To understand the ways to empower ourselves it helps if we can understand something about the ‘damage’ which can happen to each part of ourselves, which prevent us being empowered. This understanding is important because if we are mostly damaged in, say, our sense of Self Worth that would require a very different approach to fixing damage to our Self Confidence or Self Respect.
The three aspects of ourselves are very closely interelated, so damage to one part can affect the functioning of the other parts too. For example, damage to our Self Confidence may affect our Self Esteem and vice versa. Just like heavy damage to one leg of a three-legged stool can cause the stool to wobble or fall over. This close connection between the different parts can sometimes make it tricky to tell which part of us is damaged.
Damage to Self Confidence: because our Self Confidence is mostly about how we relate to the world, damage to our Self Confidence is usually about things we have done or said. In other words good old fashioned guilt. The guilt may or may not be justified. It may have been laid onto us by others, or by social pressure which was unfair or biased. Excessive guilt can block us from taking action when action is appropriate. It may even stop us from looking at how we can make amends for some harm which we have done.
Damage to Self Worth: because our Self Worth is mostly about how we relate to our inner world and what we believe we are worth, damage to our Self Worth usually takes the form of shame. It can also take the form of rage. Rage seems to be one of the ways we protect ourselves from the pain of shame.
We may just put a blanket of rage over our shame, so if you see yourself going into a rage for no apparent reason see if there is shame underneath.
Damage to Self Respect: because our Self Respect is mostly about our relationship with God (or spirit, our values, our highest aspirations, etc.), damage to Self Respect takes the form of purposelessness. When our Self Respect is damaged we might feel that life has no purpose and no meaning and that it is is just not worth living. This is so common nowadays – because of the lack of awareness healthy Self Respect is so lacking – that it may unfortunately be considered normal by some and not identified as a problem needing to be dealt with.
How to know where your are damaged.
If you are naturally wary of the ‘world’ and feel challenged by getting setting goals and meeting them it could be that you are low in Self Confidence and probably prone to guilt. It may not mean that you have done anything wrong. If others have used guilt to punish you, or control your behaviour, you may have learned to avoid relating to the world out of fear. If you are more prone to guilt than others this can make it easier for you to feel guilty for even the most minor mistake and this can set up a pattern within you of whereby you eventually become unable to life the kind of life you aspire to. You may have retreated into your inner world.
If you don’t really like yourself and cannot stand to look at yourself in the mirror, then you are probably low in Self Worth. If you are low in Self Worth this may make you often feel shy, as ‘shyness’ can be a form of shame. If you are unsure as to whether there is anything good about you, or are quite definite that there isn’t, these are very strong indications of damage to your Self Worth.
If you often find yourself feeling that life is pointless (not just your own life, but all life) and purposeless you are probably low in Self Respect. Even though there may be wonderful things in your life. You may have a successful career, fabulous relationship and so on, yet it all seems empty and pointless (or you may not have these things but feel your life would be empty even if you did have them). This a sign of low Self Respect.
In all of the above each of the forms of ‘damage’ has a role in maintaining health. It is when they they go too far that the problem arises. If an overly strong sense of guilt, shame or purposelessness had been cultivated within us we will tend to affected by this till be become aware of the damage and repair it.
Healthy guilt can cause us to modify our behavoiur and make amends for a harmful action on our part. Healthy shame can cause us to adopt a wise humility and not cast ourselves as being more valuable than others. Even a sense of ‘purposelessness’ can offer life changing opportunities when if causes us to re-examine our current lifestyle and where it matches our deepest, most heart-felt, values.
Occassional bursts of guilt, shame or purposelessness are normal, but if any of them becomes a constant background feeling that is a sign of damage. Just as these parts of ourselves are interlinked then so too are the types of damage. Damage to Self Worth may cause us to get into a rage, which in turn causes us to do or say something harmful to someone, which in turn causes us to feel guilty – and if we don’t have a strong sense of Self Respect to bolster us – we may find ourselves getting really low and telling ourselve that all of life us stupid and pointless.This is the pits when all the damaged voices are sounding off at the same time.
Archives for 2007
The Burning Ground
The Burning Ground
Do not try to fulfill your dreams for they are but illusions and so would their fulfillment be also.
Your hopes and dreams are what you create to insulate yourself from the pain of your own transformation.
Allow them to dissolve, for in their dissolving they will no longer blind you to reality.
Allow the Lord of Destruction to work in your life: let that power split your world apart.
Let it evaporate the clouds of confusion that surround you.
You will not like what you see.
For it is then that you will perceive the burning ground on which you walk.
You will see the barren land before you and at the centre of which you stand.
But this too will pass.
For it is then that you will perceive who you are and why you have come.
You will see what is needed and what you must do.
You will bring life to this place with your purpose.
You will nourish it with your love.
You will guide and direct its’ flourishing with your mind.
Then, its pain will be no more.
Your pain will cease too.
For they are the same pain.
So, do not waste the precious gift of time: or squander it on idle and purposeless doings.
More than this is offered you.
Much more.
If you feel, as yet, unready to face your chosen task, then, let it rest for now.
Find your peace as best you may.
For the truth is not a stick with which to beat yourself.
-William Martin.
Interest-free banking: Ecological Money?
I recently attended a meeting about Interest-free banking and found it fascinating. I wonder if it offers a true ecology when it comes to the handling of money.
In the Western world vast amounts of time and energy go into charging and paying interest. Yet none of that time and energy creates anything.
The cost of maintaining such a large financial system is huge. It represents a large percentage of human activity and uses a lot of planetary resources supporting all the people and infrastructure which maintains it.
I get paid interest on my saving account, I pay interest on my mortgage and on my credit card transactions. The banks charge each other interest and pay each other interest. Where does all this money paid in interest ultimately end up?
It ends up in the hands of a very few individuals who sit at the top of the financial pile. Those are the ones who ultimately benefit from interest not you and I. They effectively cream a percentage from global financial activity.
On the personal scale making enough money to afford the interest payments on a house creates immense strain. Interest payments triple the cost of a house. The taxes we pay are influenced by the bank interest rate as the Government uses our money to pay the interest it owes.
Why not do away with interest entirely? You might say that you have to earn interest on your savings. But that is mostly because you have to pay interest on what you borrow.
You might say that you need interest in order to maintain the value of any money you save or inflation will eat it away. But, what is it that drives inflation? Inflation is driven by interest rates. If there were no interest inflation would not eat away the value of savings.
It might be tempting to think that we need a complete overhaul of the whole financial system to make any progress on such a large issue. However, this is not the case.
The JAK bank in Sweden has offered interest-free banking for many years. Also the Islamic banks are normally interest-free as Islamists regard it as usury to make money directly from money (but not from supplying goods and services).
Of course, we will still need a system whereby financial services can charge a fee for what they offer. However, such a fee would be subject to competition and therefore much lower than an enforced interest rate. This would help trim the waste out of the financial system.
It would take a sea change in attitudes before interest-free banking would really take off. However, as organisations, industries and countries are increasinlgy being called to account for their ecological footprint perhaps the time won’t be far off when the financial services industry will be called to account too. Perhaps then we can see a whole new understanding of money and much healthier ecology in how we distribute and handle it.
Ginger: great for motion sickness, fever, infection, weight loss …
I heard recently about ginger being really good for motion sickness, so when my girlfriend sent me an email saying that she was getting sick on a bus journey she was taking fairly often I recommended ginger.
She does not normally get motion sickness, but she does on this particular dramatic bus trip with lots of ups and downs and lots of swerving left and right. So she tried ginger – with remarkable results.
She made some ginger tea and sipped it before and during (as cold tea in a bottle) the journey. Not only did she not feel sick, she felt comfortable enough to fall asleep on the bus. Normally she would get off that bus and have to lie down in the bus terminal seats to wait for her stomache to calm down. Not after taking ginger tea!. She was competely fine with no nausea or discomfort at all. She was delighed and I was her hero – for a little while anyway…:)
Ginger is also reckoned to be good for indigestion, fever, and infection and even weight loss.
I suspect that ginger is a good travel remedy to have around for other reasons too as it helps prevent food poisoning – which is perhaps why the Japanese often have it with sushi.
Keys to Self Empowerment: Introduction:
First off I ought to define what I mean by ‘Self Empowerment’.
True Self Empowerment is a natural outcome of combining three different, closely-related elements: Self Confidence, Self Worth and Self Respect.
You may wonder, “Aren’t those all the same thing?”. This is part of the problem because many people use these terms as if they did mean the same thing. This confuses the issue and make true Self Empowerment harder to achieve.
Even professional psychologists sometimes use terms like ‘Self Confidence’ and ‘Self Worth’ as if they were interchangeable. In actual fact they are very different things – at least in the way I like to define them.
Self Confidence: this is about how your relate to the external world and your ability to set and achieve goals and the like. It is about knowing you have the required skills, or can learn those skills, to do a thing. It is about the thoughts, feelings and assumptions you have about what you are able to do.
Self Worth: This is about how you relate to your ‘inner world’. It is how you feel about you. As a particpant in one of my workshops once said ‘Its whether you like yourself or not’. In other words it is about the thoughts, feelings and assumptions you have about what you are worth.
Self Respect: This is about how you relate to God in whatever way that is real for you. This can include the principles or values you live by and so on. It is about the thoughts, feelings and assumptions you have about spirituality, or that which gives meaning to your life.
Self Empowerment is like a three-legged stool where each of the elements; Self Confidence, Self Worth and Self Respect are the legs of the stool. We need each of these aspects to be strong and healthy to lead a rich and full life.
If a person focusses too much on Self Confidence – which is the more obvious aspect and so tends to get the most attention – and completely neglects other aspects of themselves, this can lead to them getting out of balance. This is like making one leg of the stool longer and not adjusting the others – eventually the whole thing would tip over.
In practise this means that if a person who has a lot of Self Confidence, but who is a bit weak on Self Worth receives ‘damage’ to their Self Worth (more about that later) they will ‘collapse’ more readily than a person with strong Self Worth. They may give up on something sooner that a person with less Self Confidence but more Self Worth would do in the same circumstances.
As you can probably imagine, developing greater Self Confidence is a different process from developing Self Worth or Self Respect. More on how do develop these and to repair damage does to them in future articles….
What do Men Really W ant? Not Needy or Clinging Behaviour
A woman friend of mine was recently complaining about the man in her life. What the complaints boiled down to was that he was not doing the kinds of things she thought he ‘should’ do. For one thing, she felt that if he loved her he would send her a phone text message every day.
Bizarre as this example may seem, it serves to illustrate one of the classic problems women run into with men. This has to do with having a set of expections and then putting pressure on the man when these are not fulfilled.
My friend’s boyfriend had started to get distant and unavailable. It turned out that she had been putting pressure on him to text her more often and I pointed out to her that this may well be the cause of him distancing himself.
As soon as a woman starts to put pressure on a man to modify his behaviour she needs to be very careful that it is about something important as she might lose him because of it. It takes a lot of effort for anyone to change their natural behaviour. The man in this example was not really inclined to send lots of text messages. Trying to push him into it would have two negative affects:
1) it turns something playful into a ‘have to’ and takes the fun out of it.
2) he would wonder what demands she would put on him next. (Don’t underestimate this one as it can have a lot to do why men will often resist even small requests for change).
It is much better to negotiate changes in behaviour by encouraging the behaviour you want. This is especially effective if you keep the following in mind:
1) It is much more powerful to ask for what you want than to complain about not getting it. “Can you please…”, sounds so much better than a whiney “You should…”.
2) It is much more powerful to praise the behaviour you like rather than complain about the behaviour you don’t like. “I really like it when you …” is miles ahead of “I hate it when you don’t…”.
Notice, please, what I am focussing on here is man’s personal styles and preferences not major behaviour problems (such as very aggressive behaviour or deep depression) which do require very clear and specific intervention.
Behind my friends expectation/demand for ‘text message every day’ was an unmet emotional need. This would come across to the man as ‘neediness’ and that is often what is behind men ‘running away’.
If my friend becomes conscious of her need and the nature of it she could then handle it much better. If she discovered that it was really a need for reassurance she could look to other ways of meeting that need either by a) meeting it herself b) accepting other forms of behaviour from the man which she would also find reassuring.
Trying to get other people to change is always a bit of an uphill battle. Better to change ourselves and then see what happens. We may find that the other person will change anyway, or that we don’t need them to change after all.
‘Needyness’ is the result of acting out needs of which we are not properly conscious. Learning to understand our own needs sets us free from needyness, because as we learn to understand needs we naturally see healthier way to meet them.
Yet, many of us avoid honestly looking at our needs in case that makes us more needy – the opposite is true! We cannot handle what we do not see and we do not see the things if we believe we dare not look at them.
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Germany leads the way in Photovoltaics
Germany seems to be currrently leading the world in the devevlopment and deployment of photovoltaic system cost effectively. This is largely due to the feed-in tarrif which guarantees a good price for electricity generated by photovoltaics.
This report Experience of the German-based performance programme makes interesting reading. Its shows a market growth rate of 25% per year with significant cost-reductions each year.
Here are links to German companies supplying photovoltaics.
What do men really want? What are you offering!
A women recently wrote to me via my free dating site to ask, ” What do men really want!”.
Well let’s have a go at answering from the perspective of a heterosexual man.
What a man wants (from a woman) all depends on the man, his stage in life and his mood at that moment. However, it also depends on what is on offer.
Men sometimes find it baffling that a woman will wear something revealing and then be offended when a guy takes time to really look at what she is showing. If a woman wears, say, a revealing top it is very tempting for a man to want to have a good look at the marvels on display. Yet, many women get offended if he does.
“Goodness”, he wonders, “She wants me to look as her hair when she spends time on it so why not the other bits too….”
Of course, I’m being flippant here. Most sensible men understand that a woman hates to be oggled. However, his basic instinct is to oggle so why encourage it if you don’t want it?
Most men, deep down, really want a healthy relationship with a healthy woman. A leading male guru, who helps men get better at dating women, says that around 80% of men who come to him do so they can win the heart of that special women when they find her. The majority of men are not wanting to get into dating as a game, but to find a life partner.
If, however, a man meets a woman who dress style says ‘I am hot for sex’ – where do you think his focus will go? Of course it might develop into something deeper, but such behaviour will tend to attract men who are mostly interested in what is being advertised – sex. And, it will tend to distort the attitude and priorities of men we genuinely interested in a life partner.
The fashion industry confuses the picture as sometimes the current fashion is to reveal a lot. This can cause a wave of befuddlement in men as they try to think with a part of their anatomy not suitable for thinking processes. “I would like to find a nice girl…oh wow… look at that hottie…hey darlin’…”
Some men are only interested in women for sex. No matter how a women dresses, or the wonders of her charm and intelligence, sex will be foremost on the mind of that kind of guy. But, that is really the minority as such an attitude tends to be – at most – a passing phase for the majority of men. However, it can be a recurring passing phase.
In dating you tend to get that for which you advertise. If a woman ‘advertises’ herself by emphasising her sexual attraction she will experience the results of that. If she downplays her sexual attraction somewhat (at least on the first date or two) and emphasises her personality then she will stand a much better chance of either attracting a man who is looking for something deeper, or of bringing that out in some of the men she meets (“Hey, maybe I ought to quit playing around and get serious with this one…”).
More on this topic later…:)
Bizarre Japanese ski slope stunt
A Japanese friend sent me this bizarre (and very funny) stunt done on a Japanese ski slope. The wall in a some kind of health spa at the top of the slope opens a ‘massage’ chair, with the naked and unsuspecting vicitim on board, is suddenly launched down the ski slope. As much as anything, it makes you wonder how on earth they got away with it.
I feel sorry for the people caught out by it though…
Japanese video ski slope stunt