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Self-worth is not a thing; it is a perception. Just as a gymnast begins a routine with ten points and receives deductions for each mistake, so you began life with a natural, complete sense of worth. (Have you ever met an infant with self-worth issues?) But as you grow, you serve as your own judge, deducting points when you misunderstand the nature of living and learning—when you forget you are a human-in-training and that making mistakes and having slips of integrity and mediocre moments are a part of life, not unforgivable.
Dan Millman, in “Everyday Enlightenment” |
You stupidly squander so much energy trying to rearrange the world. If changing the world is your vocation in life, go right ahead and change it, but do not harbor the illusion that this is going to make you happy. What makes you happy or unhappy is not the world and the people around you, but the thinking in your head. As well as search for an eagle's nest on the bed of an ocean, as search for happiness in the world outside of you.
So if it is happiness that you seek you can stop wasting your energy trying to cure your baldness, or build up an attractive body, or change your residence or job or community or lifestyle or even your personality. Do you realize that you could change every one of these things, you could have the finest looks and the most charming personality and the most pleasant of surroundings and still be unhappy?
Fr. Anthony DeMello S.J., in "The Way to Love" |
One of the strangest delusions believed by many of us is that it is good to love other people but bad to love yourself. I suggest that the more you are able to see, love, and accept the one facet of Spirit gazing at you from the mirror, the more you will be able to love Spirit within others. If we are the same awareness shining through a billion separate forms, then all love begins with self-love. For the heart to awaken, it cannot exclude a single soul, including yourself. If you do not love yourself, now can you find the space to love others?
Self-love is a beginning practice of love. From self-love we learn to love another--a parent, a pet, a friend, a partner--from family to friends, to associates, to the larger world. There's no place like home to begin the practice of love.
Home is where the heart is, and home is generally where the hassles are, too. What better place to practice loving without reason than
that place where we cannot always find a reason to love?
Dan Millman, in Everyday Enlightenment |
Imagine that every thought you think, every word you utter, and every feeling you experience will automatically magnetize more of the same. Metaphysical teachers urge us to speak of only those conditions we want to see manifested, and to avoid declaring anything that we do not wish to bring into our life. Our words have power. (‘In the beginning was the Word’.) Speak loving words and attract love. Speak of success and attract prosperity. Speak of healing and lift the world out of sorrow and into the light.
Imagine that you can create the kind of life you want to live by putting yourself into the frame of mind as if you are already living it. As a co-creator with God, you have the tools and the opportunity to make of your life what you wish. The power is in your hands. Do with it as you will. Be a force for love, and you will be empowered by every noble thought in the universe.”
Alan Cohen, in “Dare to Be Yourself” |
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