The fourth strength, reproach, is the courage to accept your faults. As a reminder, the seventeenth lojong slogan says, “Practice the five strengths, the condensed heart instructions.” The first three strengths are determination, familiarization, and seed of virtue. The fourth is, trickily enough, called reproach.

This does not mean bashing yourself. It means being very honest with yourself. There’s an old Kadampa saying that encourages us to carry a torch that’s powerful enough to illuminate our depths. And that means both the good and the uh, not so good.

Traleg Kyabgon says, “In order to penetrate the layers of self-deception we’ve created around ourselves, we need to undertake regular self reflection.” So, this heart strength is about getting underneath those layers of ego that say, “Nope! Not me! Everything’s fine here!” And, as the wisdom goes, if we’ve been practicing determination and familiarization and seed of virtue, this should feel less scary to us. You find you have the courage to accept your faults if you’ve just honored the seed of virtue within you.

To put this another way, Judy Lief says it’s when we “call a spade a spade.” We just stop trying to wriggle out of it entirely.

The Buddhist form of this, of course, doesn’t use religious transformation language in a joke, but it’s the same thing. We let ourselves get found out. We do the finding, even. When this happens, we stop lying about our own B.S.

What if you laugh and admit some part of your own self-deception this week? Where in your life do you need to shine that torch?