“If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.”
— Charles Bukowski.
Irrespective of what you do for a living, you’ll never be satisfied if you do it for monetary exchange.
The absolute satisfaction in life doesn’t come from squandering money on shopping or having sex three times a week with three different people. It comes from doing the work that you love to do.
Whether it’s writing or simply working out at the gym, you’ll have a different aura on your face if you love your work.
You’ll have a sense of enjoyment and enthusiasm reflecting your whole personality.
Any activity ranging from reading a book, bathing, or simply watering the plant, everything will become a form of meditation for you.
There is a program within us that runs our lives. In most cases, parents, teachers, neighbors, relatives, and peers programmed that for us.
We’re nothing but an accumulation of all the ideas that we grasped from reading books, listening to people around us, and watching movies.
I can challenge you that you’ll not find within you even a single idea that is your own.
We acquire everything from our surroundings, and often, we’re not good enough to stop those negative impressions from entering our psyche.
Later on, these impressions become firm beliefs and reflect our attitudes.
We chose jobs or businesses that don’t give us an ample amount of money and spouses who don’t have any respect for us.
Why do we do it?
Well, I don’t have a scientific framework for that. Still, my curiosity leads me to the answer that our deep unconscious beliefs and attitudes propel us to enter those relationships.
We hate ourselves from the depth of our hearts because we feel that we’re not good enough.
We think and feel that we don’t deserve the amount of wealth we wish to have and that perfect relationship we dream of having.
Internally we’ve low self-esteem and self-confidence.
I don’t know whether I can express it in words, but repeatedly, I’ve found that we do it all to punish ourselves because we don’t like ourselves.
We put effort into our work and relationships, but that is in third grade.
The reason is simple we don’t have any love or respect for our work and relationships.
Unconsciously we’re seeking punishment for ourselves. We need someone from outside who can abuse, criticize and insult us. We seek an authority who can rule and rebuke us.
I focus on self-love and gratitude because of these simple truths I’ve discovered through mediation and observation.
It’s hard to change the programming that works against us, and I’m doing my best to figure out a way that can work well to change these codes of negative beliefs and attitudes that work against us.
In upcoming posts, under this section, I’ll present a systematic approach to solving this problem by challenging our beliefs and changing our attitudes.