It is absolutely necessary that you complete Level 1 and 2 before you can work on strengthening Level 3, otherwise the “side effects” could be very harmful.
If we don’t receive enough love as children, we do not learn to receive and we find ourselves
lacking balance when we give love to others. So, our partners’ or friends’ needs become a priority compared to our own needs. This imbalance can make others feel like they are dealing with someone with a strong self-esteem: someone who is completely self-sufficient and doesn’t need anyone else to live his or her life. But, behind this behaviour, lies a deep need for love.
When we fear that we will lose someone, it is because we subconsciously expect him or her to fill the deep emptiness inside of us (especially those empty spaces linked to Level 1 of the Thaatt path) and this is when a physical/chemical reaction similar to that of ”a mussel clinging to a rock” is triggered.
The “clinging-mussel effect” usually takes two forms:
These requests can be:
Explicit: “Are you coming over tonight? Come on! I haven’t seen you since last night…I miss you!”
Concealed: “I see, you can’t come over because you are going out with friends? Alright, as you prefer…no no…it doesn’t matter, if you’d rather go out with them, go on. I will talk to you tomorrow” … and then, during the evening, the partner gets a lot of text messages.
The first type of reaction is usually typical of women, while the second one is typical of men. The other way around is very rare, but role switching is possible.
Let’s go back to self-esteem: how can we build it”?
Usually by working on…
“I am so proud of my son! He gets high grades at school, he is in the swimming team and trains three times a week. On Saturdays and Sundays we drive him to swimming races and very often he ranks in the top positions”.
But what lies behind this behaviour?This boy will start, from a very young age, to think that he is worth as much as the results he obtains.
“He is a hard worker! He is always the last person to leave the office and the first one to get there. He never refuses to work during the weekend when asked and almost never takes leave. He is truly a model employee”.
Perfect, isn’t it? Wow, such a person is likely to earn thousands of euros a month (even if, often, he or she earns way less than that), but how can he enjoy some time with his/her family?
For quite a long time, I myself have lived a life like this. I would never return home before 7.30 or 8 pm…often I would return in the middle of the night in fact.
Rob
Work was my priority and my wife (now ex-wife) was more like “someone helping around the house”. I was so stressed that it felt strange to spend Sundays at home…not to mention Saturdays! My stress levels were so high that I could never stop my mind from thinking about work: when I was at home, instead of taking some time for a walk with my partner, for skiing or even only for reading a book with her, I would sit in front of the tv or, even better, in front of videogames for hours.
In particular, this way of living not for the pleasure of doing things but to reach any sort of goal, from a very young age, prevents us from strengthening our relationship with our parents and, for this reason, creates great imbalances in the next Thaatt levels. Such a behaviour, besides, ‘moulds’ people till they become very gullible and susceptible to manipulation because of such an imbalance.
So, it seems that building our self-esteem on the values above mentioned is not so healthy after all. So, what should we do?
The other road we can take is harder because less people decide to walk on it: it is about finding ourselves all over again. To accept ourselves for who we are and not for who we would like to be. In practice, we must try to literally “esteem ourselves” or, in other words, we must estimate what we are like:
We have a body which allows us to move in the surrounding environment
We have the tools (words, expressions, gestures) to communicate with other people
We have sensors that allow us to feel warm or cold, to smell, to hear, to see, to touch…to experience the world
We have a mind which allows us to manage all of these functions
And, most of all, we have more evanescent senses which we tend to ignore (as we are raised to do so)…but they are there…and they are our emotions.
There are no goals to achieve, only experiences to live. We are surrounded by so many “mental temptations” (tv, newspapers, radio, religion, gossip,…) that we practically spend all of our time using only a minimal part of our potential: the mind.
And this is where problems come up!
The mind’s “only” task is to coordinate the other parts of the body in order to allow the deepest part of ourselves (which we can call the Soul) to experience itself in this world. Experiencing the world … exactly what we don’t do because we delegate everything to the mind.
This is why we stop discovering the world, as we used to do when we were children, but we prefer to live, in a virtual way, through other people’s experiences. We entrust ourselves to television, films, documentaries and adventure books: we live only those experiences which we consider “safe and guided”.
When was the last time you went on an adventure and explored a cave or swam in a river or that you left the beaten track and dove into the woods venturing through bushes and trees?
How long has it been since you last felt “esteemed” by yourself?
0
0
0
00000