Self leadership
TRANSCRIPT
When we are a child, we attach ourselves to things. Whether it’s a toy or it’s a person or it’s the approval of a school teacher we attach ourselves to things.
Those attachments are very important. By attaching ourselves to things we feel complete. Whether we are complete or not, is another subject.
Siblings make each other cry by taking or playing with each other’s toys without permission, and sometimes that can be destructive, and sometimes it’s just crossing a line without permission. But very few things make a child cry more than losing control of an attachment they have to something.
As we age, the things we attach ourselves to expand. We start to attach ourselves to performance, achievement, mischief, looks, approval, and in some cases, social, economic, superiority or inferiority. The process of what we attach ourselves to is not so important as why.
Obviously, we attach ourselves to things in an attempt to fill up a void. Those voids are the paranoias of our parents. If you will remember so far back as to the dialogue of your parents, it was typically, I don’t want you to become lazy, or I’m doing this to teach you how to be strong. In so doing the parents, basically divide you into complete and incomplete. What they don’t want you to become, becomes your incomplete what they do want you to become becomes your Mantra.
By the time you arrive at your 20s, you have a more sophisticated view of the things that you wish to attach yourself to in order to feel more complete. The process is exactly the same as when you were a child, i.e. seeking to feel complete, to fill the void, to reconcile your parents paranoia about not becoming something negative, by attaching yourselves to things that you think will gain you what you’re looking for.
A university degree might on one hand prove that you are complete, but on the other hand, it might also negate the possibility that you are ignorant or low. Obviously, we will be more aware of what we get than what we escape, but they are equally motivational. We certainly want to get away from things and we certainly want to get toward things. It’s really hard to know which is more powerful as a motivator. But let’s just say for now, they both exist.
If you begin to make a list of all the things, your father wanted to get away from himself, and therefore, wanted you to get away from, meaning, not be or meaning not do, you will find his paranoia and ultimately yours. Then make a list of what your mother wanted to get away from herself, and therefore, wanted you to get away from, meaning not to be or meaning not to do. You will find both these paranoia built into you solidly.
Ultimately, in some form or another, this influences your life. It will certainly influence the outcome of your life, if not the process.
We might all ask ourselves what we are looking for in life. What we hope to get and what we hope to get from what we get. Maybe we could even ask what we would get from what we get and what that would make us feel. These questions are sort of navelgazing for some people, but for me, they form the structure of the ability to be self-sufficient, a leader, a person who puts love ahead of their expectations. In other words aligned with nature.
Going to work, or being in a relationship in order to get away from something or in order to avoid something makes you very dependent on that work. It will make you hyper sensitive and underperforming. Anything we attach to runs us. If you can’t see the balance in something, which means detached, it is running you.
There is no meditation process on earth that will unravel. This paranoia passed on from parent to child. Sitting staring at a wall will make you stronger and therefore more able to overcome some of these paranoia, but it will not release you from them. More than likely it will drive them underground and make you less aware of them. Nonetheless, you will be still driven by the avoidance of something or the attachment to something. That leads to dysfunction.
Self-sufficiency does not mean isolation. It means that relationships with other people are not based on codependency, but rather self leadership. That means we take responsibility for who we are, and where we are going, and we take responsibility for collaborating with a significant other in our lives, only in the area of intimacy.
Making a relationship, clean and clear based on love and intimacy requires that the rest of our life is self-sufficient so that we can actually turn up in a healthy way. Neediness or wanting something that someone else has got places us in the unenviable straitjacket of limited range of choices and compromise. None of this leads to love or longevity.
I have met people who have gone to their grave, still believing that they have a void in their lives that can only be filled through the attachment to a significant other. I know for a fact that some people lose that significant other and grieve their loss for the entirety of the life. For them, once they have lost the source of their void, they can never find it back. That is no life. And although this person might end up with significant assets and a few trophies on the fence, they will leave this planet feeling empty.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Live with spirit,