Happiness self help resource article 210 self esteem confidence

Do you have Low Self Esteem or Do You Just
Need to Give Your Eyes a Rub?
self help article
by Patty Shortreed

Happiness and wellbeing self help personal development article about self esteem and self confidence building through self help personal development articles and resources. size=1>

In today’s world we are constantly bombarded with change.

It seems we are never able to keep up and keep on top of things.

We see ourselves fall behind in some way.

It may be that we don’t like the work we are doing or how we are doing it.

We start to judge ourselves as incapable or incompetent, regardless of what others would say about us.

We feel in a struggle against ourselves, angry about who we are and what we do.

The feeling can turn into loathing and self-hate.

The world starts to close in around us. Even though we may have the world in the palm of our hand, with all of the amenities and family life that would make the rest of the world green with envy, it doesn’t seem to make us happy.

We feel guilty, miserable, lethargic, lazy, depressed, can’t get out of bed, want to hide, don’t want to be with people, feel like weren’t hiding who we are, pretending everything is okay when we know it’s a mess, spend hours in front of the TV aimlessly watching and hoping for something to excite us, stimulate us, make us laugh, make us cry, we eat and drink unconscious of our real hunger or thirst, it’s just something to do.

Maybe words like “I’m worthless, I’m no good, Why can’t I just be happy, What is wrong with me?” start ringing in the mind over and over, the darkness hovering and closing in.

The mind becomes a whirlwind of negative chatter that’s impossible to stop.

“Am I going insane? Will I turn into one of those crazy people who wander the street talking and shouting at themself? Will I end up in a mental institution? Am I going nuts? What about suicide?

Will I become a bum or a bag lady, frightened broke and alone? Will this ever stop? Can I ever feel good again? What will ever become of me????”… and on and on and on it goes.

Sound familiar? Do you see yourself in this scenario?

Take heart you are not alone. You are not nuts. And yes you will feel good again. I’m even betting you will feel great, better than ever in fact.

How do I know this? Been there – done that – got the t-shirt – and I’m writing the book about it.

It took me quite a while – over 15 years of conscious effort – to figure my way through the maze of doubt, anxiety, fear, paralysis, insecurity, loathing, harsh self-criticism and denial to get through to the other side.

But I have found the cheese! And it’s yummy!

It took me that long because I’m thorough! I had to find all the blind allies and dead-ends along the way. (duh)

Good news is, I now know the shortcuts. I’ve figured out how to turn a bad moment into a good moment and how to do it quickly.

If I can figure this out, so can you and with some help you can do it in a fraction of the time it took me. I know it.

However, there are a few things you need to think over and make some choices about. At some point you will feel uncomfortable with what you are discovering.

That’s normal too. Just be willing to keep walking forward and soon you will begin to smell the cheese yourself!

That’s when you start picking up the pace and really enjoying the search.

Here are some ideas to support you. These are the short cuts I found and I will try to make this as simple as I can.

There Is One Thing You Need To Know And One Thing You Need To Do.

What you need to know

You are more than this! … whatever the ‘this’ is that is happening right now. Indeed, you are magnificent. Your eyes may not allow you to see this at the moment, so let me explain.

Your true nature as a spiritual being, a spark of light in the infinite field of consciousness, is more precious than a rare diamond.

There is nothing like you … anywhere! ever! You are irreplaceable and that alone makes you valuable and worthy.

There will never be another you. The universe would not be the same without you.

Everything you do, I mean every little thing, makes a difference to the entire world, the entire field of consciousness throughout the entire universe.

That’s how important you are. It has nothing to do with what you do and everything to do with who you are.

You don’t have to do anything to be who you are. By your sheer existence you are valuable and worthy of great love and appreciation.

How can that be? Here’s some simple physics. At some level of aggregation, there is the set of one.

What I mean by this is, at the greatest level beyond what the human mind can fathom, there is only one universe, even though it has no limits or boundaries. Ultimately there is only one of it.

Everything inside the universe is a subset of the universe. Everything within it belongs in it, is a part of it. This is what I refer to as God.

The biggest possible thing ever. God is the evolving universe. It expands and grows and becomes more conscious of itself, ever diversifying and increasing in complexity and order.

We are at the forefront of what might be called a 15 billion-year trend in the evolution of God, the Universe. Right now, right here.

Now here’s some mind bending logic. If it’s all God, then what does that make you? Everything is a part of that infinite field of consciousness. That includes you. God doesn’t take a detour around you. You too are a subset of God.

Furthermore all that God is, all of the qualities It possesses, are everywhere all at the same time. The love that God is just doesn’t hang around Venus and compassion here at Earth.

Love, compassion, acceptance, power, abundance, all of the qualities of God, are evenly distributed everywhere. It’s all contained in the consciousness soup, in the atoms and electrons of every thing there is.

And that includes you, too. So whatever God is, It’s in you right now, already. You’ve got it all.

Spirit vs matter

The next key point to understand is the difference between spirit and matter. Matter has form and shape.

It has boundaries where the object starts and stops. Spirit, or thought, does not. It cannot be contained by anything. It floats around as part of the consciousness soup.

When it comes right down to it, our bodies are matter; however, we, the consciousness within the body, are not. What makes us who we are is our consciousness, our spiritual presence.

Our spiritual identity is distinct from our body. The awareness that is our life enters the body around the time of birth and leaves at death.

It goes somewhere before and after. There are many philosophies about what that is.

Suffice for us to say that the body can keep on living through life support systems; however, ‘we’ are no longer there.

So, your thoughts have no boundaries. You can cast your thoughts throughout time and space, to when you were very young to a point in the future when you become very old.

Through the power of your thoughts and your imagination you can place yourself on the moon for that matter, or anywhere on Earth or throughout our galaxy, and beyond.

If your thought has no boundary, and my thought has no boundary, and everyone else’s thoughts have no boundary, then we are all sharing the same field of consciousness.

It might not seem like it because we haven’t yet developed the skill to tune in at that level.

However, the truth remains; there is only one field of consciousness. (Einstein developed the logic to explain this; however, it was only until the development of modern equipment in the physics laboratories that his theories were proven.)

Putting it together. So put these ideas together and what do we get?

1. God is all there is and the infinite field of intelligence and consciousness that is God, is being shared with you. It’s all one thing. You are participating in the mind of God. One way to say this is “You are God” which seems preposterous.

However, taken another way, you could say

God is all there is and It is being itself as You!

Now can you see why you are so precious? You are one with God. You are one with the Magnificence of God. Therefore, You are Magnificent!

2. God is the source of all life and that source is available everywhere and is contained in everything. Hence Everything you need is already within you!

This is great news! I have found this to be the most profound means of feeling safe and secure and knowing, I always will be. Once you get it that you are Divinity in Action, no one can take this away from you, NOT EVEN YOURSELF.

You simply have to learn how to connect to it and how to use the gift you were born with.

A hard thing to fathom when you are feeling depressed and unworthy, I know. However, that brings up the one thing you need to do

What you need to do

Keep remembering this. Do whatever it take to keep this idea in the forefront of your mind. Meditation, yoga, deep breathing, reading affirmations, take spiritual classes, whatever you are drawn to that will keep you open to accepting this as true.

Your outer mind will drag you away from doing so, however. So what you need to learn is how to keep remembering the truth about who you really are despite what you think about yourself! I’ll explain.

You were born with everything you need already within you; however, your ego, your personality, or whatever you want to call your outer identity, has no clue of that.

Whereas your spiritual presence, your inner identity is always with you, the ego only starts to come into existence at the moment of birth and has no capacity to understand anything before or after your life here on Earth.

Your ego is a necessary part of who you are. You need it to protect yourself, your body, your corporate entity, from any harm.

That includes emotional harm as well as physical harm. Because it doesn’t know any better, it works to defend only what it knows.

Anything it doesn’t recognize becomes labeled with fear and judgment. It oversteps it boundaries and tries to protect us from the excitement and adventures of life because it has no faith outside of itself.

Before you know it, it has everything looking like a threat and our world starts to shrink.

That inner voice of judgment and criticism is the ego’s way of getting your attention. The judgments become louder, the criticisms more harsh, and presto-chango, you’re in pain.

The ego is meant to protect your corporate body. That’s it’s job. However, when the inner identity, your spiritual presence is asleep, the ego rules the roost and will do anything to keep us small and hidden from anything it perceives as harm, REAL OR IMAGINED!

It is the ego, or outer self, that causes you to feel unworthy and small. It will keep throwing up (literally!) bogus ideas about your magnificence because it doesn’t trust anything it doesn’t know. It’s trying to contain you inside a small fence, a boundary of what it knows about you.

It has no means of knowing who you are as a spark of consciousness beyond that fence. It keeps you fenced in.

Where did that fence come from? You are the one who has so far created the ideas that went into building the fence called “Your Life”. Every morning as you wake up from sleep you put on your identity, your fence, like a pair of glasses.

The lenses are your beliefs that you put away the night before. All the beliefs you have about yourself are nailed together to make the fence.

Some fences are quite airy and have lots of spaces you can see through. They flex in the wind. Other fences are tall and rigid and tight with no way to let anything pass back and forth with the rest of life.

So, the ego simply takes that fence (your beliefs) as the truth and does everything it can to keep it intact. No growing allowed! Nice, neat tidy package that’s easy to control.

However, we are changing all the time and we need to flow with life. The science of medicine teaches us that our bodies are changing constantly. Cells die off, new cells come to life.

Physically, you are not the same person you were yesterday let alone a year ago. But what keeps you looking the same and acting the same?

That set of beliefs you have latched onto called your identity, the fence you have created that your ego is so vigorously protecting.

You are not your fence. You are more than that. You are a spark of consciousness in the infinite field.

You connect to that infinite field through the spiritual presence within you, that has always been a part of you and is the inner urging and desires that propels you through life.

It encourages you to grow, feel love, joy, beauty, to be creative and expressive. Your connection to the infinite field, the Divine Presence, has no fence and no boundaries.

When you allow the fence to come down you merge with that infinite field. Everything that is within that field is in you. Like a soap bubble floating in the air, there is only a fine membrane that separates the air inside the bubble from the air outside the bubble.

When the membrane bursts the air merges and become one. All that was inside is now outside and all that was outside is now inside. The same is true of your ego identity and your spiritual identity.

So what? When I reached this point of realization, I was dumb struck.

Who the hell am I then? I haven’t a clue. If all that is, is available to me, then I also have no clue what I am capable of.

Life shifted dramatically from that point onward. Instead of fighting to be enlightened and happy and loving and creative, I simply allow what is already in me to come out.

I’m not so consumed with getting something from out there, trying to manipulate my environment and the people within it to get my needs met.

It’s more like enjoying this newfound self and seeing what this puppy can do.

The image that comes up is like I have been given a high performance racecar to drive.

However, all this time I have been bumbling around the inside lane in the lowest of low of gears, herky-jerking my way around the track, shifting, and clutching with all the finesse of a tank.

When this new identity showed up, I moved over to the passenger seat and in stepped my higher self, the spiritual presence, and VAROOM!

Off we went! Rounding the corners with precision and power, feeling the exhilaration of the ride. Wow! Now this is fun!

It’s a completely different process of living. Instead of trying to make things happen, and focusing my energy outside of myself, I am able to be more permeable to life.

I focus my energy inside and trust that the ideas, resources or whatever I need are there when I need them. I feel more relaxed, my mind is less gnarled up with stuff, and I enjoy my life so much more.

Nothing IS the matter. When it comes right down to it, in essence you are nothing, and that has the ego scared s——-!

If you are really nothing but a spark of awareness, it has nothing to do, nothing to defend, nothing to protect.

It does NOT want to go there! So it won’t and it will fight tooth and nail to forego giving in on this one.

The ego is afraid of nothing. That’s right. It does not want to face that it is nothing.

You don’t want to face that you are nothing. You don’t want to go into the vortex and the void of all nothingness.

You don’t want to face who you really are. Your pain is a way to stay out of facing this.

It is a convenient distraction that the ego has invented to keep you focused on what you are not. Your spiritual presence is patient and persistent.

It will not give up on being expressed through you, one way or the other.

Sounds like a cowboy movie. “You can come along peacefully or we will drag you there.”

Your pain and feelings of worthlessness are useful to you right now because you don’t know what’s next. You are getting ready to open to a new you.

The biggest shortcut of all is to surrender. Now surrender gets a bad wrap. We think it has to do with giving up stuff we value, of losing something important.

It doesn’t have to mean shaving your head and meditating in some far away village in the third world. (I came this close to doing that once.)

Surrender means you let go of what’s not working

Hanging on to your fear, your illusions about who you are in the physical world, your life as you have come to know it, will only continue to bring you pain.

Pain arises when you resist what life presents to you. Suffering arises when you persist in your resisting. Illness arises when you suffer over an issue for a long time.

But that’s not what your life is about YOU DON’T NEED TO GO THERE!

How do you get past all this? Essentially by taking charge of who you already are so you can keep your ego in its proper place: helping you move through life without getting in the way of your life.

It is a tool to be used to benefit your higher self. It is the servant not the master.

So while you are reawakening your spiritual presence within you, you need to develop the skill of recognizing when your ego shows up and how to deal with it. You need to learn to

Manage the moment at the end of your nose.

Here’s what you do. Keep focusing on who you are inside, the magnificence of the spiritual presence within, and whenever the ego starts to flash up an idea of anything less than magnificence, simply turn your attention away from that thought, and go about what you want to do.

Indeed, DO NOT GIVE IT ANOTHER THOUGHT.

Okay here’s the part that’s hard to hear. Your pain exists because you create it and give it life. One of the most basics laws of the universe is:

What you focus on you get more of

Simply, if you focus on the negative thoughts your ego throws up at you, you will have more negativity show up in your outer world. It’s like a magnet.

It starts attracting more of itself. You can do that, no problem. However, if you attach to it as if it were true, then you’ve got trouble.

It just ain’t so! When a thought that doesn’t support you shows up, you simply accept that it has arrived, and let it go. Here’s a big shortcut

Don’t listen to your Ego

Let’s say you were enjoying a nice crackling fire, sitting in a comfy-cozy, lounge chair, beautifully dressed in a pair of fine leather pants.

Ooops! A spark jumps out and lands right on your beautiful pants. What do you do? Well you swoosh that spark right off your pants so they don’t get burned, right?

Treat your thoughts the same way. When a thought that doesn’t support you shows up in your mind, do you let it land on your pants? No, of course not.

Do you watch it burn a big ugly hole in those fine pants? No way! Do you let it burn right through to your skin? Not on your life! When it lands in your awareness swoosh it away right now!

It has no place landing in your magnificent consciousness. OUT! OUT! BE GONE!

You can release the pain and move past it whenever you want, when you understand YOU ARE NOT THE PAIN.

When you dwell on the pain you are experiencing, you create more pain and suffer because of it.. And no one was meant to suffer.

Persistence Beyond Resistance

Take down the fence: Change you mind about who you are. So if you were in charge of creating the beliefs that put the fence up in the first place, you are the one with the power to take it down or at least change how it is constructed.

Your thoughts are things and are completely within your control. It takes a bit of practice to learn how to rein them in on demand; however, you can do it.

Stop listening to the ego and start choosing what you would prefer to experience

All it takes to have great self-esteem is how to see clearly and what to focus on.

1. You need to WAKE UP! your inner Spiritual Presence and get to know it.

2. You need to persist beyond what your ego wants to resist.

3. You need to help your ego remember its job is to support you, not to take over.

4. You need to practice regularly and be vigilant.

5. You need to be gentle with yourself, cry when you want to, play when you want to, and accept everything in between as part of the beautiful expression that you are

In Summary

• It’s all God and it’s all Good

• God is all there is and It is being itself as You

• God is the source of all life: Everything you need is already within

• You can connect to the Divine Presence within you and allow it to flow through you

• Your thoughts and feelings create your experience

• You can choose your experience

• Logic only goes so far: You have to feel the Presence

• Tap into this Presence and you will never lack for anything again

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If you would like further information on how you can unleash the presence and power within you and never lack for anything again, call Patty Shortreed at 403-229-9321 about programs and self help services that can help you have the life you’ve always wanted or click here to visit my website. http://pattyshortreed.com/