Low Self Esteem is the Root of All Evil (part 1)
A couple of years ago, I was playing basketball and I dislocated a knuckle and broke a finger on one hand. I was going through physical therapy to heal from the injury, and I was sitting in the lobby of the physical therapist’s office feeling sorry for myself and across the room there was a girl. And she turned, and I noticed that one of her hands was malformed : it didn’t have any fingers. It was just the palm and a little nub on one of her hands. And at that moment it instantly occurred to me what a miracle it is to be born healthy. One chromosome not working to its full potential, or even over-working, then it’s an entirely different ballgame.
Buddhists believe that to be born human is to be born into an exalted state. And they believe that because humans have a higher capacity for reason than any other animal. If being born human is an exalted state, and it’s a miracle to be born healthy, how is it that people have become so dissatisfied? I’m not sure where it started, this low self esteem, how it came to pass that so many people are dissatisfied with their lives. It can go back thousands of years. Let’s just say it can go back to the beginning of organized religion. Back to a time when priests were the only ones who were allowed to read. In essense what the church was saying was “God’s very complicated and you couldn’t possibly understand Him. But tell you what, you give us some of your land, maybe give us some of your livestock, and we’ll tell you everything that you need to know about God.”
Again, the underlying message is that you are not intelligent enough to know what God has in store for you.
The underlying truth is that we are all gods, we are all THE god. It serves those in power for us to believe that we are NOT as powerful as we really are. But in reality, we are creating our very existence, every moment of every day.
Today you can see the suppression of our self esteem the way governments treat us. In essence, what they’re saying is that we’re not smart enough to understand our brothers and sisters around the world.
“Those people over there, they speak a funny language, they eat funny foods, they dress strange, they treat their women differently than we treat our women. You couldn’t understand THOSE people! But tell you what, you give us a portion of your yearly income, and we’ll tell you everything you need to know about them.”
Even more insidious, the messages we get through the media every day. Every day we are bombarded with messages that we’re not good enough, we’re not beautiful enough, we’re not smart enough. We are bombarded with messages that if you don’t have this product you’ll never have any friends. All day long, we are told you are not good enough, you’re not smart enough.
Here’s a challenge for you: watch some television. And over the next twenty-four hours, see if you can find a commercial that tells you that you’re fine just the way you are. It won’t happen.
So how does this continual bombardment of negativity regarding ourselves affect us? It creates a massive gulf between us and any other human beings we come into contact with. If we’re walking through our day, believing and knowing that we are not good enough, that we’re not special- anybody who comes up to us and suggests otherwise is automatically a suspect. They must want something from us, or they’re not intelligent enough to know what’s really going on, and therefore, they’re a mark to be played. Now imagine the stress that comes with living with somebody twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week that you do NOT like. Now imagine that person is you. That kind of stress makes people physically ill. If you look at the word “disease”, it’s in the spelling of the word: dis-ease. Dis-ease, not at ease.
You can’t love other people more than you can love yourself. If you’re walking around full of self-loathing, what happens is that you treat other people poorly, you treat other people with disrespect, you treat other people with disdain, sometimes in an attempt to make yourself feel better about yourself. As if somehow treating other people poorly boosts you up, as if cutting off other peoples’ heads makes you taller.
So you’re walking around now, not liking yourself, not trusting anybody else, and with that kind of hostility that you’re projecting out into the world, what you are also doing is that you are calling that back into yourself. So you’re walking around with this wall up, not letting anybody get too close, walking around thinking that the world is horrible, projecting that energy out there, and now you’re starting to attract other people who feel that way. Which only validates that you’re no good, the world is no good. And another thing that it does is that anybody who doesn’t feel this way, anybody who is trying to feel healthy and happy- they don’t want to spend too much time around you! So what happens is that now you are left with only people who are of a like mind. All the peaceful people are on the other side of the street from you. All the people who are hostile, they’re on your side of the street, and if you don’t look for the other people, it’s easy to convince yourself that everybody is hostile, and everybody’s out to get you.
And when you think that way, and when you behave that way, that’s the kind of world you create.
Racism is a global application to self-loathing. Low self esteem is the root of all evil. It allows you to treat other people poorly. It allows you to think of them as “less than”. It allows you to try and fill that hole in your soul with demeaning behavior towards whoever you choose to put at the bottom of your particular ladder. You get to treat them almost as sub-human.
I heard a Gandhi quote: “Become the change you want to see in the world”. That’s how healing your self esteem affects the world. You feel better about yourself, you start to treat other people better, they start to treat other people better, and before you know it like ripples in a pond, you have peace!
I spent eight years working in the addiction and recovery field, and one common denominator seems to run throughout all of the students and clients that I’ve dealt with. There’s a hole in our soul that we try to fill with money and power and sex and drugs, and it simply doesn’t work. The only thing that does fill that hole is loving ourself, being accepting of ourself, treating ourselves well. Treating ourselves as if we were the best parent in the world, and, at the same time, we are also the child of the best parent in the world.
How, then, to begin to heal ourselves? Let’s start with something we’re already doing all the time, and something that we’re very good at. Let’s start with affirmations.
We create our reality every day. We think things into existence. The average person has about seventy thousand thoughts in a day. And seventy-five percent of those thoughts are negative. So thoughts creating reality, thoughts being energy-what the average person is doing is creating negativity, creating dysfunction, creating disease in their life seventy-five percent of the time.
Examples such as “I’m not good enough”, “this is hard”, “I can’t do this”- these are the type situations that set up failure in our lives. There are the type thoughts that set up sabotage. Other examples are: “there’s not enough”; “the world is a hard place to live”.
Thoughts equal energy. Everything man made existed first as a thought. Take a look around you. Everything man-made existed first as a thought. The car that you drive- somebody sat down and wrote on a piece of paper where the stick shift was going to go, where the cup holder was going to go. And eventually, through thought and action, there you have your stick shift and your cup holder. Manifestation is simply taking thoughts and putting action to them and creating something where nothing existed but thought before.
In order to heal our self esteem, it’s important that we begin to change our self-talk. You can try and change your behavior, but without changing your self-talk first, the first time something goes awry, you will fall back to the old self-talk “Well, see, I knew that wasn’t going to work” . This, again, sets up self-sabotage. This defeats any efforts that you might have put into changing your behavior. Self-talk cycle is a three-step process. The first step is our self-talk, the things that we say to ourselves, whether they’re good or whether they’re bad. Our self-talk leads to our self-image, who we believe ourselves to be. Our self-image then leads to our behavior. An example might be: “I can’t get a job. Nobody’s going to hire me.” If you say that to yourself enough, you will come to believe that you are unemployable. What happens then is, you don’t find work. Or maybe somebody kicks your butt and says “Hey, get up and go find some work!” If you do not believe that you’re employable, what happens is you’ll go look for work, and the first time something goes a little bit wrong, first time things don’t break the way you think they should go, your self-talk begins to tell you “See? You’re unemployable.” You don’t get the job. Then that behavior feeds your self-talk, and it becomes a vicious cycle that some people never break out of. To change the negative self-talk is a very simple process. It’s called “Affirmations”, and there are three “P’s” associated with affirmations-very simple formula. The three “P’s”? are:
- Personal
- Present tense
- Positive
The first P, Personal, you have to affirm for yourself. You can’t affirm for anybody else.
The second P is Present tense, as if you are doing it now. Remember, thoughts equal energy, and when you are thinking about something, you are actually doing it, just like the person who thought about the cup holder before he actually created the cup holder. Thoughts are the first step in the process. So, merely thinking about it, you have begun the process.
The third P is Positive. That’s the fun one, because that’s where you get to think about what you want to have happen. It is infinitely healthier for you to think about what you want to have happen, rather than what you don’t want to have happen. An example of the three P’s of Affirmations: if I were to give a speech in front of a room full of people, I might say to myself: “I am good at speaking in public.” “I” is the Personal, “am” is the Present tense, and “good at speaking in public” is the Positive.
Do this enough, and what it does is it overwrites the negative programming that many of us suffer from. I pick up affirmations from music, from lyrics; I pick up affirmations from movies, I pick up affirmations from things that I hear people say. What I just described was intellectual affirmation. Thinking yourself into being able to do. And that’s beneficial, but that’s like driving in a lower gear in your car. A way to move into overdrive is to add emotional affirmations into your intellectual affirmations. Emotional affirmation is very simply recalling a feeling that you have had in the past where you felt good and whole and complete and healthy. Marrying that energy with your intellectual affirmations - when you bring your intellectual and emotional energies together - all I can say is I really hope what you’ve been focusing your energies on is something that you want, because it’s coming. It’s coming quick.
End of Part 1
host: jim mclelland - music: anna huff - transcription: colleen mclelland - engineering: dave huff
