How to Stop Undermining Your Own Best Good

We have all heard those around us who constantly sound demeaning, demanding, pejorative, condescending, or irascible.  What a pain in the backside, right?  Those people! Why do we even bother to pay attention to them in the first place?  They will not listen to reason, and they are so negative and always criticizing and finding the exception to every rule and predicting the end of the world as we know it from every angle.  If you have a physical or emotional pain, instead of their saying that they are sorry for your loss or that they hope you feel better soon so that you can feel you were heard, they launch off into their own hyperbole about how horrible they have it and all of their medical maladies.  I know, right?  Why do we bother to pay attention to them in the first place, really?  Why?

We pay attention to them because they are mirroring us.

Yep, I said it. We are looking at ourselves.

And it is sad and boring and excruciating to listen to their droning on and on about how terrible and ugly and unattractive and insensitive all the other people are in the world.  And who is their audience?  Anyone who will listen.  And so why are we likely targets?  It is a plain and simple truth: We can only see ourselves in the universe.  

We see and hear and smell and desire what we expect, and so we go about smelling out, creating, seeking out, attracting those very things which harmonize with our inner world in order to have consistency with our vision of the universe.

We unerringly find those who do what we do not accept within ourselves.  If you see it, it is emanating from within side of you.  You are the source of your world.  This is an expression of quantum psychology.  We change the world we see into the world we expect so that our chosen self-expression has a way of rationalizing itself.  If you like to complain about hypocrisy, you will not have to walk far.  Look in the mirror.

If you think that people who are financially poor are lazy, where is your billion dollars?  If you think the poor slob you are giving this advice to is an idiot, is this incredible advice something that you yourself have taken?

If you think that others are not able to communicate worth a plug nickle and yet you are waiting until they get their act together to allow them to have a civil word from you, then, "Physician, heal thyself."

Yeah, this is the classic mote and beam instruction, and I want to add this twist to it:  You can change this in a New York minute by changing your perception of what it is that is actually happening.  Imagine this one thing, and your life will forever be transformed from having this ivory tower, self-aggrandizing, ego-centric preoccupation.  I know, right?

Other people are YOU struggling with the same feelings, and they look to you for outer guidance, too.  And here is what they need:  You must take up your own cause and fight for your own emotional and psychic freedom so that you can do it for yourself instead of your doing it to show them how it is done.  Let me rephrase that.  Stop working on others.  Work on yourself.

Stop being annoyed by what others do, and look at your own life as a sculpture in process.  Stop projecting your own insecurities on the world, expecting it to be something that it is not, and allow it to be what it is by allowing yourself the freedom to be who you are.

Stop feeling shame or guilt or any of that other ugliness that you project on others.  Me, you, everyone.  Stop trying to win.  Stop living life in the future, and allow that this is all you have.  If you complain about someone else's complaining, then you have your reward. If you fill your days with finding fault, then that is your life.  If all you see is glasses, empty or half full or neither, then you just spent your precious days and nights measuring.

Whatever you have rationalized as your proof or logic or reasoning for doing what you are doing, it has been eating up all of your time, and, instead of your fully living, it has been one long secession of self-abuse.  If you are seeing less than beauty, why?  If you are feeling less than love, why?  If you are being other than intimate, why?  If you are doing other than being yourself, what are you waiting for?  If you are not out, not vulnerable, not sensitive, not aware, not empathic, not on your game, not healthy, not doing what you most want to do in life, then why in the name of all things sacred in the universe, why not?  What can ever be the excuse we hold so very dear that we cannot take time out during the very few precious moments of life to simply perform the ultimate task of showing ourselves as we are to ourselves?

We are just now beginning to feel the impact of these shows on TV where people show their talents, compete with skills, defy the imagination, endure and excel, take they compelling sense of self-expression to new heights in the world, and at rates we have never seen before.  How is this possible to have this explosion of talent worldwide?  We are seeing it and experiencing it right in front of us. Someone is doing that. It can be done.  "He or she is doing that amazing thing, and I want to do that and more," our children are saying.  We are on the brink of the impossible.  We are about to break the creative barrier worldwide.

Sometimes we see tremendous pain in the world, and most of it is due to self-punishment or else the crushing willfulness of others who are on track to make the world a more tragic place.  Those people are all a part of this cycle, too.  Regardless.  We are all the same idea, the same person, the same "schmuck," Lenny Bruce said.  We have relative comfort, but inside, we are all struggling with the same universal questions, and we push them aside or else we tackle them full on to some degree.

Here is what to do about this.  Start small.  Do one thing.  Then add to that one more thing. Take it easy.  You can't undo the entire thing today.  It is enough to understand the principle of self-acceptance and this process of your owning your own life.  If you were to do just one thing per week, do one percent of the work, over two years your life would change 100%.  Add this thing that is .2%.  Add this other thing that helps to only .2 degrees.  Add and bolt and shim and sheer and cut and post and plod and plot and go and do and crawl and walk and run and sprint.  

If you have a goal or a thought or an idea or a sense or a need or a desire or can show or display or write or sculpt or teach or demonstrate or model or photograph or paint or perform or in some way express yourself from your center mass, from that point of origin inside yourself, then you can change your life.  Don't get it from outside, but rather create it from inside.  Serve, illustrate, bloom, but for the reason that we exist at all, do what you feel best expresses who and how you are.  You are the missing piece to the whole insane jigsaw puzzle, and we have been waiting for you.