The following reflection originally appeared in the newsletter I sent out on August 7h, 2025.
Feel free to read just the bold words and skip the rest.
Introduction
Over the last few months, I’ve been sitting with the question, “what is humility?” and follow up questions, like, “why be humble?” and “how to be humble?”
On some level, humility is pretty straight forward. It’s an absence of pride and arrogance. A real down to earth quality. To not carry around a bunch of pretenses about how special and wonderful we are. Of course, on some level, all of us are special and wonderful (more on that below!), but I think you know what I mean.
It feels nice to be around humble people. They aren’t trying to convince you of anything. They don’t have hidden agendas.
They aren’t doing a bunch of social maneuvering, trying to get you to see them as competent, likable, or whatever else is en vogue. They are just themselves. They tend to be caring and kind. Open to learning. Open to feedback.
I feel at ease in the presence of true humility.
So what is it?
The best answer I’ve come up thus far is that humility means deeply understanding, “I am not the center of the universe.”
Intellectually, everyone knows that not even the sun, let alone “me” is the center of the universe. But emotionally it sure does feel like it sometimes.
Our ideas, feelings, sensations, and beliefs are the ones we tend and care for most of all — that is, the ones we feel are most important. Even if you say, “well I tend most of all my family, my company, or my planet,” notice there’s still that “my” in there.
To enter true humility, the task is to soften our clinging, reactivity, and the sense of “me.”
It’s to soften our need to become someone or something; to be special in relation to others. To relax our craving for a different or better world. To release the feeling that I am right and good, and everyone who disagrees with me is wrong and bad.
It’s a movement into loving what is, even if it’s painful.
Humility Wrong Turns
(1) True humility is not false modesty.
I can accurately tell you that I am not good at back flips.
However, if I told you I really didn’t know much about Buddhism, and I was still a beginner, that isn’t actually very accurate. I can see that I still have a lot to learn. That there are people who are far beyond my skill level. That it’s good to learn from those people, and to keep applying myself. That it would be delusional to call myself some great master who has it all figured out. All that can be true, and at the same time, I can see that there was a stage that I was a beginner, and I’m past that as well.
True humility is the ability to just call it like it is. Not make it personal. It’s to be more objective. It’s like this. We can notice our strengths and weaknesses.
True humility doesn’t have shame in the places of struggle nor pride in the places of excelling. It’s not about “me.” It’s just nature.
(2) True humility is not low self-regard
Typically, we find our sense of worth by evaluating how we are in relation to others (or our ideas of how we should be). One of the central delusions is I am better than, less than, or the same as. Pride is being caught in I am better than, low self-regard is caught in I am less than.
True humility is getting off that judgement ride altogether. It points to an infinitely positive self-regard, as we know our goodness doesn’t rely on being “good at something” or “better than average.”
Just the fact that we are here is enough to love ourselves (and everyone else).
(3) True humility is not moral relativism
An example of moral relativism is saying, “some people think apples covered in pesticides are healthier than organic, others think pesticide use makes no difference on the environment, and other people think pesticides are terrible for health and terrible for the environment and should be abandoned. Everyone is equally right. Whatever you believe in is good. Truth is relative.”
The above is not humility. It’s delusion.
True humility can take a stand, but without demonizing, othering, or making anyone bad or unworthy of love. We can disagree and even take pro-active action to protect or defend, but without all the pretenses and righteousness.
It strikes me that if someone is truly humble, their stand-taking is probably not very flippant or reactive. It comes from a deeper in-the-gut kind of knowing of what’s right and wrong.
Humble stand-taking also involves being open to being wrong. It’s about not being so fixed in our way of seeing or doing things. Humility knows understanding is never complete. Humility is open to learning.
A Personal Story Part 1
Life has felt like a big stream of humbling experiences.
When I was an adolescent, maybe it came through getting a bad grade on a test or having a girl I liked not reciprocate the interest. Or perhaps via putting myself to a new undertaking, like learning Spanish, and feeling pretty terrible at it for some long while.
Alternatively, growing into adulthood and trying to figure out how to support myself, take care of this body, and tend my relational life. Witnessing people die that I know and care about, knowing that the same fate awaits me. Having health issues that don’t lend an easy resolution, in spite of my best efforts to stay healthy.
Humbling. It’s all so very humbling.
If we’re paying attention, life is a steady stream of humility development opportunities. Of course, we could always bypass, deflect or blame our way out of actually learning. But what good is that!
Anyhow, two of the most humbling periods of my life occurred back-to-back.
First, I spent two years as a monk. I meditated a lot.
During that chapter, while there certainly were some humbling experiences, like having my teacher poke at me, or being acutely aware of how chaotic my mind was, there wasn’t exactly a single moment I can highlight that was “the humility moment.”
Rather, the humility came little by little through developing a strong and steady present-moment-awareness, and witnessing a million times over, the cascade of inner experience.
Intimately observing just how little control “I” actually have over how the body or mind feel, what the thoughts and emotions are doing, and on and on.
Witnessing the mind & body unfold a million times over, in crystal clarity, it started to sink in, “none of this is who I really am — I don’t have to believe those thoughts or react to those feelings.” It’s not personal. It doesn’t mean anything about “me” or “reality.”
The sum total of lots of Insight Meditation is to thoroughly dislodge the deep felt sense that “I am the center of the universe.”
On a level beneath words, I realized I’m just another person who wants to be well and not suffer, like everyone else. I was born to a mother and someday will die. Can I pass my days trying to help out?
I came out the other side of that two year retreat less argumentative. Less caught in my views. Less compelled to get my way. Less captivated by the desire to achieve something or become anything in particular.
My family noted I was more empathetic and kind.
A Personal Story Part 2
When I left the monastery, I took about a year to transition back, worked on a farm, and also re-initiated a relationship with an old girlfriend. The relationship crashed and burned — turns out we had both changed. I also saw some of my emotional & relational wounding that wasn’t really touched in a meditative environment. This was all quite humbling in itself — how could I, the accomplished meditator, “fail” so horribly at romance?
In the aftermath of that, I was back in Portland. No stable job or career. No community, save a single old friend. No reliable living situation. Almost no money. I floated myself with 0% APR credit cards for a time.
I had left monkhood coasting with a relaxed serenity. Spacious awareness came easily all across the day. I thought it would be like that forever. It seemed so stable.
As it goes, when life got difficult and all those things piled up, a sense of suffering returned. I noticed myself stressed and anxious. It’s not like all that meditative training disappeared. There was a deep understanding in my bones that this is not me; this is not ultimately a problem.
There was a layer of profound okayness within the chaos. And yet, there was chaos.
“It isn’t supposed to be like this,” said the mind, “Why is it so hard to find a job that pays a living wage?”
I just kept practicing, kept plodding along, patience, perseverant, and eventually my circumstances smoothed out enough. I nestled into community. I took a part time tech job that allowed me to get off the credit cards. I committed myself to teaching, not for personal gain, but for the love of the dhamma, whatever that may bring.
I look back and see that year or two as one of the most humbling periods of my life.
What made it so humbling was really the hidden delusion that “I” had achieved something great over in Myanmar, and that “it would be like this forever.”
That delusion had to brush up hard against reality. In the process, it also brought up all sorts of hidden emotional wounding, like the sense of being a failure or not good enough.
Part of the true humility process was realizing that just because I was having a hard time didn’t mean everything I’d learned was null and void. It didn’t mean my life was a waste. It just meant I was a regular human, like everyone else. Not great, not a failure. Just a person who happened to have meditated a lot.
I reflect on my teacher, Sayadaw U Tejaniya, who gave me a great lesson in humility. In spite of having tens of thousands of students, many books written, retreats filled to the grim, and various profound insights into the nature of reality, he never liked any moniker that made him sound like a great being.
He would typically say, “I’m just another practitioner on the path. If people come to me, I’ll share what I can and try to help.” And when I came to him in my lowest points, all I felt was acceptance & a normalization of what I was going through, even if not-so-Buddhist or meditative.
How to Develop Humility
It strikes me that all humility basically comes down to experiences of death.
In Buddhist jargon, humility happens when the three root causes of suffering — craving, aversion and delusion — die within us. Dislodging the sense of “I” am the center of the universe.
Of course, sometimes the trigger is something like the death of someone dear to us, or to a part of our life or ourselves, like moving to a new place where you know no one, or having an illness or injury that means you don’t do things like you have before. These all force us to re-consider our understanding or who we are and what life is about.
Perhaps the quickest route to humility is deeply understanding that one day I too will die, or more accurately, that I am already dying. That like every single human being on this planet, I am but a speck of dust in cosmological time.
Realizing in our bones that I am just as much nature as the oak tree, the wind or the squirrel. That being human doesn’t mean I transcend aging, illness, and death.
The death of our expectations or “cravings” for ourselves or our sense of how life is supposed to be. A coming to terms with the messiness of it all and a release of our righteousness.
A death of our desires, hopes and dreams, especially to become someone or something; to be special or above average. To really understand that even if we have some special skill like making money, flying airplanes, sitting still for hours without disturbance, or possessing societally-desired physical features, still in the scheme of things, we’re just another person with various strengths and weaknesses who will one day die.
A death of the idea or “delusion” that my good fortune has come through all my hard work or greatness, and not as a product of vast conditionality, like the country or family I was born into, or the privileges that I’ve been granted that have nothing to do with my actions, like being white, hetero, cis, or male.
Maybe it’s an ego death, like the sort of thing that happens through meditation, like I described above, where we realize we’re not who we thought we were. Read: you are not your thoughts, you are not your emotions, you are not your beliefs, you are not put-in-a-box-able.
Some of the above happen intentionally, like through meditation, psychedelics, or forms of education, like books, training or schooling. Most happen unintentionally through suffering. Suffering is always a great teacher, if we’re open to learning.
So how to develop true humility?
Sure you could go meditate a lot, read some books, and so on. But it’s entirely possible the ego could just co-opt all of that.
In turn, mostly open your eyes to the nature of death. Notice how your grand desires typically don’t work out just the way you want them to, like to always feel good and have the world bend to your will. Notice all the many delusions of “how it should be.”
Notice how these deaths could lead to despair, shame, or the yearning for something more — or, they could brighten you, like with what I describe below.
Basically, allow death to be a part of life. Allow yourself to be humbled. To feel your feet on the Earth. To see other beings as siblings in aging, illness, death and loss.
True humility is to release the yearnings and ideas of what should be and wake up to the reality that is.
What Opens with True Humility
As craving, aversion, and delusion begin to die within us, we open to interconnectedness.
We see that our specialness and uniqueness come not from being better than average or having a special talent, but from being part of the whole of the cosmos. We see that every person and every living being is part of this whole.
We likewise enter into deep gratitude. When we understand all the good fortune we’ve come into is not because of how great we are, but of myriad conditions conspiring in our favor, we can be grateful. A simple, humble thankfulness for this gift of life. Even in pain, how precious to be here.
Of course, what we do matters; what happens is not all random. Rather, it’s as if the current of life is the great Columbia River and we have a tiny little canoe going against the stream. It is important to steer this way or that, but by grace we have placed in a river, in a canoe, with a paddle, and along with many other canoers inspiring us to keep going.
In this way, true humility empowers us to be a more embodied, loving being, who isn’t so obsessed with getting an advantage for oneself or one’s “side.”
Grateful. Connected. Open.
Conclusion
There is a Middle Way between arrogance/pride on one side and shame/apathy on the other.
In that middle, there is a capacity to care deeply about oneself and other, and to endeavor to live that care, maybe even speaking firmly or acting decisively, but doing so without all taking-things-personally, self-comparisons, and holier than thou attitude.
I call this true humility — a mode where we soften the sense that “I” am the center of the universe and open to how “I” and everyone else are perfectly interconnected pieces of the cosmos.
And when we still get caught in all the noise. We struggle. We suffer. We criticize and demonize. We collapse into shame or puff ourselves up in hubris.
Well, we can be humble about that too. Even the best of us get caught sometimes. In all this mess of being human, we’re here, together, connected — and in it’s own way, there’s a perfection in that.
A deep bow of gratitude for being here with me.
May we all grow in humility and try to help out.
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