Clean Up Your View of You…
What is your relationship with yourself like? Do you beat yourself up? Do you judge yourself harshly? How do you talk to yourself? Do you spend time caring for you, loving you? The relationship we have with ourselves is the basis of every other relationship we have. Many of us ignore the relationship we have with us in order to care for or please others. This isn’t living my friends. This is living for others only. We must clean up our relationship with ourselves before we can really move into the life we are meant to live, into the space where we have evolved and find our happiness within.
So many of us look for happiness elsewhere or think life is hard and there is very little happiness. You may recall a few years back I wrote a blog called “Three Minutes of Happiness.” It was inspired by something a friend had shared where her mentor told her if you have three minutes of happiness a day, true bliss, they you are living well. I believed that then, as I wasn’t very happy in my life at the time. I rebuke that today. We can and should have way more than three minutes of happiness. In fact if you only have three minutes of happiness a day, you need to probably look at the relationship you have with yourself. Our happiness comes from within. Too often we look to other relationships, situations, work, to achieve happiness. Too often we assume if we just had that relationship or that outfit or weighed that amount, we would be happy. Happiness is an inside job . Happiness is a choice.
Our real journey to happiness comes from getting to the place where we find our pure awareness, our true selves. Not the self created by our ego, by the stories we have told ourselves or the stories other’s have told about us, but who we are without all of that crap. As a simple example, because of the way I worked, and my focus on perfection instead of progress, I told myself I was a morning person. I was up early, I was in work early, I was creative early. When I left corporate America, someone said to me to pay attention to what inspires me and when I get that inspiration. I have found although I still love the stillness of the morning and awakening early, my creativity comes in spurts. I am, at times, much more creative later in the evening after I have had time to digest a few different ideas. I have found that I am less a morning person and more a 24 hour person, able to think clearly at different times of the day. This story has changed for me. Again, a simplistic example but one just the same.
Cleaning up our relationship with ourselves means looking critically at who we have been and who we want to be. It means saying you want to be the best version of yourself and that may mean releasing behaviors that do not support that version. For me to be the best version of me, I need boundaries which I was never good at. Today I can say no to things without feeling guilty. I don’t need to be around people who actually drain my energy. For me to be the best version of me, I need time alone. I need to be outside by myself, meditate, read, write, create without the influence of others. For me to be the best version of me I need to talk to myself with compassion and empathy, not scold myself and fill myself with “shoulds.” For me to be the best version of me I need to not think I am always right, but listen to others with an empathetic ear. For me to be the best version of me, I need to let go of people who no longer support where I am heading, and let go of my need for relationships that have changed dramatically and do not support the life I want to live.
Changing the relationship we have with ourselves to know that we are enough, to me, is the moment when true happiness enters. It doesn’t mean we don’t continue to develop, evolve, grow and change. It does mean that we love ourselves while we go through that development, evolution, growth and change. It means we stop looking outside of ourselves for happiness. We are happy as we grow, through the messiness of change, knowing that we will be happier due to the changes. We let go of what stories we no longer want to be a part of who we are and create a new path, a new part of the journey.
Clean up your view of you. Clean up the relationship you have with you, and see how the rest of your relationships change. Change what has held you back from your true self and you will move into the life you are meant to lead.