthy, balanced emotional and spiritual development.
In order to overcome this problem, Tibetan Buddhist Lamrim has special teachings and meditations intended to reduce one’s self importance and increase the importance one places on the happiness of other beings.
Tibetan Buddhist Lamrim: The Disadvantages of Self-Cherishing
Tibetan Buddhist Lamrim: The Advantages of Cherishing Others
Emotional entitlement is directly opposed to gratitude. Anyone who feels entitled to whatever they receive perceives the kind acts of others as the compelled act of a debtor.
Where they should perceive kindness, instead they perceive obligation.
This stops the natural arising of the desire to repay kindness, and the entire step-by-step progression of spiritual growth is stopped cold.
Anyone who has been in an interpersonal relationship with someone with a sense of entitlement will recognize this effect.
Have you ever given generously to a significant other, and instead of receiving thanks or feeling of gratitude, you feel like you weren’t even acknowledged? Did that make you want to be generous in the future?
No one wants to give to someone who feels entitled to the gift. There is no emotional reward, no payback for the kindness.
While some may argue that giving should be completely selfless and without any expectation, it’s also true that when a gift is received humbly and with gratitude, it’s far more rewarding for both the giver and the receiver.
Perhaps the giver should not expect gracious acknowledgment, but when the receiver provides this acknowledgment of the kindness they receive, both parties benefit, and the relationship is strengthened.
As a spiritual practice, acknowledging every benefit you receive as an act of another’s kindness is a superior way to go through life, bringing happiness to yourself and others.
