Who You Are is Enough

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. –Eleanor Roosevelt

The importance of loving ourselves, making this our first priority in life, cannot be overstated. A healthy sense of self worth, being in possession of one’s self, is fundamental for acting in the world around us in ways that edify and minimize the potential for doing harm.

Feelings of inferiority are often a key signal that our self is in need of some care and attention from us, beginning with an acknowledgement and acceptance of both our potential for goodness and our potential for being far less than good.

Without this we cannot expect to function well in life because we are not living in alignment with this basic truth of human nature—that everybody is both wonderous on the one hand and tragically, inevitably flawed on the other.

So, the challenge is one of increasing our awareness of these two contradictory energies in ourselves, becoming more acquainted with their texture and flavour (so-to-speak), which will then allow us to manage them with much more skill and grace.

This, from my point of view, is how we learn to do as little harm as possible, but it isn’t a quick fix. Much education of both the mind and the heart is involved.

It’s about cultivating compassion beginning with ourselves, which at some point becomes natural to extend to others as well.

However, the road to success in these matters isn’t a straight line—patience is required.

We need to be gentle with ourselves as we make our way through varying degrees of successes and failures, the ups and downs, embracing them both, working with them as well as we know how at any given moment in time.

But as we mature, as we begin to bear fruit and feel just a little more worth our own attention and care, we will eventually sense that who we are is enough, not perfect according to the dictates of conventional wisdom, but perfectly, inevitably human—a condition paradoxically characterized by being perfectly imperfect.

This is the basis on which no one will ever make you feel inferior again, for how could they? We are all born of the same fundamental human impulses, no one of us better or worse than any other, except according to misguided beliefs or narratives that don’t serve anyone well.

It’s all about accepting the humanness of our condition, forgiving ourselves and others for the inevitable failures, being patient and always returning to home, to our center—to love.

3 Ridiculously Simple Steps to Success

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it. –Maya Angelou

I love this simple prescription for living well. It cuts right through all the socio-cultural bullshit we are conditioned to think of as normal, ideal and acceptable.

The first encouragement suggests that if our life has no foundation in self-respect, dignity or personal integrity we will have failed ourselves in the most basic and soul-destroying way possible. And no amount of worldly success will ever make up for the loss. So, we better learn to come to terms with ourselves flaws, failings and all. Which is to say, we need to show ourselves a little love. 

With a little love and respect intact, liking what we do becomes easier and more natural—embracing our native abilities, talents, personality and potential is now a freer exercise in living well, using whatever it is that we’ve been given as an opportunity to explore new territory.

And very closely linked to this idea is how we choose to do things—creatively and in sync with our values preferably. Salient point being to refine our value system and preserve our personal integrity as we make our way along our chosen path.

Simple, but not easy, liking ourselves, what we do and how we do it, is a great template from which to create a life of depth, substance and joy. 

Basic and real.

Of Too Busy Lives, Social Dis-ease and Learning to say "No. Enough. I'm not doing this anymore!" My vote for a saner way of life.

I’ve shared this quote before, but with all the talk revolving around the current economic crisis, the increasing disparity in wealth among the classes and the increase in stress-related health problems—courtesy of our too busy lives—I felt it worth repeating:

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times. –Thomas Merton

For me the key word that jumps out in that apt observation is, violence.

Running faster on the hamster wheel of our work life is particularly understandable. It is the most readily available (read: easy) solution to the problem of making ends meet, but there is one obvious flaw--the harm we do to ourselves, and by extension, our family members, friends and others.

Sacrificing ourselves on the altar of family responsibilities or community responsibilities may seem like a noble thing on the surface, but scratch that surface, locate the mental, emotional and physical dis-ease that all of this so-called ‘noble’ sacrifice often results in, and we may need to re-consider what it is we are saying yes to and get a deeper sense of why.

We need to get real about what is truly important in life.

Understanding over-committing/over-extending ourselves as an act of violence I think is key because it is true. And we have other options, one of which is lifestyle adjustment. We can re-examine and question the value system promoting this bigger, better, faster mentality. We can do things differently: smaller, slower and more thoughtfully, for example.

All I mean to point out is that we all probably have saner options for keeping house and home together that don’t do so much harm.

So, who/what do you really Love?

Where are deep meaning, joy and fulfillment actually located at the end of the day?