Self-Esteem Poems, Self-Esteem Help

admin Self-Esteem, Spiritual Poems March 15, 2012April 14, 2012love, poetry, self-esteem poems 0 Comment

Self-Esteem Poems

The most relevant self-esteem poems to this website and shadow work. These poems all express the importance of self-acceptance. Ellen’s below is wise and I also love Rumi’s. Although they are not strictly obviously self-esteem poems, they are about complete self-acceptance and that is the crux of self-esteem help.

Be Yourself

by Ellen Bailey

Why would you want to be someone else

When you could be better

by being yourself

Why pretend to be someone you are not

When you have something they haven’t got

Cheating yourself of the life you have to live

Deprives others of that only which you can give

You have much more to offer by being just you

Than walking around in someone else’s shoes

Trying to live the life of another is a mistake

It is a masquerade; nothing more than a fake

Be yourself and let your qualities show through

Others will love you more for being just you

Remember that God loves you just as you are

To Him you are already a bright shining star

Family and friends will love you more too

If you spent time practicing just being you

How to Improve Yourself

Anonymous

Let each man learn to know himself;

To gain that knowledge let him labor

To improve those failings in himself

Which he condemns so in his neighbor.

How lenient our own faults we view,

And conscience’s voice adeptly smother;

Yet, oh, how harshly we review

The self-same failings in another!

And if you meet an erring one

Whose deeds are blamable and thoughtless,

Consider, ere you cast the stone,

If you yourself are pure and faultless.

Oh, list to that small voice within,

Whose whisperings oft make men confounded,

And trumpet not another’s sin;

You’d blush deep if your own were sounded.

And in self judgment if you find

Your deeds to others are superior,

To you has Providence been kind,

As you should be to those inferior.

Example sheds a genial ray

Of light which men are apt to borrow;

So first improve yourself today

And then improve your friends tomorrow.

I Love Being Me

by Gemma Hayton

I can’t run the fastest

I can’t swim the sea

I can’t type the quickest

but I love being me

I can’t kick a ball

or even climb a tree

I can’t roll in the grass

but I still love being me

You see, this is my life

as others would see

they don’t know what it’s like

to really be me

So next time I’m about

rolling down the street

don’t think of me disabled

but someone cool to meet

I have lots I can teach you

I have loads I can share

you will never gain my wisdom

if you just point and stare

So maybe I can’t run the fastest

maybe I can’t kick a ball

but I wouldn’t change being me

not for you, not at all

The Guest House

Rumi

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

Remember the more completely you accept your experience the higher your self-esteem. Poems can speak directly to us and put words to an experience that often prose cannot.

I hope you enjoyed and got some benefit from these self-esteem poems. If you have, or come across, any additional self-esteem poems that you feel express profoundly the work of accepting and owning our complete experience, please contact me.

Self-Empowerment, Self-Esteem Empowerment, Empowerment Exercises

admin Self-Help March 15, 2012April 14, 2012love, recognition, self-love, understanding self 0 Comment

Four Ways To Self-Empowerment

Here are four ways to self-empowerment. The best and easiest personal empowerment exercises that I use every day and have helped transform my life are below.

None of these exercises are a quick fix forever. You become a product of your habits over time. If you introduce and practice a new habit such as the ones below, even for five seconds, you will experience personal self-empowerment.

1. Be In Your Body

About two finger-widths below your belly button is the area that could be thought of as your physical and energy centre. It is a place that martial artists and masters of eastern practices such as Tai Chi and Qigong are aware of and they regard as a place of power. Referred to as dantien, you could also imagine
your breath starts and finishes here. When you have your awareness on this internal centre you feel more relaxed, calm, present and powerful…try it, practice it, meditate on it.

2. Be Directly Conscious Of Your True Nature

Beyond the experience of your thoughts and emotions there is something more real. To be directly conscious of your true nature helps you to de-identify with your thoughts and emotions. You are not your emotions you have emotions. You are not your thoughts you have thoughts. Practice watching with awareness.

3. Be 100% Responsible

You can live two ways; either live as if everything you experience is your responsibility, or pick and choose which experiences you want to take responsibility for.

4. Always Reach For A Slightly Better Feeling

Feelings can be thought of as a spectrum rather than each ones as separate entities. At one end of the spectrum you have deep depression and suicidal thoughts. At the other end you have peace and contentment. Because feelings exist on a spectrum you can always do something or think something that moves you a bit closer to the next feeling higher up on the spectrum. You can read extensively about this in the book Ask and It Is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks.

Raising Self Esteem, Overcoming Low Self Esteem, Ways To Improve Self Esteem, Raise Your Self Esteem, Boosting Self Esteem

admin Self-Esteem, Spirituality March 15, 2012April 14, 2012acceptance, love, raise self-esteem, recognition, understanding self better 0 Comment

The Process of Raising Self-Esteem

The process of raising self esteem is simple but not necessarily easy. Simple in the fact that all it requires is a transformation in consciousness from denial and fear to acceptance and love.

It is not necessarily easy because the belief that you are a separate, completely independent thing is strong and convincing.

One way of raising self esteem is to take your belief that you are a thing and pump up the beliefs about what that thing is like. In short you change your self image for a better one.

You can attempt to focus on something that you believe to be true about yourself that makes you feel a bit more worthy and acceptable. By the way, in doing this the parts that you don’t like about yourself don’t actually disappear they just get ignored.

This might seem like a result however it will likely cause greater problems for you at a later date in some way.

Just as if you are repairing or cleaning something and you try and do just enough so that what is immediately visible looks OK, deep down you feel a nagging that you haven’t quite done a proper job. You know it will have to be faced at a later date. Or you feel a false sense of achievement that you have got a way with it. It is like you feel clever for taking the easy way out and achieving your task.

How does it feel when you know you have really done a thorough job and you know your repair will last? Just like rust in a car or a hole in a sock the section needs to be completely rebuilt and reintegrated into the whole.

So it is with the ego and the Self. The ego is who and what you think you are. You might think you are kind and polite and this and that. Or you might think you are stupid and pathetic and mean and cruel. Whatever self image you have is your ego.

Your ego is just your idea and becomes the focus of your life. It is what you then interpret life’s events through.

Just as the rust in the car would attract the eye and the attention and make you miss seeing the car as a whole so to we end up focusing on the self image and miss seeing and feeling the whole experience. By the whole experience I mean the experience of being part of the whole, connected to all that there is, divine, Self.

The process of raising self esteem is to bit by bit transform your awareness from the ego to the whole. When you meditate the ego takes a back seat. When you sit across from another person and feel their energy and really get what they are communicating the ego takes a back seat. There are many many ways of accomplishing this task of deidentifying with the ego and reidentifying with the whole.

Why does this raise your self esteem? Because genuine self esteem is a product of your awareness, acceptance and love of the truth. It is not something you build up and pump up, it is something that comes because you see how futile it is to continue trying to be something or not trying to be something.

Some people try to always be right, some people try never to be rude. Some people try and be cool, other people try and never be wrong. This is all ego and genuine self-esteem can never come
through rearranging, pumping up or resisting the ego.

Self-Appreciation

admin Self-Esteem, Self-Help, Spirituality March 15, 2012April 14, 2012love, self-love 0 Comment

How You Build Self-Appreciation

Self-appreciation is easily achieved with a shift in the way you think of life. We each have our own unique talents and aptitudes. Some people’s talents are seen on the world stage, many more are only ever seen by one or two.

Here are four ways to see things differently in order to begin the upward cycle of self-appreciation.

1. Drop the comparison with other people’s skills, talents and gifts.

Often we sort of assume by default that everyone is born with same potential and same internal resources and talents. This is obviously not so.

If ever you have done some reading on astrology you will quickly accept that everybody has their own particular make-up of skills, interests and talents. The key is to find out what yours are and use them in a committed way.

2. Discover, own, embrace and express your particular, unique talents.

Some people are natural leaders, some are natural support people, some are great with kids, some bake and their food naturally tastes amazing, some people have deep compassion and caring. The above is just a small sample of the gifts each person could naturally possess. Start a journey to find out exactly what your unique gifts are, then use them, love them and don’t deny the world their expression. Your self-appreciation will then have an opportunity to be felt.

3. Think about yourself as completing some part of the whole.

As I said above some people naturally end up as world leaders, some as world entertainers, yet others as kings and queens. Likewise some people have a natural affinity and talent at making small bracelets that children love and yet others just naturally know how to make people feel comforted, while others write in a way that words flow and leap from the page.

Do you think it is a mistake that you make amazing baking that people love, but others are doing more worthwhile things? What I mean by that is be true to you. If you love baking and feel fulfilled by it then do it and love that talent within. To make this whole world go around we need people of all talents and aptitudes. The secret is to discover what yours are, use them, nourish these talents and use them to help others is some way. This will begin the upward self-appreciation cycle and get you closer to your true self.

4. Have a look at where you naturally spend your time, energy and money.

In order to discover your particular, unique talents have a look at where you already spend your spare time. Some people might say have a look at what you daydream about as an indicator of what your interests might be. This is misleading in my opinion because the imagination and dreaming could be coming from a place of a fantasy or it will be a thought that something would be nice for you to do.

What is more real is what you actually do now. I spend spare time reading and learning about ancient wisdom and related topics. I go to bookstores and libraries if I have a few spare hours and I feel at home and fulfilled doing that. Because I feel that way I do it without guilt or shame or what others might think of it. I don’t compare myself to those who go kite-boarding or surfing when they have spare time. They have different skills and interests.

I could think of very little worse than lugging equipment down to the beach and being out in the water for more than 10 minutes.

Follow your bliss and you will discover your talents, interests and skills. Your inner harmony will become evident and you will experience greater self-appreciation.

Healing the Shadow, Shadow Work, Human Shadow, Healing The Shadow, The Shadow Effect

admin Self-Help, Shadow Work March 13, 2012April 16, 2012acceptance, love, shadow self 0 Comment

Healing The Shadow

Improves Your Life

Healing the shadow is probably the quickest, easiest and most powerful way to increase self-esteem, self-acceptance and self-love.

What is the Shadow?

The shadow is a term coined by famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Jung coined the term ‘shadow-self’ to make a distinction between

1. the traits you are unhappy to identify with (shadow)

2. what traits you are happy to hold
within your self-image (ego)

In other words, as you go about your life you have an image of…

what you are like
ways in which you behave
what others think of you

Let us call this your self-image. It is an idea or a creation within your mind that you identify as ‘you’.

We might even go so far as to say you think this is you in reality.

Your shadow is whatever is left out of your idea of you plus anything about this idea of you that you don’t like, accept, or want to be there.

You might not readily hold your hand up and say “I am selfish”, but you might readily hold your hand up and say “I am kind” for example. We would then say that ‘kind’ would be in your self-image but ‘selfish’ would be in your shadow-self.

Now here comes the powerful piece, which allows you to feel better and have a life that works a little bit better…

…in reality there is no one particular, absolute, undeniable, concrete, indisputable way that you are.

The way you think you are is a creation of your mind based on teachings and experiences and an absence of awareness of the truth.

This is why you feel stuck and yuck! It is OK that you are no particular way. You are everything in reality, every possible experience and interpretation.

Healing the Shadow

To heal the shadow means to welcome back these traits you previously excluded from your self-image. Have a good, honest look at every area of your life and find two times in your past where you were selfish.

Without judgment accept that as a human being this interpretation called selfish will come up from time to time. Accept that as the way it is, then accept ‘selfish’ as being part of your experience of living.

The power comes when you do this because for each trait you move from the shadow back to the self-image, you become a little bit more whole and content and you will notice self-acceptance and an increase in self-esteem and self-confidence.

While the shadow is full of traits it runs your life. When it is less full you run your life as a conscious being. Each time you re-own a trait you have experienced a little more of healing the shadow.