Tag: selfmastery

  • Resisting the norms

    Resisting the norms

    The relentless pace of society towards retiring those who are no longer contemporary is enough reason to settle into the rhythm of preparing for old age. Just writing that out makes me nauseous.

    To regain my sanity, or at least to push back against the approaching insanity, I remind myself that I have a good 20 to 30 years still left in me should I not succumb to the violence that pervades so many social spaces. 20 to 30 years is a lifetime in itself, which makes it difficult for me to grasp why someone would willingly plan to surrender a lifetime in favour of a belief system that has put out to pasture the wisdom of lives lives and struggles overcome.

    Society is only as strong as the most pervasive weakness that it celebrates. At present, we appear to celebrate mediocrity, sensationalism, materialism, and debilitating comfort. Passion and purpose do not feature in the most important discussions around me, both in my personal domain or in the public domains that I frequent.

    My aversion to such norms has seen me increasingly isolating myself from such spaces leading to a dulling of my spirit that threatens to land me in exactly the state the thought of which nauseates me. Thus, if left to my own devices without a grasp on life itself, I will succumb to the very thing about which I judge others. That has proven to be the only truth about the struggles of my life.

    The judgement that I flirted with in my youth visited me in my adulthood and threatens to define my twilight years. However, I refuse to embrace the twilight. I will marvel at it, and perhaps even taunt it, but I have no intention of embracing it. My irreverence at that sight of social norms creates a tension within me each time I even contemplate fitting in or going with the flow of the river of affluence that stenches up the environment around me.

    An art neglected will be lost. Thus, I find my ability to express myself slowly eroding while the mental clutter of everything that I have grown to despise about mediocrity takes its place. The despicable narrative of the contempt that I hold for the lack of conviction that I am bombarded with takes up more head space than it ever should.

    The absence of a sounding board or an understanding gaze leaves me adrift in a sea of tumultuous currents that have exceedingly brought me closer to tipping over and losing myself to the idealism of a mind fraught with angst at the sight of everything that threatens the wholesomeness that I hope to experience before my final calling.

    When the spoken word is not welcomed, the written word is all that remains of my avenue of protest against a world that celebrates vulgarity and self-aggrandisement rather than the substance and wondrous nature of life itself.

    A distracted clown appears deeply philosophical. A whimsical philosopher appears foolish.

    I must avoid both.

  • You will, or else…

    You will, or else…

    If it is true that the path to hell is paved with good intentions, then it confirms that good intentions are not enough to create positive outcomes.

    If we raise children with the fear of negative consequences, they’ll never truly connect with the benefit of doing what’s right.

    When that fear barrier is broken, and it will be broken at some point, we lose our children to influences and social structures that offer them inclusion and acceptance, rather than fear and punishment.

    With ease of access to alternate value systems and cultural norms, fear and a demand for compliance is no longer sufficient to influence children towards doing good or being good.

    Methods of escape in the form of substance abuse, pornography, demeaning and abusive social media trends, and more are accessible by toddlers, let alone teens or adults.

    The only sustainable approach towards combating such harmful influences is not through the fear of hell fire, or the threat of punishment,it’s through the establishment of a healthy self-esteem.

    A healthy self-esteem is built on how emotionally available their parents are.

    But parents can’t give what they don’t have.

    That is, if the parent doesn’t have a healthy self-esteem, they will rely on compliance and obedience to measure their worth with their children, failing which they will resort to being more controlling and intolerant towards bad behaviour.

    Given the norms of intolerance and compliance that set the tone for many of today’s adults, connecting meaningfully with our children has become a struggle that many are not even aware of as we interpret the behaviour of the youth as willful disobedience, rather than as a desperation to feel significant.

    If we can’t connect the youth with the value of the value system that we want to instill in them, they will connect with value systems that stroke their need for inclusion and understanding.

  • Your dignity is yours to claim

    Your dignity is yours to claim

    Did you notice how some people, when faced with soul destroying realities, are still dignified in how they rise above it.

    If you wait for your aggressor or abuser to treat you with dignity before you find reason to respect yourself, you’re doing life back to front.

    Expecting recognition of your humanness from the world is like expecting your tormentor to become your mentor.

    It’s irrational.

    Dignity is not bestowed, it is claimed!

    It is undignified to ask to be treated with dignity because that means that your dignity is dependent on how others treat you.

    It means that it’s dependent on others agreeing that you’re deserving of dignity.

    You either maintain your dignity in the face of them being undignified towards you, or you trade your dignity for inclusion or validation.

    However, be sure that you’re offering what you’re demanding from others.

    Expecting people to treat you with respect and dignity while you treat them harshly or dismissively is hypocrisy, and hypocrisy is the opposite of dignity.

    As always, you cannot give what you don’t have.

    If you lack self-respect, you’re likely to demand respect from others so that you can feel better about yourself, while ignoring the fact that you not only treat others with disrespect, but you also treat yourself the same way.

    If you lack mindfulness of who you are in moments when your patience is tested, you’ll feel compelled to respond the way that you think they deserve, rather than being able to consciously choose who you want to be in that moment.

    It always starts with you.

    mentalhealthrecovery

  • Who’s draining your joy?

    Who’s draining your joy?

    Avoidance requires distractions, and distractions are exhausting.

    We don’t always avoid the truth because we want to.

    In fact, most often, it’s because we’re persisting in what we believe to be true that causes us to ignore the reality that we’re facing.

    Like investing in someone who is at war with themselves.

    Or expecting opportunities to work out when the others involved have a different agenda.

    Or wanting to believe that we’re significant to someone when we never were because they were chasing significance in something or someone else.

    And of course, when we deny the reasons for not achieving something by insisting that it was due to actions from others rather than accepting that we didn’t quite commit to it the way we should have.

    Protecting ourselves from admitting the truth is only necessary when we attach shame to having gotten something wrong.

    That shame is not because of how others would react, but because of how we judge ourselves relative to how much weight we place on the opinions of others.

    Life gets a whole lot simpler and more fulfilling when our opinion about ourselves matters more than what others think of us.

    That’s when the truth becomes easier to embrace because instead of viewing ourselves with shame, we see less than ideal outcomes as feedback on how to raise our game.

    Unfortunately, most of us are playing our game by someone else’s rules and then blaming them for why we’re unsuccessful at achieving our goals.

    Maybe that’s why you’re tired before even stepping out of bed.

    It’s time to own your life.

    It always starts with you.

  • Own your misery

    Own your misery

    Miserable are the ones who compete with their companions, and then go searching for companionship among those that will ruin them.

    Self-pity and self-loathing are the marks of ingratitude that turn your greatest supporters into your greatest distractions.

    All because you think that they see the inadequacy and shame with which you view yourself.

    That’s why at times, when someone believes in us, we convince ourselves that they’re simply trying to humiliate us.

    Such is the seeds of ingratitude and self-loathing, that we end up taking advice from enemies, and discarding advice from those who care most about our success.

    Your self-loathing is your ingratitude for who you are.
    Stop blaming the world for you getting in your own way.

    It always starts with you.

  • Self-pity is never a recommendation

    Self-pity is never a recommendation

    When we go out searching for safe spaces in which to grow, we’re more invested in hiding the shame that we feel about ourselves, than we are in growing.

    Rather than focusing on pushing ourselves into spaces that are uncomfortable, we need to focus on why we feel such shame to begin with.

    Shame doesn’t always feel like shame.

    But, if we pay attention, we’ll note how difficult it is to talk about what we’re struggling with, or what we think we’re failing at.

    That difficulty is because we’re judging ourselves for failing or being inadequate.

    So we protect ourselves from that becoming visible by disguising it as our legitimate struggle against everyone and everything that treated us badly.

    That’s why we polarise towards those who share such weaknesses, because there is less shame in failing together than there is in failing alone.

    That’s how we limit our growth.

    If you want to be successful in business, you don’t seek advice from others who have failed at it.

    Similarly, if you’re not reaching your goals in life, don’t surround yourself with others who are also messing up theirs.

    Choose your role models and your advisors carefully.

    If you choose them out of self-pity, they’ll convince you that nothing is your fault and that everyone else is to blame, including the dead.

    That may make you feel better in the moment, but it will also keep you stuck in that moment for that much longer.

    It always starts with you.

    Own Your Life.

  • Are you there for you?

    Are you there for you?

    We’re more inclined to recognise the needs of the weak, than we are of the strong.

    Without meaning to, we diminish the humanness of those who persevere without complaint, because they often make it look so easy.

    When we’re the strong ones persevering without complaint, we risk diminishing our own humanness as well, because we become defined by being strong for others.

    Whether you’re strong or weak, you need to take time to connect with the human behind the strength, or the struggle that you observe in others, and especially within yourself.

    If you don’t, you risk becoming the enabler of weakness and dependence, or the enabler of harshness and insensitivity.

    Because that’s what happens when we lose contact with our humanness.

    We stop expecting, or allowing ourselves and others to be human.

    That’s when everything becomes dutiful and focused on rights and responsibilities.

    And empathy and compassion, let alone love and affection, leave through the window.

    All this because we forgot that we’re human, and that the ones failing us are human too.

    We cannot choose differently for how others show up in our lives, but we can choose how we show up for them, and for ourselves.

    Focus on that, and let the rest take care of itself.

    When you achieve this, you’ll taste the sweetness of life and not just the accomplishment of goals.

    Own Your Life.

    It always starts with you.



  • A path to insanity

    A path to insanity

    We work with the assumption that our partners and our children share the same values that we try to uphold in our lives.

    This is rarely true.

    While we may share the same frame of reference or even the same cultural norms, values are much more personal, and therefore unique.

    Our personal value systems are shaped by what we take from life.

    Note, what we take, not what we’re taught.

    Our teachings form the frame of reference within which we live our lives.

    However, what we place emphasis and priority on, and what flexibility we allow ourselves within that frame of reference is what shapes our unique value system.

    For this reason, two siblings raised in the same home under the same rules of discipline, and with the same privilege and emotional access to their parents may adopt very different values because of what they assumed to be true about the motives or sincerity of their parents towards them.

    The difference between the two is self-worth.

    The important thing about self-worth is that it’s about how we feel about ourselves, and not how someone else feels about us.

    No matter how much we convince ourselves that we feel how we feel because of how someone else treats us, it doesn’t change this fact.

    Self-worth is about how we feel about ourselves.

    How we develop this sense of self is a complex process that can change with life experiences, but until we’re aware of what we allow to influence how we feel about ourselves, we’ll blame the world for our unhappiness or misery.

    It is this that we must bear in mind when we try to rationalise the behaviour of others when it conflicts with the value system that we thought we shared.

    Self-worth or self-loathing is what makes the difference between authenticity and selling ourselves short to gain validation.

    It always starts with you.