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Raise Your Self Esteem, Overcoming Low Self Esteem, BoostingSelf Esteem, Help Low Self Esteem, Ways To Improve Self Esteem

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Raise Your Self Esteem

Once you raise your self esteem, if done thoroughly, you experience life flowing.

A translation by J.H. McDonald of chapter 2 of Tao Te Ching says…

Things come her way and she does not stop them;

Things leave and she lets them go.

She has without possessing,

and acts without expectations.

When her work is done she takes no credit.

Once you begin to transcend the illusion of being an isolated, separate object and feel and know that you are not…

  • a certain way
  • separate
  • completely in control
  • doing something wrong

then it becomes pointless worrying about…

  • things that you don’t have
  • what other people think of you
  • what you should be doing

If you could pretend right now that everything that you thought to be true about your life and yourself was part of a larger plan to help you do something magnificent at a later time, would that make more sense?

If you could trust the intelligence of what has you aware of yourself, and trust that this power, force, potential, ability, creator call it what you will, is actually who you are in essence, you could let go of trying to work out with your rational mind why things happen, why things don’t happen, why this and why that.

Some people like to feel in control of their lives and they don’t have much internal turmoil.  They are probably quite content with their life experience most of the time.  If you have much internal turmoil and angst it would indicate to me that there are memories within your nervous system which have not yet been processed and let go of.

Either that or your attitude and beliefs about what life is are so far removed from reality that life is a traumatic experience for you.

What does all this have to do with boosting self esteem?  Well, self-esteem is not a thing that you develop like a muscle.  You cannot think of self esteem as a thing you have.  You cannot develop more of it specifically.

To raise your self-esteem you simply need to know the truth of what self is.  There are two selfs.  One we write with a small ‘s’ and means the ego or illusion of who you think you are.  The big ‘S’ Self means the essential, spiritual, real, authentic you.

The one you were born as, the one who is unique and unknown.  Once you turn your attention inwards to the feeling of being aware and curious about who and what that is, you start to get to know the real you, the real Self.

So in order to experience overcoming low self-esteem know the real you, the big ‘S’ Self.  The big ‘S’ Self thinks that it is pretty AMAZING.  The big ‘S’ Self loves itself and knowing that this is who you are is how you raise your self-esteem.

Radical Acceptance, Let Go and Let God

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Radical Acceptance Makes You Feel Better

Radical acceptance is a very powerful principle to practice in your life. Great inner peace and contentment comes when you know this way of thinking about life and you may find it a way of boosting self-esteem.

When an event is about to happen or has happened take a moment to first observe the event before you..

  • decide whether they are right or wrong (judge)
  • interpret an event as meaning something about you
    (e.g. he forgot my birthday therefore I am not worthy enough)
  • pretend it has not happened (denial)
  • react to it (anger/rage for example)

Radical acceptance is to first acknowledge how something is in your life.  This doesn’t include your desires, wishes or preferences, it is simply facing the honest truth with impartial self observation and non-judgmental awareness about how things are.

In summary you can practice this and simply let go and let God. This means taking a perspective on life that is more inclusive of reality.  Faith that you are not a separate object in the world needing to be totally in control of everything.

You can know this to be true by acknowledging you didn’t produce what you know to be yourself and you simply need to look at the ocean or stars to see there is a lot you don’t know… and that is fine, in fact encouraged.

You don’t need to control every aspect of your life.  You cannot control other people and events.

If something is going to happen or has happened then instead of acting immediately and unconsciously with one of the four points above, you create some space within which you first of all observe.  Then you have conscious awareness in which to respond and the response will be more empowering and involve greater power than an unconscious reaction.

Psychological Projection, Ego

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Discover Your Psychological Projection

Psychological Projection

What is psychological projection?  Who you think you are; your self-image, ego or id as Sigmund Freud called it is OK with being some things but not OK with being others.  The ego ‘breathes’ by virtue of believing you are an object that is separate from the rest of the world.

In actual fact you are not separate, you are not an object and you are not one particular way.

In order to feel remotely in charge of your life, the ego that you think you are employs a range of strategies and techniques to..

1.  persist the illusion that you are as you think you are

2.  allow you to reduce some of the pain and anxiety

One such strategy is to have you throw a whole lot of assumptions and labels at the people who appear in your awareness.

Pressure at Work

One example that I can give you from first hand experience is feeling that I was coming under pressure from senior people at work.  When I really looked within at the patterns of thoughts I was running and my attitude I could see that I was putting myself under pressure because I had expectations and an aversion to stress.

Yes I needed to work through it but I myself wanted to get it done because;

– I don’t like people waiting for work from me so I rush through it with urgency so I can then feel free again.

– I want people to be happy and impressed with me.

Instead of seeing this clearly and accepting that I myself was creating pressure to get the work done, I projected the source of the pressure onto senior people at work.

Instead of looking deeply within to see the true cause, the self simply finds someone outside of you to attribute the cause.

Assumptions

Next time you are interacting with someone notice how much mind-reading you really do.  What you are doing is assuming you know something about them and about the way they are thinking.  You will be wrong.

Whatever you think is true about their thoughts will be a projection of a thought or attitude that is held by you.

1. Notice you are assuming things about them

2. Be curious about why you are assuming these things

I recall being in a supermarket and a man spilled some peanuts or something similar from the bulk bin dispensers over the floor.  He was obviously embarrassed but he started angrily lecturing me as I walked by saying ‘ everyone makes mistakes, you make mistakes, she makes mistakes…”.

He projected onto me some thought or attitude.  He thought I was thinking he was incompetent or a fool or stupid or something.  In reality I was quite oblivious and couldn’t care and had only compassion and understanding for what had happened.

Once you see that these projections actually originate from within your psyche just notice that it does.  You don’t need to do anything else.

You see the ego cannot play out it’s strategies with the light of your watching on it.  Awareness is transformational.  Bring consciousness to everything you do and everything you feel and everything you think is true about others.  Your ego’s tendency for using psychological projection will drop away leaving you present and calm and loving.

Prosperity Affirmations, Words of Affirmation, Abundance Affirmations, Weight Loss Affirmations, Self-Esteem Affirmations

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Prosperity Affirmations & Others

If you are searching for prosperity affirmations, or affirmations for self-esteem, weight loss, happiness or abundance, then what follows is the easy way to understand what you need to do, and it is much easier than I used to think.

When I attended John Assaraf’s weekend seminar at his beautiful Californian home in 2004 (before he went big into larger audiences, coaching and The Secret) I remember feeling frustrated because what I
wanted to achieve or have kept changing soon after I would decide on my affirmations.

This confused me and annoyed me, and an Australian women at the same seminar said that is what happened to her also.

After all, how do you decide on your affirmations if you don’t even know what you want?

Well…..here is the secret that I finally worked out seven years later, and within two short weeks my life has changed just by understanding and applying this one subtle but necessary shift.

Of course I could tell you how great it is and that there is a secret and bait you along just to get you to buy a product from me, or pay me to tell you.  But I am not going to do that.

A prosperity affirmation, or words of affirmation about abundance, weight loss, happiness or self-esteem are not about affirming what you HAVE!

This is why I would not stick to my affirmations longer then two days!  What is wrong with me I thought.  Why don’t I say my affirmations so I can get the things that I want instead of plodding along or changing my mind?

The answer is simple, although it wasn’t simple at the time over those last seven years, it was annoying.

You see affirmations are not about affirming what you want to have, but don’t have now, they are about how you want to BE!!!!!.

An affirmation should start with the words ‘I am’.  This is the breakthrough that I did not understand.  If you affirm something like ‘I have an annual income of $300,000″ then there is no real substance to it.  An income of $300,000 is not a quality of your essential nature, therefore it is not an affirmation, it is simply a wish.

Now I am not saying that saying ‘I have an annual income of $300,000″ won’t get you there, maybe it will.  But is your heart in it and will you carry on with the affirmations day after day?  If so try it, if not then that is probably why you are reading this page.

Affirmations are statements that affirm what is true about your true, essential nature that you are not in touch with at the moment.  For example your essential nature is happy, wise, wealthy, healthy, abundant, forgiving, loving, calm, peaceful, friendly,…etc.

In other words these are states of Being.  They are not things you have or do they are ways to be.  This is the secret of affirmations.

We have it backwards.  We think that when we have something, or do something we will be something.  But we need to go the other way.  We need to be something first, and then everything that is lined up with state of being will be attracted into our lives.

If you are happy, then the universe will attract to you opportunities for you to be happy.  if you are healthy, then you will findyourself turning away from foods that disagree with you and moving towards more raw fruit and vegetables.  Not because you are using will power to eat better, but because your whole system is lining up with who you have selected to be, which is healthy.

So if you want to weigh less, affirm that you are healthy (I wouldn’t even affirm “I am slim’ for example because your essential nature is not slim, it is healthy).  You want to affirm the things that are essentially true about you, which you are choosing to experience.

This also allows for short snappy affirmations that are easy to repeat over and over like a little tune in your head.  I am happy, I am healthy, I am wealthy, I am wise.

Whether it is a prosperity affirmation, self-esteem affirmation or something else, choose how you want to be, and the universe will conspire on your behalf to arrange the circumstance and opportunities for you to be that.

Practice Of Contemplation, Meditation

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Practice
Of Contemplation

To Empower You

A very powerful technique is the practice of contemplation. Some might call it navel gazing but these people probably don’t understand how or why this discipline can change your life. As a child I remember contemplating why I could see the pen on the table.

Contemplation was too big a word for a ten-year-old but I was just curious why could I make the distinction between the pen and the table.

After considering the matter for a while I knew that the light was different between the two objects and that allowed me to see that one thing was not the other. Pretty simple explanation but nevertheless it sort of says enough.

Do you remember doing such things as a child?

Maybe you didn’t acknowledge it but you doing this was engaging in the practice of contemplation. I am sure at some stage you would have wondered why things are the way they are.

The practice of contemplation is to look into a matter to become aware of the way something is, or the why something is.

We generally hold a thing to be something we can pick up, something tangible, a form that two or more people could come to some agreement about its existence. Consider that a thing – a form – is also a thought, a feeling, an experience, and a way of seeing the world.

These ‘things’ are invisible we might say but still they occur.

These things occur in your experience of life and you can objectify them to a greater or lesser degree. By that I mean you can watch them occurring. You can step back, so to speak, and say ‘I am noticing I experience this’. You would do well to consider anything that you can distinguish as a ‘thing’, ‘object’, ‘form’.

I am calling a thing anything that you notice now which wasn’t there once upon a time and won’t be there in the future. That being the case, why is it there now? If it is not fixed, unchanging and absolute then why is it there now? This is fodder for the practice of contemplation. Why is it? Why is it so? Why is it so the way that it is?

Take shame for example. The next time you feel embarrassed, be curious about what you assume to be true to make you feel embarrassed right then. You can do it later if more appropriate but the important point is to notice that it is there now, or was there and it will go in time. So why is it there now? What do you hold to be true in your idea of yourself and the world that causes the shame? We are too passive in our living. We assume that experiences and feelings come pre-packaged. Combined with the ‘it is just the way I am’ naive mentality we end up living a life of self-ignorance and reaction.

I rarely have negative emotions these days. I rarely feel that inner contraction to a noticeable degree. Sure if there is a confrontation or some issue being worked through I might feel some physical sensation but rarely do I notice any real emotion.

For a couple of years I have engaged in the practice of contemplation. Either on the spot or later that evening contemplating anything that happened that day which I reacted to with a feeling. Even the slightest contraction away from another person would see me wonder what I didn’t like about this situation. If I felt fear I wondered what was I afraid of happening. If I felt down or uninspired by work I would contemplate the way I was thinking about life and work. I could then see the cause and effect relationship between my thoughts and my experience.

Once I could see I was creating this unconsciously I could change it consciously and feel better.   Contemplation is powerful, ancient and used by great spiritual leaders and masters the world over.  It can also be used by you.

Poseidon God of the Sea, Archetypes And Myths, Unconscious Personality

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Poseidon
God Of The Sea

Poseidon God of the sea is the archetype covering the domain of emotion and instinct. With Poseidon active you will feel emotion intensely and that will give you plenty to work with to transform.

The word archetype describes what Carl Jung identified as patterns of behaving that arise from the collective unconscious of humankind. The pattern of being is not unique to an individual; it is available to manifest in each of us because we each reflect a part of the whole.

To recognize Poseidon active within your life look
for…

  • Bottling up strong emotions instead of instantaneous
    expression
  • Feeling strongly
  • Uncontrollable rage
  • A poor loser
  • Not comfortable in the world of school and intellectual
    realms
  • Operates day-to-day from a feeling and instinctual base
    rather than logic and planning

Possible drawbacks to living the Poseidon archetype…

  • Can be viewed as emotionally unstable or inappropriate
  • For men can feel alienated as emotions are not
    traditionally accepted within men
  • low self-esteem for not being allowed to be himself by
    society (lack of acceptance)

This information has been summarized from the book Gods in Everyman by Jean Shinoda Bolen.

If you recognize your patterns of acting and being in the world from the above list and are curious about what you can do to change, then first and foremost use this information as proof that you are not different, defective or a victim of your past programming.

The above shows the commonality in the human experience when certain innate energies are active. As such begin by accepting that you do indeed own these particular traits and let it be OK that you do.

This will slightly raise your self-esteem and self-acceptance for each trait you own.   If you would like some guidance or clarification, please contact me, I would love to help.

Pisces Moon Sign, Pisces Traits, Astrological Moon Signs

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If You Are A Pisces
Moon Sign

A pisces moon sign will have primarily the following traits. Your self-esteem and personal and spiritual growth comes primarily from you acceptance and letting go of any emotional reaction to being labeled something.

Have a look at the list and notice anything which you resist, i.e. it doesn’t fit in with your self-image or you wish it wasn’t part of you.

– Sensitive

– Intuitive

– Probably psychic

– Likes change

– Dislikes routine

– Shy

– Easy going

– Creative ideas

– Romantic ideals

– Compassionate

– Easily amused

– Easily misunderstood as dreamy but in reality deep thinkers

– Empathic

– Can understand things not yet experienced

– Curious

– Not overly attached to material possessions

Then go through all the other astrological moon signs and work your way through those also.  We all posses the ability to display every trait so your sense of self-acceptance and self-esteem is dependent on you embracing all the pisces traits from this moon sign list, and all the other 11 as well.

Personal Responsibility For Your Life

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Personal
Responsibility For Your Life

Personal responsibility for your life and what you experience is critical.

It is one of life’s paradoxes that we think if we don’t take responsibility, and blame others instead, we will feel better or suffer less.

It certainly seems like the world happens on its own and affects you in random ways. Every reaction, emotion and feeling you experience is yours. Many people don’t realize that when you don’t like someone it is not what they are doing or who they are, it is all coming from you.

In a reaction to someone you don’t like it is you unconsciously deciding what should be different about him or her or the situation (but secretly you are reacting to that trait within yourself).

Remember we are not judging these reactions as right or wrong.  This can take much work to watch and really be honest with yourself, but this is what it takes to have personal responsibility for your life. The reactions will still happen even when you know it is coming from within.

However, once you know and can own this fact, you are empowered to consciously stop doing anything that hurts you or doesn’t feel so good. Until such time as you let go of wanting the world, others or yourself to be different you will still have these reactions.

The first step in having personal responsibility for your life is to be conscious of what is happening. Imagine a time when your foot has ‘fallen asleep’ as we say. You know your foot is full of pins and needles because you are sitting on it. You understand the cause and the reaction. What if you were so unaware that you had not yet put the two together?

To blame it on outside forces as if you are a help-less victim is the opposite of taking personal responsibility for your life.

Chocolate Story

I recall a story told to me years ago when I was a teenager. It is a true story told to me to explain food allergies. Every Sunday morning a woman would wake up with a headache. This went on for years and of course she sought treatment from doctors and various therapies. Things got so bad and intolerable for her that she was ready to commit herself to a mental health institution. Luckily someone was aware enough to ask her what she ate or did differently Saturday evening.

Her husband had a little ritual whereby he would walk to the local store Saturday evening and purchase three things; the newspaper, some milk and a bar of chocolate. That evening they would share the chocolate bar. Of course being intolerant or allergic to chocolate she would be a mess by Sunday morning. Not surprisingly once she became aware of this the following Saturday she took personal responsibility for her life and consciously chose to not eat the chocolate. The pain didn’t come.

How does this relate to helping yourself or having a more peaceful life? Any reaction you have, any feeling or thought comes from you, end of story. It is caused by you and the outside world simply reflects an aspect of your inside world. The outside is a reflection of you. This includes all events and relationships and experiences.

Personal Example

Recently I have been in a situation twice (both within the same week which gives me a big clue as to what I am to learn about myself at that point in time) where I have done something for the benefit of others. Not surprisingly when the others haven’t reacted with total appreciation and showered me with specialness in the way I imagined, I have felt hurt. With the hurt comes resentment and a contraction away from these people.

However, thankfully I am aware enough to own that I completely and utterly created this situation all on my own. I take personal responsibility for my life and these people don’t owe me any feelings. The solution? See clearly that I created the whole thing, and then the hurt isn’t generated.

Through owning what I did I released attachment to those outcomes and no longer have hurt or resentment. I take personal responsibility for my life and what I alone experience.

If you are resenting someone have a look and see what the generator of the resentment is. In your mind have you sacrificed something for someone, then felt unappreciated and so now you resent them?

You either take 100% personal responsibility for your life or you are the victim. Whichever one you choose will determine the amount of suffering or peace you experience. Simply by having that attitude you will already be creating more peace in your life.

As Ken Wilber says; it’s like if you had a sore arm and then one day looked down and realized you were pinching your arm. So too if an area of your life is not working you can look at your thoughts, values, desires, self-image and see the way you create your emotional and feeling states.

To be the victim by definition means you hold it that the outside world happens on its own and affects you in random unprovoked ways. If this is what you hold to be true no wonder you feel fearful, scared, isolated, depressed, despairing and alone in a big world.

To take personal responsibility for your life, which includes material possessions and relationships as well as your emotions, is to immediately in that moment progress your growth and enjoyment of life. Being a victim causes you to suffer. Taking personal responsibility for your life still brings feelings but the feelings become feedback instead of suffering.

Paul Potts Audition, Britain’s Got Talent Paul Potts, Self-Confidence, Self-Esteem

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Emotional Paul
Potts Audition

Two years before Susan Boyle came another amazing moment in TV.

This Paul Potts audition has been watched by millions on YouTube. It brings about an extraordinary emotional reaction in people.  Paul talks briefly about his lack of self-confidence and self-esteem, but as is usual when he is doing what he loves, he feels like he is a part of something bigger and that nothing is missing.  This is his spiritual awareness that singing allows him to touch.

This is the first ever Paul Potts opera performance on Britain’s Got Talent singing Nessun Dorma, and he goes on to sing Time to Say Goodbye in the next round.

UPDATE: The video has had to be removed due to not being able to secure a non-copyrighted version. I recommend you search on Youtube for Paul Potts Audition.

Since 2007 Paul Potts has been around the world promoting his albums.  It is a great example of how life can change very quickly for us as he used to sell mobile phones.  Whether it is something in the stars that finally brings us to a place I don’t know or maybe it is all about visualizing and manifesting.

Either way I believe if you follow what you are passionate about and stay in integrity you will be drawn to the circumstances that allow you to serve others in the best way you can.