Self-esteem is your relationship with yourself. You have to be with yourself at all times, so it is crucial to develop a trusting and loving relationship with yourself.
- High self-esteem individuals are in healthy relationships with themselves.
- Low self-esteem individuals are in a toxic relationship with themselves.
Toxic relationships should be avoided at all costs. This includes the relationship with the self. Relationships take work, so you must work on yourself to have a good relationship with yourself.
If you find yourself in a toxic relationship with anyone, including the self, you must prune it; this is law.
A toxic relationship is gangrene; its infection will continue to grow the longer it is allowed to fester in any of your three domains of body, mind, and spirit. You can have a toxic relationship in each domain, or multiple domains at once.
8 second self-esteem test
Make direct eye contact with yourself for 8 seconds in the mirror without looking away.
- Advanced mode: Body scan yourself while naked in the mirror. Scan your body, and make direct eye contact for an 8-second period.
The eyes are the gateway to the soul. If you cannot hold sustained eye contact with yourself, it’s because you do not want to see your soul. This doesn’t mean your soul is evil. It means your spirit is depressed because you are not living in harmony with your spirit.
You must live in accordance with your written or unwritten personal code & philosophy in order to have a healthy relationship with your spirit, which governs your velocity for pursuing attainment in all domains.
Do you make eye contact with yourself in the bathroom mirror? What about other mirrors? Reflections? When was the last time you looked into your mind and spirit by looking into your eyes?
If you quickly avert your gaze, your self-esteem–the relationship you have with yourself–must be refined.
Low self-esteem
Low self-esteem means having a poor relationship with yourself. A weak self-relationship results in poor health across Body, Mind, and Spirit(BMS).
You will never see authentic high self-esteem in an individual who does not walk the path in Body, Mind, and Spirit(BMS). You cannot have high self-esteem with low investment in the domains that define you. It is impossible.
Be diligent in destroying toxic weakness you identify within your domains.
Low self-esteem damages your mind, body, and spirit. This is why people with low self-esteem will often have body, mind, and spirit issues, whether that is obesity or mental/spiritual illness of any kind.
Low self-esteem manifests in the spirit domain via low confidence and a low drive for progressing down the path towards goals and chosen masteries.
Low self-esteem manifests in the mind domain via the pursuit of mental pleasure as a source of fulfillment, which we know pleasure cannot provide fulfillment because consumption cannot be mastered.
Low self-esteem summons poor emotions like anger, depression, sadness, melancholy, or worse.
How to fix low self-esteem
Fix low self-esteem by designating masteries in Body, Mind, and Spirit(BMS) and pursuing them loyally. We pursue our masteries to strengthen our relationship with ourselves. Loyalty is most important in any relationship.
Cheating is the non-pursuit of masteries. Cheating is painful for the cheater, and the one being cheated on; if you cheat on your relationship with yourself you will feel pain on both sides.
Meditation is knowing thy self
Determining your self-esteem and improving it must involve meditation to some capacity as meditation is how we exist with ourselves without noise. You must turn down the volume of your mind to be with your spirit.
Imagine being on a dinner date and the table next to you is shouting every thought in their head, while you try to get to know your date. You might be able to get to know them, but at best you will be distracted, frustrated, and carry other negative emotions. At worse you may give up on your date and go somewhere else, leaving them behind.
This is a metaphor for trying to get to know yourself when you aren’t meditating or grounding yourself. In order to understand yourself, you must remove the noise of your mind through meditation.
Build your self-esteem by building the relationship with yourself. Do this for all of existence, this life and the next.
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