Excerpt from "The Right Relationship Can Happen: How To Create Relationship Success":

In order to attract the right person, it is critical to acknowledge and accept your positive and negative qualities. The most important part of your life is the essence of your being and how you care, respect, and are responsible for yourself. If you do not love and value yourself, no one in your life will ever provide the love you are seeking. Regarding your life as valuable and important is the definition of a personal belief in self-love.

Every individual has a message to deliver to the universe, whether the call is answered in this lifetime or many lifetimes later. Depending on how willing you are to develop and strengthen your spiritual muscles, you may choose to consider yourself unimportant as a way to avoid living up to this responsibility.


When you feel worthwhile in your personal, social, and work life, you have a healthy self-love. If your parents made you feel loved and respected, you were comfortable in your environment. If you were not raised in such a loving household and were criticized excessively, you probably feel unlovable. This feeling may extended to school, where you felt rejected by peers or felt you were not able to compete in sports or in the classroom.


When we are growing up, our minds create tapes of the impressions others have of us. For example, I am the oldest of three children. As with many firstborn children, my parents expected a lot from me, not only intellectually but also in my behavior toward others. So, I created a tape of being a responsible person. Because my parents encouraged my intellectual growth through praise, my self-image was positive and my excellent academic grades were a reflection of that belief.


Each time an incident reminds us of one of these positive or negative tapes, we react to the present event from our memories of the first time we experienced that feeling. Sometimes, these disparagements evolve into self-criticism and drag us down until we lose our self-love.

In order to achieve personal transformation it is necessary to examine the reasons you are here and understand the lessons placed in your path for your emotional and spiritual evolvement. It is also essential to become aware of the ways that you sabotage yourself and refuse to understand these lessons. The sooner you achieve higher awareness to issues that you resist, the sooner you can live in fulfillment of your true purpose. The discovery of who you really are is the most exciting aspect of being alive. Without this insight, life seems meaningless, laborious, and boring.


Defiance is a fundamental stance toward life. What you resist persists and the areas that will provide the most growth and change are those you avoid most fiercely. In order to grow, personal power must be developed and strengthened. I describe personal power as experiencing life in harmony, emitting positive energy into the universe regardless of what is happening. It is not only the ability to act harmonious in thought, word, and deed; it is also the interaction we have in our relationships with others. It takes strong self-affirmation to be present each moment and consciously live in this manner.


The opposite of personal power is powerlessness. This is a general feeling of helplessness in which you deny your ability to impact your environment. Do you believe that what happens to you is a consequence of your actions and is within your control? Then you internalize events and their results. Do you believe what happens to you is related to external events, powerful others, and chance, and thus beyond your control? Then you externalize events and their results.

Personal power lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from abusive or manipulative power. It is defined as power within the self rather than power over others. It is an expression of self and not domination. As a child, your thoughts and words were validated and you felt free to participate in intellectual curiosity and questioning. Developing personal power requires secure connection and attachment with parents coupled with healthy separation. Too often our personal power is silenced through educational systems, family, and mass culture that ignore the authenticity and creativity we have as children.

Powerlessness may be the same as having no control, but this does not make it the opposite of having control. We do not need to feel that we are in control as much as we need to feel that we are integral parts of what is occurring around us; that we are involved intimately in our lived experiences. A high degree of personal power correlates with greater general happiness and less manifested anxiety.


The connection between openness and personal power is that you either invest power in force or in loving acceptance. Offering love to all, even your enemies, requires an openness of spirit and vulnerability borne in self-confidence and therefore in non-defensiveness.

So, what are the antidotes to powerlessness? How can you stop your inner critic from controlling your life? Ego surrender tends to increase inner strength. Personal power is enhanced through the process of letting go. Opening yourself to raw experience, unprotected by pretense, denial, and guardedness, is liberating. Letting go of the futile attempt to control life allows tension to give way to relaxation.

We might view the process of expanding one’s personal power as stepping from defensiveness into vulnerability. The ego is generally on alert to maintain the persona of acceptable qualities and to keep repressed the shadow of unacceptable or unattainable qualities. Fear of discovery is the driving motivation; shame and force are the primary vehicles.

Inspiration occurs as a shift in awareness and is characterized by contact and connection, opening, clarity, and energy. You intuitively know that you have learned to trust.



- posted by Nancy @ 10:31 AM