How we treat others matters, and it matters greatly. But the bigger question is—how are we treating ourselves with the way we’re treating others? How do we treat ourselves by being who we are being with others?
Each act is first an act towards self and then an act towards others. The radiance of our thoughts and actions illuminates us first, before it shines out into the world. And in that light, we are. We enact ourselves into being—and we are both the benefactors and beneficiaries of the energy we exude.
Often, the way we treat ourselves with the actions we take is the very antithesis of what we’re trying to achieve with those actions.
People who are trying to get others to respect them, are often disrespectful of themselves. People who want to prove themselves are often coming from self-doubt and self-judgement. People who want to be in the spotlight, are often not present with themselves. If someone is trying to be strong, resilient, resourceful—that’s most probably in reaction to their feeling they aren’t.
The attempt to prove usually disproves. When we know, deeply—that’s in our hearts—we don’t need to prove. Only the mind seeks to prove, because only the mind doubts. Embodied knowledge, which is visceral knowledge, never questions its existence, only intellectual/acquired/mind-based knowledge does.
The harder we try to prove, the more we widen the abyss of uncertainty within us.
We seek to achieve something with the actions we take. We seek to have an experience. There’s an end we have in mind. And we’re only trying to get there, because we aren’t—i.e. in reaction to the feeling of not being there. And often, more than anything the trying to arrive distances us from arriving.
A different way of getting what we want is to get it before we have it. To step into the energy of what we’re trying to experience, before we experience it. To be the person we want to be, to feel like that person, before we become it. Feel loving, to have love. Feel respect and appreciate for yourself, to have respect. Feel absence of insecurity, before you feel confident.
It’s not where we’re going, it’s where we come from that shapes what we get.