Taking Care of Myself First

"If I take care of myself and my basic needs, I contribute to my own personal power and sense of self worth."

Like many things in life, there are many different approaches that achieve the same goal.  On the spiritual path, I have found that my instinctive approach to something is completely backwards.  I tend to look at the goal and then work backwards from that.  For example, I may be unhappy with a particular circumstance.  Conventional wisdom wants me to put all of my attention and energy on changing the circumstance.

I always have two choices.  I can try to change the circumstance or I can accept it for what it is.  I always have this choice, too: focus on the inner life or focus on the outer life.  Focusing on the inner life may mean that I accept the circumstance as part of the Cosmic plan.  If I focused on changing the circumstance, what do I feel?  I feel that I am out of alignment with Life.  I am working upstream.

This is not to say that I can never change my circumstance.  This is simply saying that I should first accept it and consider if there is anything within me that needs to change.  Perhaps I need a perspective shift that will allow me to view it in a new light.  I might see that the circumstance does not need to change at all.  Or, the circumstance changes of its own accord.  As I put out higher and higher vibrations, the vibrational field around me will eventually match.  In other words, as I become a more positive, accepting person, my circumstance will improve to be lighter and freer than it was before.  This may be because of my perspective change, the influence of my attitude and actions on others, or the causal effect of external, mysterious forces.  The point is that rather than take the seemingly correct action of attempting to change my external reality, it may be helpful to consider an inside-out approach.

Another example where an inside-out approach may be warranted is when I want to increase my own sense of personal power and self-worth.  One road may be for me to directly attempt to empower myself through perhaps trying to control others or manipulate my circumstance.  Or, I may try to inflate my self-worth through elevating myself in relation to others or accomplishing things that improve my external image.  Rather than attempt to increase these areas directly, it may be more helpful to look deeper at their origin.

Is other words, I need to look at what needs to change within me.  To change me, I take positive actions that invest time and energy into myself.  If I take care of myself and my basic needs, I contribute to my own personal power and sense of self worth.  This is because deficiencies in my personal power may be related to an undeveloped sense of self.  To cultivate a sense of self, I need to devote time and energy into fostering it.  By simply spending time on myself, I am increasing my self-worth through my actions.  I am investing my limited resource of time on me which builds my worth.  If I practice self-care, I am watering, nurturing and fertilizing both my physical body and soul.  This, in turn, is putting money into my "personal power bank."  I am building up a reserve of power that I can draw upon to mindfully wield when challenging situations arise.

We Are All Energy

"Yield your spirit to the Energy of the universe and see that we are all united and part of one cohesive whole."

There are many levels that are planes of existence.  I will not exhaustively list them all but, among them, are the spiritual, physical and energetic planes.  These are gross simplifications, but the energetic plane is a mixture of the physical and spiritual.

We are all energy.  At a basic level, the molecules of our bodies are composed of mostly empty space.  Energy vibrates at different rates.  The slower it vibrates, we see a condensation into physical matter.  Thoughts vibrate at a faster rate and the spiritual world vibrates at even a faster rate.  In a very real way, we have an entire Universe inside each of us, if we look at things on the energetic level.  Energy unites us all and provides a foundation we can all return to when discussing the spiritual world.

There are many lessons we can learn when we consider reality from the energetic plane.  The first and foremost lesson is that all forms, labels and systems are a trap.  If the thing uniting everything is energy, then we can explain everything in terms of energy.  If we try and assign a label to this or that, it may help our rational mind understand it but, in the end, it is still energy.

For example, I may look at water and have different words for different types of waves, notate how it may change form at various temperatures, and so on.  Others may, simultaneously, be observing this same thing and come up with their own words and notations.  However, can we not see that we are still studying water?  It is when I say that my theory and names are the one, true way that I run into problems.  Now, it is no longer about water but about the names or forms I have given it.

Similarly, if we can understand that the spiritual world is no different, then we have taken a very evolved spiritual step in our progress.  In the end, we are talking about energy.  It is this energetic component that unites us all.  To talk about it, we need the names, forms and labels.  Yet, to get caught up in these currencies we use to exchange ideas about the spiritual world is to miss the forest for the trees.  Yield your spirit to the Energy of the universe and see that we are all united and part of one cohesive whole.