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.