This is a long (45m) interview about RPT and healing / personal development.
With thanks to the lovely Kara-Leah Grant of The Yoga Lunchbox.
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?!
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)
Somebody can be. And it’s my pleasure.
I just did a presentation in Zagreb. I presented Reference Point Therapy (my healing work), and I did a very public demonstration of it.
The 3rdlevel course of RPT is called Mastering the Miraculous.
Since I took that course in November 2009 I’ve been able to master miracles.
And tonight was a beautiful example of that.
First of all – who has ever heard of a ‘healer’ claiming to have the “fastest, most efficient healing technique in the world”.
Secondly, who ever had the balls to prove that claim with a public demonstration?
Well actually, there are a bunch of us RPT teachers doing just that – I’m not the only one…
5/6 people put their hands up.
I asked each of them what the problem that they wanted to heal was.
Then I intuitively chose the one I thought most suited a public demo. (Not too complex, easy to ‘measure’ a change).
The woman I chose had a ‘calcified’ shoulder. Medical diagnosis, long-term (2 year) problem. Chronic pain.
Before the session – pain was fairly low: 2 /10 whilst standing; 3/10 moving the arm.
Mobility in the shoulder was clearly impaired.
The woman said that sometimes the pain was so bad it made her cry.
I asked her a few questions:
When did the pain start?
What else was happening in her life around that time?
We ‘felt into’ the pain. A childhood memory came up to do with being abandoned.
I healed the feelings, the subconscious associations, and the ancestral trauma that caused it all. I also healed it for all of us that were present, and humanity as a whole, because it was an issue that I know is very real for many people today.
Afterwards, when I asked her to move her arm, there was no pain. Full mobility. She cried with gratitude and gave me one of the sweetest hugs.
There was a medical doctor in the audience who was utterly gobsmacked. She signed up for both RPT courses Level 1 and 2 on the spot.
And when I came home I had an email that read (I’ll paraphrase, because the sender’s English was hard to understand):
“Dear Ben
I was on presentation of Reference point therapy in (Zagreb).
Not sure if somebody can (be healed) just by being
there at the demonstration healing
but I feel relief (like somebody understand me)
It feels like silence and you can’t describe it with words.
Thank you very much”
Somebody can be. And it’s my pleasure.
Spread. The. Love. Share (using the green button below) the good news: healing is easy, fast, fun. Because we’re meant to be healthy, happy, and free – it’s our birthright.
Spread. The. Love. Share (using the green button below) the good news: healing is easy, fast, fun. Because we’re meant to be healthy, happy, and free – it’s our birthright.
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.
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.
Offended by the word Cunt? (This one’s for you)
Mark was my best friend.
We grew up together. I knew him since I was 4 years old.
We used to sleep over at each other’s houses, sliding down the staircases in sleeping bags, keeping each other’s parents awake at night.
I never felt comfortable in his house though. Everything was too clean and tidy – not a thing out of place.
And he wasn’t allowed to say ‘God’. He got round this by saying Gaw’ instead (like Gawd – ‘Queen’s English’ pronunciation, but without the D). I remember the first time I heard him say it. I laughed out loud.
His mother (who I must say is a lovely lady, and still friends with my mother) didn’t let him say God, but Gaw’ was ok. Even though we all knew that the meaning was the same.
I was always afraid of his Mother as a child. She reminded me of Nurse Ratched.
The thing that bothered me the most about this vocabulary restriction that my friend was under – it sounded so contrived. As if, at the moment when he wanted to exclaim “Oh my God, the house is on fire!” or “Good God, I’ve never seen such a large carrot”, or “God Almighty is that really the time?”, he had to check his surprise / indignation / relief, and redirect his feeling into another direction. It was the censorship of expression that I found hard to swallow…
Once, when I was sleeping over at Mark’s house I woke up having shat in the bed (I promise you, it never happened before or since). After I got over my fear of waking up Nurse Ratched and telling her the bad news, I stood in the hall and chuckled to myself as she changed the sheets. Somehow, it felt like divine retribution.
And I don’t imagine that she was saying to herself: “Oh my Gaw’, what a mess”…
In 1939 when Gone With the Wind was released, the famous line: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” almost didn’t make it past censorship. In those days, the words ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ were taboo. Hard to imagine that now isn’t it?
Nowadays there is really only one word left that universally causes us to pause and consider “can I really say that?”
Cunt.
A cunt is a vagina. We all know that, right? But a cunt is also a person so despicable that no other word/s will suffice to describe. In my recent article Why I Had To Leave Bangkok After Just One Night – The Girl With The Black Eyes I used the word ‘cunt’ to describe the various men who tried to ‘sell’ me an 11 year old child for the night. I personally would have preferred a nastier word, but I can’t think of one. (If you can, please let me know).
Several people commented that the story would have been better without the use of the word ‘cunt’.
Really, this is my reply to those people.
A word is primarily a sound. And it can of course have a meaning attached, but meaning is subjective. So one person who hears it will react in a different way to another…
And of course, the single syllable that is ‘Cunt’ can mean beautiful genitalia (your vaginas are all beautiful, girls, please realize that) or a despicable man. In the same way that a dick can be a phallus, or a fool!
So in a way, the two people who react differently to the same word are really only separated by their cultural exposure to the word itself (the more someone has heard it, the less they will react).
For example: Gone with the Wind did wonders, I’m sure, for the cultural acceptance of the word damn.
This article is doing wonders (I hope) for the word cunt (although perhaps not for my reputation. Oh well).
The meaning doesn’t change. Just the level of cultural acceptance.
So, when I am speaking or writing something, I won’t dampen my expression, my voice, to suit the audience. I just won’t do it. What would be the point – to protect delicate sensibilities? If so, should I worry about every word – god, damn, cunt…?! Where do I draw the line?
Rather, I challenge those of you who find this use of language offensive to question what part of you it is that is offended, and why?
…
If you remain offended after said questioning, then I apologize for causing pain. It certainly was not my intention. I promise you that I don’t often use the C word. (I save it for special occasions)…
Mark and I drifted apart. We were too different.
Last time I saw him was Christmas a few years ago. He came over with his fiancée, who I’d never met before. During dinner I went upstairs to find an old photo of the two of us at University. I wanted to show his wife-to-be how hilarious the two of us looked, both wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, with long hair and glowing red eyes. He intercepted me on my way back into the dining room, and insisted that I shouldn’t show her that photo.
Later, I figured out why. He had a joint in his hand, and he didn’t want her seeing that he’d ever smoked.
A couple of years later he and his (then wife) had a baby. I found out about it a week later from my Mum. That was when I realized that our friendship was dead and buried.
Censorship is not a Good Thing.