For decades, a prayer has circulated in the background of my daily life: may I trust my own goodness. May I see the goodness in others. This longing emerged from a deep place of suffering I went through as a young adult. During that dark time, I felt anxious and depressed, separate from the world around me. I was continually judging myself as falling short, not good enough, doubting my basic worth. That, of course, kept me from feeling close and connected to others and to the world. It blocked me from feeling creative, stopped me from being fully alive.

It feels like grace that this “trance of unworthiness” led me onto a spiritual path that showed me how to hold myself with compassion. This allowed me to see through the layers of judgment and doubt and to discover beneath them, clarity, openness, presence, and love. Increasingly over the years, my trust in this loving awareness as the essence of who we all are has become a guiding light. No matter how wrong or lacking we may feel, how caught in separation, or how trapped by the messages, violations, and inequities of the society we live in, this basic goodness remains the essence of our Being.

A beautiful story holds within it this truth. During the mid-1950s in Bangkok, Thailand, a huge clay statue of the Buddha began to crack due to heat and drought. When some monks arrived to investigate, they shined a flashlight into the largest of the cracks. What they saw surprised everyone. Deep under the gray clay was the gleam of gold.

No one had known that inside this popular, but ordinary-looking statue was a solidgold Buddha. As it turns out, the statue had been covered with plaster and clay six hundred years earlier to protect it from invading armies. Although all the monks who lived in the monastery at the time had been killed in the attack, the golden Buddha, it’s beauty and value covered over, had survived untouched. Trusting the Gold: Uncovering Your Natural Goodness. Excerpt from the book by Tara Brach For decades, a prayer has circulated in the background of my daily life: may I trust my own goodness. May I see the goodness in others. This longing emerged from a deep place of suffering I went through as a young adult. During that dark time, I felt anxious and depressed, separate from the world around me. I was continually judging myself as falling short, not good enough, doubting my basic worth. That, of course, kept me from feeling close and connected to others and to the world. It blocked me from feeling creative, stopped me from being fully alive.

Just as the monks disguised the beauty of the golden Buddha, in order to protect it during dangerous times, we cover our own innate purity and goodness as we encounter a challenging world. As children, many of us were criticized, ignored, misunderstood, or abused, leading us to doubt that gold within us. As we grow up, we increasingly internalize the judgments and values of our society, further losing touch with our innocence, our creativity, and our tender hearts. We cover over the gold as we seek the approval of others, looking to them to measure our worth-to determine whether we are good enough, smart enough, successful enough. And if we are part of a non-dominant group in our culture, we take on additional layers of protection to help us face the violence of social injustice and oppression.

Adding layer after layer to protect ourselves, we become identified with our coverings, believing ourselves to be separate, threatened, and deficient. Yet, even when we cannot see the gold, the light and love of our true nature cannot be dimmed tarnished, or erased. It calls to us daily through our longing for connection, our urge to understand reality, our delight in beauty, our natural desire to help others. Our deepest intuition is that there is something beyond our habitual story of a separate and isolated self: something vast, mysterious, and sacred.

What helps us uncover that gold? How can we learn to trust the pure awareness and love, the basic goodness that is our very essence? How can our lives be an active expression of our natural wisdom and kindness? And how can we respond with a wise heart to the human ignorance, greed, and hatred that perpetuates violence toward each other, racial and other cast systems, cruelty toward nonhuman animals, and destruction of our living Earth?

...We begin with learning to recognize the Truth of our experience by opening to life, just as it is. Then we discover how to awaken our inherent capacity to meet this ever-changing life with Love. This unfolding of presence and love reveals the Freedom of our true nature.

Even though the gold of your true nature can get buried beneath fear, uncertainty, and confusion, the more you trust this loving presence as the truth of who you are, the more fully you will call it forth in yourself and in all those you touch. And in our communities, as we humans, increasingly remember that gold, we’ll treat each other, and all beings with a growing reverence, and love.