Chapter Two“It is safe to look within.”
My Body Doesn’t Work
It hurts, bleeds, aches, oozes, twists, blows up, limps, burns, ages, can’t see, can’t hear, is rotting away, and so on. Plus whatever else you may have created. I think I have heard them all.
My Relationships Don’t Work
They are smothering, absent, demanding, don’t support me, always criticizing me, unloving, never leave me alone, pick on me all the time, don’t want to be bothered with me, walk all over me, never listen to me, and so on. Plus whatever else you may have created. Yes, I have heard them all, too.
My Finances Don’t Work
They are nonexistent, seldom there, never enough, just out of reach, go out faster than they come in, won’t cover the bills, slip through my fingers, and so on. Plus whatever else you may have created. Of course, I have heard them all.
My Life Doesn’t Work
I never get to do what I want to do. I can’t please anyone. I don’t know what I want to do. There is never any time for me. My needs and desires are always left out. I’m only doing this to please them. I am just a doormat. Nobody cares what I want to do. I have no talent. I can’t do anything right. All I do is procrastinate. Nothing ever works for me, and so on. Plus whatever else you have created for yourself. All these I have heard and more.
Whenever I ask a new client what is going on in his or her life, I usually get one of the above answers. Or maybe several of these answers. They really think they know the problem. But I know these complaints are only outer effects of inner thought patterns. Beneath the inner thought patterns is another deeper, more fundamental pattern that is the basis of all the outer effects.
I listen to the words they use as I ask some basic questions:
What is happening in your life?
How is your health?
What do you do for a living?
Do you like your work?
How are your finances?
How is your love life?
How did the last relationship end?
And the relationship before that, how did it end?
Tell me about your childhood, briefly.
I watch the body postures and the facial movements. But mostly I really listen to the words they say. Thoughts and words create our future experiences. As I listen to them talk, I can readily understand why they have these particular problems. The words we speak are indicative of our inner thoughts. Sometimes, the words they use do not match the experiences they describe. Then I know that they are either not in touch with what is really going on or they are lying to me. Either one is a starting point and gives us a basis from which to begin.
Exercise: I Should
The next thing I do is to give them a pad and pen and ask them to write on the top of a piece of paper:
I SHOULD
They are to make a list of five or six ways to finish that sentence. Some people find it difficult to begin, and some have so many things to write that it’s hard for them to stop.
I then ask them to read the list to me one at a time, beginning each sentence with “I Should…” As they read each one, I ask, “Why?”
The answers that come out are interesting and revealing, such as:
My mother said I should.
Because I am afraid not to.
Because I have to be perfect.
Well, everybody has to do that.
Because I am too lazy, too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, too dumb, too ugly, too worthless.
These answers show me where they are stuck in their beliefs and what they think their limitations are.
I make no comments on their answers. When they are through with their list, I talk about the word SHOULD.
You see, I believe that should is one of the most damaging words in our language. Every time we use should, we are, in effect, saying “wrong.” Either we are wrong or we were wrong or we are going to be wrong. I don’t think we need more wrongs in our life. We need to have more freedom of choice. I would like to take the word should and remove it from the vocabulary forever. I’d replace it with the word could. Could gives us choice, and we are never wrong.
I then ask them to reread the list one item at a time, except this time to begin each sentence by saying, “If I really wanted to, I could _____________________.” This puts a whole new light on the subject.
As they do this, I ask them gently, “Why haven’t you?” Now we hear different answers:
I don’t want to.
I am afraid.
I don’t know how.
Because I am not good enough.
And so on.
We often find they have been berating themselves for years for something they never wanted to do in the first place. Or they have been criticizing themselves for not doing something when it was never their idea to begin with. Often it was just something that someone else said they “should” do. When they can see that, they can just drop it from the “should list.” What a relief that is.
Look at all the people who try to force themselves for years into a career they don’t even like only because their parents said they “should” become a dentist or a teacher. How often have we felt inferior because we were told we “should” be smarter or richer or more creative like some relative.
What is there on your “should list” that could be dropped with a sense of relief?
By the time we have gone through this short list, they are beginning to look at their life in a new and different way. They notice that many of the things they thought they “should” do are things they never wanted to do, and they were only trying to please other people. So many times it is because they are afraid or feel they are not good enough.
The problem has now begun to shift. I have started the process of releasing the feeling of “being wrong” because they are not fitting someone else’s standards.
Next I begin to explain to them my philosophy of life as I did in Chapter One. I believe life is really very simple. What we give out, we get back. The Universe totally supports every thought we choose to think and to believe. When we are little, we learn how to feel about ourselves and about life by the reactions of the adults around us. Whatever these beliefs are, they will be recreated as experiences as we grow up. However, we are only dealing with thought patterns, and the point of power is always in the present moment. Changes can begin in this moment.
Loving the Self
I continue to explain that no matter what their problem seems to be, there is only one thing I ever work on with anyone, and this is Loving the Self. Love is the miracle cure. Loving ourselves works miracles in our lives.
I am not talking about vanity or arrogance or being stuck-up, for that is not love. It is only fear. I am talking about having a great respect for ourselves and a gratitude for the miracle of our bodies and our minds.
“Love” to me is appreciation to such a degree that it fills my heart to bursting and overflows. Love can go in any direction. I can feel love for:
The very process of life itself.
The joy of being alive.
The beauty I see.
Another person.
Knowledge.
The process of the mind.
Our bodies and the way they work.
Animals, birds, fish.
Vegetation in all its forms.
The Universe and the way it works.
What can you add to this list?
Let’s look at some of the ways we don’t love ourselves:
We scold and criticize ourselves endlessly.
We mistreat our bodies with food, alcohol, and drugs.
We choose to believe we are unlovable.
We are afraid to charge a decent price for our services.
We create illnesses and pain in our bodies.
We procrastinate on things that would benefit us.
We live in chaos and disorder.
We create debt and burdens.
We attract lovers and mates who belittle us.
What are some of your ways?
If we deny our good in any way, it is an act of not loving ourselves. I remember a client I worked with who wore glasses. One day we released an old fear from childhood. The next day she awakened to find her contact lenses were bothering her too much to wear. She looked around and found her eyesight was perfectly clear.
Yet she spent the whole day saying, “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.” The next day she was back to wearing contacts. Our subconscious mind has no sense of humor. She couldn’t believe she had created perfect eyesight.
Lack of self-worth is another expression of not loving ourselves.
Tom was a very good artist, and he had some wealthy clients who asked him to decorate a wall or two in their homes. Yet somehow he was always behind in his own bill paying. His original quote was never enough to cover the time involved to complete the work. Anyone who gives a service or creates a one-of-a-kind product can charge any price. People with wealth love to pay a lot for what they get; it gives the item more value. More examples:
Our partner is tired and grouchy. We wonder what we have done wrong to cause it.
He takes us out once or twice and never calls again. We think something must be wrong with us.
Our marriage ends, and we are sure we are a failure.
We are afraid to ask for a raise.
Our bodies do not match those in Gentleman’s Quarterly or Vogue magazine, and we feel inferior.
We don’t “make the sale,” or “get the part,” and we are sure we are “not good enough.”
We are afraid of intimacy and allowing anyone to get too close, so we have anonymous sex.
We can’t make decisions because we are sure they will be wrong.
How do you express your lack of self-worth?
The Perfection of Babies
How perfect you were when you were a tiny baby. Babies do not have to do anything to become perfect; they already are perfect, and they act as if they know it. They know they are the center of the Universe. They are not afraid to ask for what they want. They freely express their emotions. You know when a baby is angry—in fact, the whole neighborhood knows. You also know when babies are happy, for their smiles light up a room. They are full of love.
Tiny babies will die if they do not get love. Once we are older, we learn to live without love, but babies will not stand for it. Babies also love every part of their bodies, even their own feces. They have incredible courage.
You were like that. We were all like that. Then we began to listen to adults around us who had learned to be fearful, and we began to deny our own magnificence.
I never believe it when clients try to convince me how terrible they are, or how unlovable they are. My work is to bring them back to the time when they knew how to really love themselves.
Exercise: Mirror
Next, I ask clients to pick up a small mirror, look into their own eyes, and say their names and, “I love and accept you exactly as you are.”
This is so difficult for many people. Seldom do I get a calm reaction, let alone enjoyment from this exercise. Some cry or are close to tears, some get angry, some belittle their features or qualities, some insist they CAN’T do it. I even had one man throw the mirror across the room and want to run away. It took him several months before he could begin to relate to himself in the mirror.
For years I looked into the mirror only to criticize what I saw there. Recalling the endless hours I spent plucking my eyebrows trying to make myself barely acceptable amuses me now. I remember it used to frighten me to look into my own eyes.
This simple exercise shows me so much. In less than an hour, I am able to get to some of the core issues that are beneath the outer problem. If we work only on the level of the problem, we can spend endless time working out each and every detail; and the minute we think we have it all “fixed up,” it will crop up somewhere else.
“The Problem” Is Rarely the Real Problem
She was so concerned with her looks, and especially with her teeth. She went from dentist to dentist feeling each one had only made her look worse. She went to have her nose fixed, and they did a poor job. Each professional was mirroring her belief that she was ugly. Her problem was not her looks, but that she was convinced something was wrong with her.
There was another woman who had terrible breath. It was uncomfortable to be around her. She was studying to be a minister, and her outer demeanor was pious and spiritual. Beneath this was a raging current of anger and jealousy that exploded now and then when she thought someone might be threatening her position. Her inner thoughts were expressed through her breath, and she was offensive even when she pretended to be loving. No one threatened her but herself.
He was only 15 when his mother brought him to me with Hodgkin’s dis-ease and three months to live. His mother was understandably hysterical and difficult to deal with, but the boy was bright and clever and wanted to live. He was willing to do anything I told him to, including changing the way he thought and spoke. His separated parents were always arguing, and he really did not have a settled home life.
He wanted desperately to be an actor. The pursuit of fame and fortune far outweighed his ability to experience joy. He thought he could be acceptable and worthwhile only if he had fame. I taught him to love and accept himself, and he got well. He is now grown up and appears on Broadway with regularity. As he learned to experience the joy of being himself, the parts in plays opened up for him.
Overweight is another good example of how we can waste a lot of energy trying to correct a problem that is not the real problem. People often spend years and years fighting fat and are still overweight. They blame all their problems on being overweight. The excess weight is only an outer effect of a deep inner problem. To me, it is always fear and a need for protection. When we feel frightened or insecure or “not good enough,” many of us will put on extra weight for protection.
To spend our time berating ourselves for being too heavy, to feel guilty about every bite of food we eat, to do all the numbers we do on ourselves when we gain weight, is just a waste of time. Twenty years later we can still be in the same situation because we have not even begun to deal with the real problem. All that we have done is to make ourselves more frightened and insecure, and then we need more weight for protection.
So I refuse to focus on excess weight or on diets. For diets do not work. The only diet that does work is a mental diet—dieting from negative thoughts. I say to clients, “Let us just put that issue to one side for the time being while we work on a few other things first.”
They will often tell me they can’t love themselves because they are so fat, or as one girl put it, “too round at the edges.” I explain that they are fat because they don’t love themselves. When we begin to love and approve of ourselves, it’s amazing how weight just disappears from our bodies.
Sometimes clients even get angry with me as I explain how simple it is to change their lives. They may feel I do not understand their problems. One woman became very upset and said, “I came here to get help with my dissertation, not to learn to love myself.” To me it was so obvious that her main problem was a lot of self-hatred, and this permeated every part of her life, including the writing of her dissertation. She could not succeed at anything as long as she felt so worthless.
She couldn’t hear me and left in tears, coming back one year later with the same problem plus a lot of other problems. Some people are not ready, and there is no judgment. We all begin to make our changes in the right time, space, and sequence for us. I did not even begin to make my changes until I was in my forties.
The Real Problem
So here is a client who has just looked into the harmless little mirror, and he or she is all upset. I smile with delight and say, “Good, now we are looking at the ‘real problem’; now we can begin to clear out what is really standing in your way.” I talk more about loving the self, about how, for me, loving the self begins with never, ever criticizing ourselves for anything.
I watch their faces as I ask them if they criticize themselves. Their reactions tell me so much:
Well, of course I do.
All the time.
Not as much as I used to.
Well, how am I going to change if I don’t criticize myself?
Doesn’t everyone?
To the latter, I answer, “We are not talking about everyone; we are talking about you. Why do you criticize yourself? What is wrong with you?”
As they talk, I make a list. What they say often coincides with their “should list.” They feel they are too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, too dumb, too old, too young, too ugly. (The most beautiful or handsome will often say this.) Or they’re too late, too early, too lazy, and on and on. Notice how it is almost always “too” something. Finally, we get down to the bottom line, and they say, “I am not good enough.”
Hurrah, hurrah! We have finally found the central issue. They criticize themselves because they have learned to believe they “are not good enough.” Clients are always amazed at how fast we have gotten to this point. Now we do not have to bother with any of the side effects like body problems, relationship problems, money problems, or lack of creative expressions. We can put all our energy into dissolving the cause of the whole thing: “NOT LOVING THE SELF!”
In the infinity of life where I am,
all is perfect, whole, and complete.
I am always Divinely protected and guided.
It is safe for me to look within myself.
It is safe for me to look into the past.
It is safe for me to enlarge my viewpoint of life.
I am far more than my personality—past, present, or future.
I now choose to rise above my personality problems
to recognize the magnificence of my being.
I am totally willing to learn to love myself.
All is well in my world.