Escape the Fog of Admiration

This is an article I'm reading as I delve into deeper healing with reference to idealization of others.

The vital need of each child is to be valued, seen and appreciated. When children are responded to with respect, love and joy, their sense of self and self-worth flourish. If this need is crushed, its unfulfilled anguish drives us into the fog of admiration. Either we turn into self-obsessed admiration-addicts that cannot tolerate in others thoughts and feelings that deviate from what we expect of them. Or we become devoted servants who believe that their life has meaning only when they bestow admiration upon those that crave it. Children's self-worth is crushed and their strength perverted into the coercion to please if they do not receive joyous appreciation. Parts, soaked with the anguish of being unwelcome and rejected since life's beginning, were silenced by other parts that want to protect us from this pain and buy into the corruption that admiration sustains relationships and grants a sense of worth. The experience of love is replaced by the compulsion to admire and the illusion that admiration endows us with love.

http://screamsfromchildhood.com/escape_admiration.html

How to Stop Loving the Narcissist & Start Loving Yourself (Video)

Benefits of Meditation

I found this description of meditation from an article about opening the pineal gland. Living a meditative life is a requirement for those who need inner healing. Inner wounds draw one to the source of the pain which you find can only be healed through meditative practice. No self abandonment will suffice. If you are wounded and you want to heal, you must go to the source of the pain, face yourself and know all about yourself. The truth.

Anyway, here's the article excerpt.

Meditation is the art of mastering the mind through the development and strengthening of one’s awareness. Being that the subconscious mind is constantly dumping thoughts at random into the conscious mind and can hijack one’s consciousness and attention, it is critical that one develop their capacity to master their mind so that they can steer it in the direction they truly want.

As the barriers between the subconscious and conscious mind are gradually dissolved through the act of meditation, one progressively gains more and more of a leash over their consciousness, which in turn enables them to direct their will power more precisely into what they truly aim to accomplish with their life.

Being that our mind/brain is constantly in action in both our waking lives and dreaming lives, it is an organ of the body that is typically deprived of enough time to be rested and rejuvenated. In meditation, one seeks to relax the mind through putting one’s awareness and intention on stillness. In this state one allows themselves to stop their thoughts and worries and just be at peace for the meditations duration. If and when thoughts arise during meditation, it is the meditator’s mission to not engage in the thought, but to view it from a third person perspective without identifying with it.

Through the practice of this act, one gains more mastery over the subconscious mind and as well as a better perspective on their own undesirable mental programs that may be running like a feedback loop. As one progresses in meditation and the mind acquires more and more stillness, tension in the mind from over-active thinking is reduced and the grey matter of the brain becomes more soft and flexible. In turn the pineal gland which sits in the center of the right and left hemispheres of the brain is enabled to function with greater energetic receptivity and transmutation.

From this article: 3 Most Powerful Tools for Opening the Pineal Gland.

Should You Embrace Or Reject Your Inner Critic?

This is an excerpt of a blog comment I just wrote on a beautiful blog post. I thought it may be helpful for you. See original comment.  And please leave me a comment or send me a private message on the SelfLoveU Facebook Page telling me how this work is affecting you (I am the only one who sees it and your message will be confidential, unless you give me permission to share). I love hearing from you. It keeps me going.

Embrace the negative or eject it? I know it’s important that we embrace our whole selves, however, I feel that parts of us that are divided against the well being of the whole (even if they’re trying to protect us), should be kicked out, separated, banished, shoved against the wall, kicked to the moon.

That Imago Interject is the voice of the abuse. It’s insidious. When you are hurting inside and in pain because of something your subconscious is telling you… things you were taught about yourself as a child, under all the layers, keep repeating themselves over and over and repeating the trauma. We’re programmed to do it to ourselves. The pain our wounded child feels is the result of these false messages. It’s despair.

There is no power in despair. But, there is power in anger. Even the body response is different, more alert, upright and ready for action. Tapping into our anger inside against the false messages that are inside. Getting mad at the injustice our own hearts spew without conscious awareness. Standing up to the Inner Critic has helped me to access my own power and given me the ability to set boundaries within and without against criticism and conditional love.

My Inner Critic is never sad, confused or angry. It is just cognitively and constantly saying that I’m not good enough. It doesn’t go that deep, however, it wounds deep. My Inner Critic is not in my limbic, it’s in my Cerebral Cortex. It’s the judgment piece, which takes critical thinking, which is higher level, more cerebral than the wounds of my inner child (the emotional part).

I love the way Peter Walker, MA Psychotherapist explains how to deal with the inner critic. I’ve read it many, many times.

http://www.pete-walker.com/shrinkingInnerCritic.htm

Once I started rebelling against the negative inner voices, I stopped hurting. There was no hurt in that area for the inner child to be hurt. It feels like I embraced the hurt not by holding onto it, but by kicking butt internally. Stopping the bleeding. Standing up to the Inner Critic has made all the difference. 1000s of little hurts, but one at a time.

Why Manipulators Manipulate

Great Audio of "Why Manipulators Manipulate" by Melanie Tonia Evans

Why Manipulators Manipulate

Notes on Melanie Tonia Evans talk:

If we are around manipulation, and we continue to hang around to receive it, then we have to go into maladaptation. We have to change our own levels of authenticity when we're involved in that, and that absolutely undermines our self worth. If you are aligned and solid in your truth and your authentic self, you would not be hanging around with someone who manipulates you (such as a narcissist or other manipulative person).

When you're on the battle field with a manipulator, you have no choice but to become someone you are not because your true self is under constant attack.

An essential truth of life is, we need to be very aware of the levels of consciousness that people have in your life because if you are intimately connected with people or spending a lot of time with people, what happens is that your levels of consciousness start balancing out and meeting. Either your consciousness is going to meet those people's levels, or they're going to drag you down to their level of consciousness.

The only way to raise your level of consciousness is to take responsibility that "I am creating my own life."

Manipulation is a way to play out unhealed wounds. Manipulation occurs from core wound / core belief of unworthiness without manipulating external circumstances. Comes from place of lack, outside yourself.

The only place worthiness can ever take place is within your own inner being, regardless of the conditions outside of you. We never have control of conditions outside ourselves. We only ever have control of our own beingness, and how that beingness is manifesting itself through us.