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It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the available ways to make life better, and most of it is based in the perilous world of “self-improvement.” There are myriad self-help books, podcasts, videos, and TedTalks, just like there are many different modalities in therapy. Sometimes, when it comes to faith, it’s hard to know when to “Let Go and Let God” without waiting on the world like a piece of lawn furniture, sitting, waiting, doing nothing. When exactly do we turn the other cheek? How many deep breaths am I supposed to take to quell righteous indignation? Which prayer is the one for the patron saint of road rage?

Humanity likes to overcomplicate pretty much everything, including spirituality. Sometimes I think it makes God chuckle, watching the great lengths we go to make things better or different. I think the crux of the issue is whether or not we are living in a state of flow, which is inherently without judgment and full of self-acceptance. Are we being mindful, content at a basic level with ourselves and the here and now, without too much concern over the past or the future? Have we turned everything over to our Higher Power and accepted any outcome or are we still preoccupied with getting faith or life “right”? Are we still trying to manipulate people or outcomes? That meditative state is not easy to achieve, which is why some religious or spiritual practitioners commit to it for a lifetime.

Louise Hay, author of You Can Heal Your Life, believes the fundamental issue in all dysfunction is a somewhat pathological commitment to the belief that we are “not good enough.” She believes that very few of us really know how to love and approve of ourselves unconditionally, which makes it hard to love or approve of anyone or anything else. It also makes it harder to connect with Flow, if we are spending most of our time feeling unsettled in ourselves.

I have been reading The Optimistic Child by Martin Seligman, PhD. Seligman is one of the founders of Positive Psychology and is Director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center. In the book, he argues that the self-esteem movement was thrown off track relatively early in our cultural lexicon. It has become purely about helping people feel better about themselves, regardless of the circumstances. Seligman argues that real self-esteem is not just about helping people feel better, but also about basing that better sense of self in perseverance, resilience, and mastery.

Given the abundant amount of research he and his colleagues have done on the subject, I don’t doubt he’s wrong, but I do think there may be a Third Heat (that’s a 30 Rock reference, my apologies) missing from his simple equation. It may not just be feeling good + (resilience + mastery) = self-esteem. There may be a step required before reaching Seligman’s arena, a precursor to developing resilience while feeling good about oneself, and that is to actually feel worthy of Good, to feel like it is allowed, to feel like we are all entitled to feeling hope or love or success and that if we try, it might actually work out.

That, I think, is where faith comes in. It’s a leap of faith for some of us, perhaps even many of us, to feel like we are deserving of the best life has to offer. We have to be encouraged to make the effort, given permission to aspire, or just allowed to have hope before we even start out on a journey that requires perseverance and will eventually lead to us feeling good about ourselves. We need to have a little faith that we will encounter positive outcomes.

I actually don’t know why that is. Perhaps it really is on a case-by-case basis, but the ubiquity of the issue suggests otherwise. It seems to be a systemic problem, perhaps brought on by the rugged individualism of American culture and our exhausting need to correlate science with the absence of God. In my view, the more the scientific world discovers, the more I believe, based on the wonders of the natural world alone. The perils of the structure of religion is it makes faith in a simple Good or God feel inaccessible to so many who need it. All of us should be allowed to have faith in something more. Where we take it from there is up to us.