Part 1~

How do you see yourself?   Do you walk around feeling like a beggar or an emperor/ empress?  What determines how you see and treat yourself?  Self-respect? Self-esteem? How your parents felt about themselves and each other and you?  How others perceive you and treat you?   On a subconscious level, all of these factors contribute to your present vision of yourself.

What is the difference between self-respect and self-esteem? Are they the same?  How are they different? How are they related?   My understanding is that  how I think about myself determines my level of self-esteem…whether it is high or low.   Self-respect, on the other hand, is influenced by my thinking and my belief system (which is pretty much based on my social conditioning) and shows up in how I treat myself and others, with regard or without regard.

What naturally follows from this is that if I think well of myself, I will treat myself well!  This points to the importance of  weeding out the false beliefs that I’ve picked up along the way about myself during my formative years.  These belief systems include how my teachers, parents, friends, and family members have projected upon me…which continue to effect me in the present.

Then there is the question of how did you develop your level of self-esteem, high, medium, or low, in the first place?  Common-sense tells us that:

• First,  you developed high self-esteem if your  parents have or had high self-esteem.
• Second, you built self-esteem if you were listened to by your parents and care-givers.
• Third, you adopted higher or lower levels of self-esteem  depending on how much success you experienced in learning age-appropriate skills and tasks, at home, at school, or at play.

When you were born, like most babies, the innocence and purity of you, the soul, shined through effortlessly as the natural state of the soul.  In other words, you were expressing directly as a soul.  You responded to life without your present, acquired mechanisms of ego and habit, name and gender, opinions and beliefs, for you had not formed any of these aspects as yet.  The world and your own karmic accounts had not yet played upon the soul’s innocence to give you a reason to develop any false or protective ways of being human.

To lose this true natural sense of self is the greatest loss one can experience.  And yet, most of us don’t realize we have lost the most important jewel we could ever possess!  Instead, once the soul merges into the background and the ego starts living as though it were you, the soul  becomes dependent on the external environment for its identity.  The ego turns toward people, places, things, position, social media, obsessions, compulsions, and  addictive behaviors to make you the soul feel temporarily good about yourself and even to define your sense of who you are and who you are not.

Your vision of yourself becomes impacted or impressed upon by the external, changeable, and temporary things of the world. This vision supplants your inner vision of who you truly are eternally!

Until we recognize the difference between the true self and the false self, we don’t have the power or awareness to choose which identity to give life to.  Soul-awareness brings us in touch with our intrinsic value and with the fundamental goodness of ourselves and others.

Without the identity of soul consciousness, we don’t know ourselves as beings of light…positive, loving, complete, beyond gender, beyond name, beyond fame, serenely peaceful and eternal!

This predicament of the soul in modern times fuels the fields of psychology and psychotherapy.  While psychology, in its literal sense, means the study of the soul (psyche=soul, ology=study of) and psychotherapy promises therapy to the soul, both of these fields mainly focus on changing or adapting the personality/ego and its behavior to be more effective and in line with the world.   These fields do not include methods to restore the soul’s conscious awareness of its Self!

Part 2 will be added tomorrow and will have the answer that is just waiting for you!!!

p.s. If you suspect you are experiencing this kind of loss of your true identity and would like to restore your original innocence, purity, joy, love, and peace, feel free to call on me!  I am offering  free classes on Living as a Divine Soul, instead of as a Temporary Body. Please call to register~my # is 808-639-9436.  Classes will be held on the FIRST 3 MONDAYS in AUGUST, 2018.

Wishing you Oceans of Peace and the Blissful Awareness of the True You,

Shivalaya