Choosing to see ourselves differently
As children, we constantly wanted to understand things at a deeper level. We’re all familiar with the never-ending ‘Why…?’ that emanates from young children’s lips. This constant flow of growth through reflection and openness to life needs to continue to characterize us as adults. Continue reading What Do We Deserve?
Leaving ‘survival mode’ and celebrating who we are
Unless we’ve become free of it, each of us continues to measure ourselves every day. It’s almost as if we’ve swallowed an inner measuring tape by which we constantly check ourselves with questions like, “Have I done enough?”, “Am I clever enough?” or “Have I met their expectations?”. This inner tyrant drives us to keep proving we’re enough. But constant judgement is waiting to fall! Continue reading Finding Enough
Looking at ways we’ve learned to value or devalue ourselves
Self-reflection is important because through it we discover how we came to be who we are now. We see, too, where our self-esteem is ‘firm’ and where we’re still ‘wobbly’ and scared to push out on it. Through it we also realise where our movement outward has been compromised.
Most of us have spent the first half of our lives trying to satisfy society’s expectations and ways of measuring us. Continue reading Measured and Found Wanting
Facing what we find when the tide goes out
With so much information available to us now at the touch of a button, it’s easy to think that ‘we know.’ This attitude will actually jam our whole process of relating. Much of what we know of ourselves was what we were told; it was learnt behaviour. And if we stop and look at our relational patterns, we can see what ways we’ve been taught. We can affirm and continue in those patterns or we can choose to change them. It’s like we’ve been given a room to live in which is full of another person’s taste in furnishings. We can leave it as it is for security’s sake or we can make it our own while keeping some of the things that are ‘us’. Continue reading Learning to Know Ourselves
Physically representing emotions that we carry from our earliest childhood can be helpful. For example, we could choose an object to illustrate our struggles or draw our early emotional dynamics. Then we are able to see our inner landscape.
By receiving our emotions, by re-feeling the feeling, we better understand what has created our own unique emotional landscape. We often think our feelings come from someone or something ‘out there’, but those situations are simply mirroring back to us what is going on inside.
As we reflect on how we’ve come to be, we realize that we were formed by our needs. What relationship do we have with our own needs? Continue reading I Need You
