Are you familiar with Shadow Work? Developing security starts with kissing the dragons within you.
Loving others stems from loving yourself, and loving anything means acceptance without condition. Furthermore, we can only receive love at the level we give it to ourselves. Eliminate the conditions for your love, and you’ll maximize the flow.
Take these four steps:
1. Identify your patterns
What situations seem to keep playing out on repeat? Or, perhaps another question could be: What lessons keep presenting themselves as challenges for you to grow? If you feel like you’re stuck in a rut in some aspect of your life, examine the nature of the pattern so you can explore the underlying beliefs that are holding you back from achieving your goals. Once you achieve a more enlightened perspective on the situation, whatever problems are presenting will immediately shift.
2. Validate yourself
If you have an idea or a hypothesis, you might want to seek external validation to confirm its truth or accuracy. But how often do you look to others to validate your worth? I’m willing to bet that it’s more often than you realize. Your worth is inherent in your existence. How your existence is valued by others is subject to their programming, and not representative of the validity of your intrinsic worth. Only YOU can validate your worth for yourself, and that will set the stage for all of your interactions with others.
3. Embrace your shadow
One of the most unloving things we do to ourselves is done in our attempts to prevent abandonment, and it results in us abandoning ourselves. In order to appeal to those whose approval we seek, we splinter off bits and pieces of ourselves that we presume might be offensive or undesirable. All of these little shards are shamed and shunned away into our “shadow”. One of the most loving things we can do for ourselves is reclaim those parts, bit by bit, accepting them as elements of our being, and loving them back into ourselves, to become whole again. Only as whole persons can we connect with others fully, and only then can we achieve true intimacy.
4. Fear no judgment
That anxious spell of apprehension you experience when you’re quietly fretting about how your words or actions might be received by another is essentially fear of judgment. It’s worth noting, however, that the only judgments that affect us, are those we hold of ourselves. Once you’ve done your “shadow work”, you will begin to recognize your fears about judgment, and you’ll recall that you’ve already deemed yourself worthy.
Next Pillars of Security: Affirmation & Balance…
(Updated March 18, 2021)