Ben Ralston

Low Self-esteem (and what to do about it)

“I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your 
own being”

 ~ Hafiz


You may suspect that you have low self-esteem,

but you probably have no idea what to do about it!

Most articles about self-esteem talk about thinking positively, making affirmations, smiling a lot, etc. These things are just band-aids – they will only serve to suppress the truth about how you feel about yourself for a short time. I am not interested in band-aids. I am interested in prevention and cure…

In this post I’m going to tell you what self-esteem is really all about; how it is negatively affected; why I think it’s hugely important that we do do something about it – and what to do.
What is self-esteem?
(other than a term that is much used and little understood)
My definition of self-esteem is 5 words:
~ ‘how deeply you love yourself’ ~
So, how deeply do you love yourself?!
(Don’t worry, I’ll help you answer that question quite accurately in just a moment)…
I believe this is perhaps one of the most important questions you will ever ask, and here’s why:  the extent to which you love yourself dictates how successful you are in every area of your life – relationships, work, and health (emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual health).
I have a nice way of answering the above question. It is called The Mirror Exercise*, and there are 3 simple steps:
1. Look yourself in the eye in a mirror.
2. Tell yourself sincerely: “I love you”.
3. See how it feels, and measure the feeling out of 10 (see below).
If your self-esteem is intact (if you do indeed love yourself deeply) then the exercise should be fun!
However, for most people there is at least some difficulty – as they say the words there is a feeling ofstress. This is because human beings are hardwired not to lie. So if you have low self-esteem (you don’t love yourself), telling yourself “I love you” feels like a lie – it feels stressful.
Lie detector machines (polygraph machines) work by detecting the biological symptoms of stress. But you don’t need a polygraph machine – you know when you are lying, because you feel the stress. That’s why this exercise is really quite an accurate (although not scientific) indication of how high your self-esteem is.
So the mirror exercise is to do the above 3 steps. The final step, measuring the feeling of stress on a scale of 0 – 10, works like this:
10/10 stress: as you say the words you probably feel quite uncomfortable, and you just don’t believe it at all. This means that you have very low self-esteem.
0/10 stress: no stress, therefore high self esteem.
Go ahead and do it now..
~ (I’ll wait right here) ~ 
So, if you just did the exercise, you probably felt at least a little discomfort or stress as you said those 3 words. Here’s why:
We should love ourselves completely. Human beings are Loving beings. The essence of the human experience is love itself. Your essence is love.
In Yogic terms this is known as Satchitananda: pure existence, pure consciousness, pure bliss. In a word – love.
But almost all of us suffer the consequences of unresolved trauma – usually much more than we realize.
Childhood trauma…
Birth trauma…
Trauma experienced by our Mother whilst we were ‘in utero’…
Not to mention ancestral trauma: the emerging branch of science called Epigenetics has demonstrated conclusively that trauma from the lives of our ancestors – especially trauma from the time when our egg was created in the ovary of our Mother (when she was a fetus in the uterus of her Mother*) – directly impacts on our life, even our genetic predispositions and biological constitution!
The kind of trauma that affects self-esteem the most is abuse trauma. And if you think that abuse is probably something that happens to a minority of those ‘other’ people, think again! There are perhaps as many as 99 different kinds of abuse, ranging from the more obvious (sexual) to the very subtle (emotional neglect). And abuse (defined here as a violation of one’s boundaries) is entirely subjective…
Some of the consequences of abuse are that we feel guilty, ashamed, and responsible for what happened. Essentially, we feel that there is something wrong with us – and if there is something wrong with us, we have a very good reason to love ourselves less, right?
Our self-esteem suffers.
My theory is that abuse trauma is the cause of most of mankind’s problems. Not long after establishing this theory, something happened that blew my mind. I was sitting at my desk, thinking and writing about this theory when someone sent me a link to a book:
“The Origins of War in Child Abuse”
 by Lloyd Demause.
So I realized that other people were also coming to the very same conclusions as I was. And I don’t believe in ‘co-incidence’.
The purpose of this post is not to explain the mechanism of trauma and abuse in detail. If you’re interested to know more about that check back later, because I’ll be posting articles about it soon. Right now though I want to stay focused on self-esteem. And what I want to communicate is this:
1. Most people don’t love themselves nearly enough.
2. This low self-esteem causes many, many problems, both on the personal level, and globally (think war, corruption, and environmental destruction).
3. It’s not so hard to fix the problem on the personal level (thus directly and powerfully influencing the global).
When is your self-esteem determined?
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance” ~ Oscar Wilde
If you go through a painful divorce after 20 years of marriage, can that affect your self-esteem? I don’t think so: I think that the experience will simply expose your underlying low self-esteem (that was always there even while you were married). I believe that our self-esteem is set in childhood, perhaps up until the age of around 21 years old. Early trauma (at birth and pre-school) is probably the most impactful on how much we love ourselves.
However, another theory (which does not necessarily negate the childhood theory, but may just be another perspective on it) is that we inherit our self-esteem. After all, the trauma that we experience in our lifetime is usually  an echo of similar trauma that our ancestors experienced. So it could be that we inherit poor self-esteem, and then attract experiences that reinforce it (such as divorce), and perpetuate the pattern.
Either way, it does not really matter. Two things are important in this – being able to recognize the effect of the trauma (as opposed to the actual trauma itself, which is far less relevant), and being able to heal those consequences.
With modern healing techniques like Reference Point Therapy, which are simple, fast, and highly effective, we are able to pinpoint the exact consequence of the trauma (which is usually a subconscious association between one of our survival instincts, and safety), and heal it (release the subconscious association).
The effect of this kind of healing is a subtle change in all aspects of one’s life. Relationships, feelings, emotional reactions, and even the physical structure of the body (posture, lung capacity, etc) are transformed.
And the beautiful thing is that the change is not a particular change, but a wave of change – it is an ongoing process, namely, of us coming back to our true selves: love.
The analogy I use is this: if you have walked for a long time with a stone in your shoe, it will eventually affect every area of your life – your posture, your emotions, your deeper feelings, your sense of self-identity (ego), even the expression on your face!
But when you remove the stone, all of these changes do not instantly disappear – it takes time for each aspect of you to settle back to normal, and even the expression on your face will gradually, over time, relax.
Similarly, when releasing subconscious blockages, the effects may be felt instantly, but are always ongoing…
How do you raise your self-esteem?
“You can’t build joy on a feeling of self-loathing.” ~ Ram Dass
As with anything else, you solve a problem permanently only by changing what caused the problem.
In this case, low self-esteem is caused by the consequences of unresolved trauma. When you heal the trauma, you instantly begin to love yourself more.
I wish I could tell you in a short blog post how to heal trauma yourself, but it’s not quite as simple as that – it takes a number of days of intensive training to be able to safely find the blockages, identify their roots, and heal them. It’s quite simple really – you don’t need a degree, but you do need proper training.
I hope though that this post sheds some light on something that I believe to be the key to a more sustainable, compassionate, and peaceful human society: how much we love ourselves as individuals.
Participate in a simple social experiment?
“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” ~ Joseph Campbell
I would like to propose what could be a useful social experiment: when you do the mirror exercise post the ‘score’ (out of 10) as a comment below (along with the feelings that came up too, if you like). It only takes a moment to do this, and may be done anonymously, and if this article gets 1000 reads, and 5% of people participate that’s 50 people – a reasonable number of results to compare and analyze . The results will either support or undermine my theory that most of us suffer from low self-esteem, and either way, it’ll be interesting! If you also write a little about what feelings came up as you did the exercise, I will do my best to answer your comment in a helpful way.
And share it up folks – spread the love, as always. Thank you!
* Biology lesson: a woman’s eggs are all produced long before she is born. They are formed in the ovaries at around the time of 3 months gestation in the womb of her own mother.
Bonus: click here for a fascinating and entertaining documentary about epigenetics.
I believe I first discovered The Mirror Exercise in a book, but I have no recollection of which book. So please, if you have ever come across this technique before, let me know so that I can properly give credit to it’s creator? Thank you! (edit: I’ve been told that it may have been Louise L. Hay)

Mark Ruffalo Occupies Wall Street with passion, compassion, intelligence, charisma

I was an actor once. A terrible actor. I made audiences cringe. I myself cringed inwardly on stage. I had no confidence. I was in a play at the National Theatre once (just the once) and my parents got in the elevator with Neil Kinnock (head of the opposition party at the time). That’s my claim to acting fame. That’s how bad I was. Thank God I don’t have to act anymore; I found my real purpose in life.
Then there’s Mark Ruffalo. He’s a great actor. I could watch him all day. There’s an openness and an integrity about him that is very attractive. I’ve seen a few of his movies and I always felt like he’s the kind of guy I’d like to get to know. A good guy.
Then there’s Occupy (Wall Street). I love that movement. I put the brackets around the Wall Street part because I don’t feel it’s really about Wall Street any more. It’s about… no, wait.
Occupy has become a global movement and it’s only going to get bigger. It’s going to get bigger and bigger because more and more people are awakening to the simple truth of who they really are. More and more people are becoming conscious of their own innate power. We are not sheep. We are not here to be herded around like cattle, victims of a system that is based on greed and fear, so that 1% can prosper and be free while 99% live without dignity…
We are human beings: perfect, beautiful, powerful expressions of pure consciouness. We are free already, and as more and more people awaken to that simple truth by letting go of survival based fears, the system in which we live is changing. Occupy is a sign of that change – and I for one am overjoyed to see it happening.
So what’s Occupy about? I’ll let Mark Ruffalo explain it much better than I can:
And an equally intelligent, even more eloquent ‘call to arms’:

Pure beauty (A poem by Ben Ralston)



Beauty is not something you buy in the aisles of drug stores,
Or (cosmetic) surgeries,
Or anywhere,
In fact.
Beauty is a feeling, deep within;
An overflowing, slow-flowing surge
that lifts and burns and Devours
With subtlety.
Pure beauty is the essence of life itself:
Show me a living being, and I’ll show you Beautiful.
Because when you feel that surge within
All of without is moved by it.
Beauty is the light that guides your eyes,
The waves that open your ears,
The nerves that soften your skin.

Beauty
Is
That which feels.
We all want beauty.
But it’s in our desire to own it
That we lose sight
Of the only place it can really be found…




3 steps to profound healing (broken heart, bones, spirit)

I bleed. 
My heart bleeds out into the lonely night, and only the yearning for daylight; only the memory of a better day gives me hope…
Do you know what I mean? I know you do.
At least on some level, you do.

I’m a healer. I work as a therapist, I counsel people, and I heal their wounds (mostly emotional, but also physical). I didn’t ever desire to do this. I wanted to do many things, but never this…

When it came on me though, I knew it was my calling.
Healing is the simplest, most natural thing in the world. There are just 3 simple steps that you have to take to heal almost anything.
Of course, not everything can be healed. But even most things that are thought incurable can be.
And these are the 3 steps:
1.   Take responsibility for it.
Whatever the problem, it’s your problem. Own it. It’s yours. Not anyone else’s.
Even though you may have thought in the past that it was someone else’s fault.
Even if you wanted it to be someone else’s problem.
It isn’t. It wasn’t. It’s yours, and yours alone.
Own it.
Face it.
 Imagine that this problem is (literally) in your hands. Hold it up before your eyes and look into it deeply. This belongs to you alone. You alone can let it go.
But first, you must own it.
When you have taken responsibility you no longer blame others; and you no longer look for outside of yourself for the answers.

You know that you are responsible for your own change.
Quite often people call me and ask if I can help their partner / parent / friend. I have learnt to say ‘no’ in those situations. If that person had taken responsibility, they would be calling me themselves. If they haven’t taken responsibility, I can’t help them. Neither can you.
2.   Find the cause of the problem.
This is not so hard as it may seem, but it’s not as easy as step 3. It’s not as hard as step 1 though. Most people don’t make it past step 1. You should know that. If someone comes to me having taken step 1 (having taken responsibility for their problem) then I can almost always help them. And when they do come, I have the utmost respect – because I know what it takes to come to that point. It takes humility, and dignity, and courage. It takes being real. Most people don’t have that courage, and that’s why the world is in the state it is in…but more of that in a moment.
To find the cause of the problem, there is a very simple formula. Trace the problem (to use the analogy of a tree) to its roots. The topmost branches of the problem are in the head. The outermost symptoms are in the head (thoughts, beliefs, idea). The trunk of the problem is in the heart (emotions). The roots are in the gut(deeper feelings of trauma)… and the cause is in a reaction to those deep feelings of trauma. The reaction is a survival instinct.
Ask the question “how does this problem make me feel?” And then keep on asking that question until you come to the deepest feeling. Then ask yourself: “When I feel that deepest feeling, what do I want to do?”
The answer will be a survival instinct – almost all of our problems are rooted in our survival instincts.
There are exceptions to this rule – secondary gain is the most common one.
But if you clear the secondary gain (the process is almost identical to the one outlined above) then very often the problem falls away immediately.
Step 3: Heal the cause.
This is so easy as to be almost ridiculous.
Yes, that’s right. Healing is easy.
Taking responsibility is hard. Finding the cause is a little tricky, but when you know how, it’s pretty easy too. But healing the root cause of almost all our problems (gut-based survival instincts) is a doddle.
The cause of the problem is a subconscious blockage. To be specific, the blockage is a subconscious association between safety / survival and an instinct (fight, flight, and freeze – and their many variations: for example, fight may translate into feelings of wanting to run, hide, escape, etc.)
So if the nature of the problem is that it is subconscious, we heal it by simply making it conscious.
You see, our essence is pure consciousness. Light.
The blockage is like a shadow.
In the same way that you can remove a shadow by simply throwing light on it, you heal the subconscious blockage by bringing the light of your awareness to it.
This is mindfulness, and the power of it cannot be overstated.
When I heal a client’s blockage, I bring us both into a state of presence (here and now), and we acknowledge the blockage.
Our combined awareness (the light) bearing down on the blockage (shadow) makes it simply disappear.
The blockage is like an uninvited guest. When he is discovered, he leaves promptly. He is in fact waiting to be discovered, and wants to leave. He has a guilty conscience. He doesn’t belong there.
What belongs there is pure consciousness. When the blockage is removed, pure consciousness flows through the space again naturally, spontaneously and joyfully.
***


This is the most important thing in the world! There is no issue more urgent. Nothing is more worthy of your attention, time, and energy.
The world is in the state it’s in because so many of us are motivated unconsciously by survival instincts. In one word: fear.
We behave the way we do as a species (war, abuse, greed, hypocrisy, corruption) not because we are innately bad. On the contrary, we are innately good – our essence is goodness, or God-ness (“made in the image of God”).
However, our innate goodness has been tainted by the very thing that makes us so intelligent. Our higher thinking. Somewhere along the line human beings forgot how to quickly and easily release trauma (wild animals do it naturally). We instead learnt to hold on to our trauma. And those instincts that helped us to survivethe trauma stayed locked in place – permanently switched on.

So that our lives become ruled by subconscious tendencies towards fighting (conquer, destroy, kill, argue, conflict, win, etc); flight (hide, run away, escape, remain passive, etc); and freezing (numbness, paralysis, stiffness, lock-down, tightening up, etc).
This is why you may be a highly evolved, spiritual person, but have health, emotional, or psychological problems. Because there is something in your subconscious that trips you up and interferes with your essential nature from expressing itself naturally.
It all comes down to survival instincts.
When enough of us heal these blockages, I am sure there will be peace on earth, because peacefulness is the natural inclination of life. War is an aberration, like murder.
Death, killing, sickness – these are not aberrations – they are natural and necessary aspects of life. But war, murder, corruption and abuse are the consequence of un-released and un-healed traumas.
It’s so, so simple. We have the tools to forge a new society, a new earth, a new humanity.

Healing ourselves is the ultimate environmental activism.


It is a political act.


It is an expression of Ahimsa (non-violence) and Satya (truthfulness) and compassion.

Let us heal ourselves and each other.
Let us heal the global heart that is bleeding and crying out for us to stop abusing ourselves.
“He who saves one man saves mankind”
Save yourself. Save mankind.

Why I left Bangkok… part 3: “Tread softly, and with joy.”

After my unwitting incursion into the world of child prostitution – part 1 – and my adventures with amphetamine crazed truck drivers and Thai gangsters  – part 2 – I was feeling pretty lost.

I’d been traveling alone for about a month and I was lonely.
One day I was driving through town on my motorbike and I started to feel ill again. The fever wasn’t quite gone yet. I pulled over to the side of the road and found myself sitting at a table outside a small bar. I ordered a drink and before it arrived I realized I was outside some kind of brothel.
There were about 5 or 6 girls in the bar, lounging around and leaning over a couple of Dutch sailors.
The sailors were about 50 years old, heavily tattooed. I really wish I could remember my conversation with them because it was both hilarious and very interesting.


The expression on their faces (and the faces of all the men I saw in that bar) stay with me though. They were like young men ‘on the pull’ – that strange kind of desperate intensity in their eyes (sexual desire) and a kind of assumed (false) arrogance. They were trying to look confident and self-assured. In short: they wanted to be found attractive. I recall finding this very amusing: they were in a brothel. They knew they only had to pay for what they wanted, and yet they still went through the suffering of the ‘chase’.
The girls were an interesting bunch…
There was Jo-Jo: a very young, extremely sexually precocious girl who was clearly interested in making as much money as fast as possible.
There was a tall, beautiful but strange-looking girl. Later, I found out that she was a transsexual. I don’t know if it’s politically correct to say ‘a transexual’, but that’s what she was: a boy, pretending to be a girl. I also don’t know if it’s p.c. to say ‘pretending’, but that’s what s/he was doing, to be honest. ‘Her’ name was Sumalee. She was very sweet. I liked her a lot. When I came to the bar a few weeks later to say goodbye to them all, she went upstairs and came back with a beautiful silver necklace which she gave to me, tearfully.

A silver necklace exactly like this one.
The Thais have an incredibly generous heart…
There was also ‘Miaow’. She was quiet, and sad looking, and beautiful in a mysterious, sulky kind of a way. I remember thinking that she probably didn’t make much money like that…
I visited the bar again the next day – it was far more interesting than any of the temples I’d seen.
The girls all ‘flirted’ with me of course, and I played along. I had no intention of hiring their services, but I was enjoying the fun and games too much to spoil things. I was sat there, the only guy there at the time (unless you count Sumalee!), surrounded by laughing and joking girls. At one point Sumalee asked me if I was going to make one of the girls ‘happy’. So I had to explain that I had no interest in paying for sex. I’ve never understood how someone can pay for sex. To me sex is about intimacy, and you can’t buy intimacy, can you? They all looked disappointed, apart from Miaow, who looked at me somehow differently after that…
They invited me out with them to a nightclub that evening, and I happily accepted.
I only remember that the music in the club was awful, and that we all got pretty drunk. Sumalee tried to seduce me, and I ended up going home with Miaow.
She came up to very nervously and asked me if I’d like to spend the night with her. I told her that I’d love to more than anything else in the world, but that I just couldn’t bring myself to pay for sex. She looked a bit pissed off, and just said:
“No money, just night together.”
That’s how my time with Miaow began.
We spent the night together in her tiny room, and she was incredibly shy for a prostitute. We didn’t sleep much. We had sex, and talked a lot. She was very gentle, shy, and kind.
After we slept a little she told me she had to go to work. I didn’t like it, but what could I do? When I asked her not to go she impatiently snapped:
“No worry. I no go with man”.
Then she left, and I was alone again.
Later that day, when I saw her, she asked me if I would like to spend some time together. I said yes. So she told her boss that she was taking time off work, and we spent the next two weeks together.
Miaow had a small, brand-new, beautiful motorbike. A guy she had met from New Zealand had bought it for her.
She was very smart. She didn’t sleep with anyone who came to the bar unless she liked them. The other girls sold themselves to anyone, and made some money. But Miaow would choose clients very, very carefully, she told me. She told me that she was lucky to have a boss who allowed her to work like that. Not only did she have a beautiful motorbike, but she also received money every month from various former ‘clients’ around the world. When I asked her why she worked like that, she told me she had a son, and asked me if I’d like to meet him. I said yes.
It wasn’t easy. We were both young (I was 21 but oh so immature for my age). Miaow was a little older but didn’t speak very good English. There were jealous arguments and misunderstandings.
She took me to the Chiang Mai night market, where we ate the best food I’ve ever tasted in my life for the equivalent of a few pennies. She chatted animatedly to the locals, and I felt like the luckiest person in the universe. I was sitting there experiencing life on another planet as if I belonged…
After a few days, we drove on her motorbike to her hometown, in the rural Northern midlands of Thailand. She let me drive, and I remember her suddenly making me pull over, and then screaming at me for a while by the side of the highway. I had no idea what was wrong. Finally she told me in English:
“You too fast”.
When we set off again, she whispered in my ear:
“Every girl want feel safe”.
When we drove into her hometown, everyone stopped and stared. Groups of children ran alongside the motorbike. They’d never seen a Falang (foreigner) before.
The houses were small, wooden, raised above the earth on stilts.
We stayed there with her Grandmother and son. Grandma had no teeth, and just smiled at me all the time, non-stop. She raised Miaow’s boy. His Father had been an abusive alcoholic, and Miaow had left him years ago. The little boy had a few teeth more than his Grandmother and that’s all I remember about him.
While we were there it was my birthday. There was a huge celebration and people came with gifts – bottles of whiskey, a watch, and various dishes that they’d prepared. It was a feast. We all sat on the ground around a sheet spread out underneath countless delicious Thai treats. They laughed and sang. I remember feeling incredibly humble. I was wealthy compared to these people, and yet they gave me these relatively expensive gifts… I was confused by my feelings. Why was I made so uncomfortable by their generosity? Looking back, I know why:
It wasn’t just their gifts that made me uncomfortable. It was their generosity of spirit. They gave me some things, yes. But they gave me all of their attention. They were totally present. I’d never met anyone in my life that wasn’t in two places at once. I certainly didn’t know how to be so present – even at my own birthday party.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that meal under a perfectly dark, star-filled night, was the first of my two great lessons in what wealth really is. (Read the last paragraph of this post for the second lesson).
I also remember the local policeman. He sat all day outside his shack, whiskey bottle in hand. Miaow told me that’s all he did: drink, and accept bribes.
It was 17 years ago. I was young; arrogant; naïve; foolish; immature; irresponsible; selfish. I stepped into worlds that were completely alien to me. I trampled through them carelessly. Thum once told me that he could hear me coming a mile away. My footsteps were heavy. He said that the Thais have a saying:
“Tread softly, and with joy”
I’ve thought about that saying many times over the years.
When the time came for me to leave Thailand, Miaow drove me to the bus stop. I would be getting a bus and then a flight home halfway around the world. She would be going straight back to work.
It was a strange moment, saying goodbye. We’d perhaps both used each other, and there was a total lack of sentimentality on her part. We kissed briefly and awkwardly, and I told her I’d write. She didn’t look impressed. I felt guilty.
I did write, once. She wrote back. Her written English was so bad that I could barely understand anything. I felt very, very sad getting that letter.

She told me that her real name wasn’t Miaow. It was Surya.
I hadn’t even suspected.
I’ve thought many times over the years of trying to track her down, but what would I do? I like to think that she probably achieved what she hoped to achieve: met a kind older man who whisked her and her boy away and gave them a life of material security. She was smart enough to achieve that. She deserves at least as much.
Wherever she is, I hope she’s happy and feels safe.




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