Awakening is Not Self-Help

Let me clear the air on this mistaken idea~
Spiritual awakening has absolutely nothing to do with self-help, or self-esteem, or 'working on your self' as such.  The reason being is that if spiritual awakening is authentic and true it is about realizing that the self that you would 'help' or 'esteem' or 'work on' is an illusion.  And, not only is it an illusion it is the illusion from which all other illusions are created.  Spiritual awakening really has at its core a destruction of all these types of self-improvement projects, and a basic discovery of what one actually is, when the layer of self is removed.  This is not to say that there is no room for self-esteem or self-help within the scope of life, it is simply to say that if you're interested in the discovery of truth, you can't simultaneously be interested in building self-esteem or you go somewhat mad....
What spiritual awakening reveals is that what lies at the core of our being needs no improvement, no help, and has absolutely no need to be held in high esteem.  In fact, if anything, spiritual awakening puts our high esteem on a chopping block, and leaves us totally powerless to improve ourselves--so that we may wake up and see that what we are needs no change, needs no fixing. 
You could say that spiritual awakening becomes quite deep when we give up all the self focused striving, and begin to see that awakening is not about having a better 'me'.
Ironically, the self that we've been trying to fix is made whole in the radical discovery of what it actually is. 

Pathless Path

One of the most common questions that I hear come out of spiritual seekers is How.  How do I wake up?  How do I realize what I am?  How do I live the enlightened life?
One of the things that we are very much aware of but very much unwilling to see is that there really is no how.  We don't have some convenient formula or prescription for what awakening looks like, acts like, or even feels like.  And as soon s we adopt a particular concept of what it looks like, we have set the ground for another disillusionment, which comes when we realize that our concept of enlightenment doesn't fufill this deep need to live it. 
So what I often suggest is that we take the pathless path, the road that has no landmarks, signs, or pointers other than the immediacy of our experience as it is.  This pathless nature of the path often leaves minds very confused and bewildered as we jump from one concept to the next, one idea to the next.  If we just stop relying on our ideas and concepts and we give up this need for a prescription and how-to manual, what we begin to realize is that the path is living through us, not the other way around.  In other words, we have no control over the path, because it has always been in control.  If we try to control it, It eats us up....if we allow it to take over we are left with the Heart of the Truth.  The fiery immediacy of this pathless path will shows all that Is, not because we do it right, or get it somehow...but because that is just what it does.