What is best for you is best for others.
When you care for yourself, you can happily support others in taking care of themselves.
When you take impeccable care of you, you inspire, and encourage others in caring for themselves.
When you are aware and self-sufficient in caring for you, you feel confident, capable and empowered.
In our culture, we are so preoccupied in taking care of others, we neglect ourselves.
In our family system, we learn you take care of others first and then maybe they will care for you.
In our society, we are taught that it is bad to be “selfish, to listen to outside authorities.
We literally have learned that others no what is best for us and we need to cater to their needs.
How can we meet another’s needs with sensitivity, respect and kindness while neglecting our own?
How can we recognize the basic needs of our infants and children, while denying or ignoring our own?
How can we claim to know what someone wants, if we do not know what we want?
We are so busy meeting the needs of family, institutions and employers, we have lost ourselves.
Do you know when you are hungry?
Do you eat what and when and how much you need?
Do you stop when you are satisfied?
Do you listen to your own appetite signals or eat when you have time and whatever is available?
Do you go to bed or take a nap when you are tired and get up when you are rested?
Or have you learned to live on whatever sleep you can get and wake up with an alarm clock?
Most of us in our sophisticated culture no longer have an awareness of how to sleep naturally.
You may use alcohol, exhaustion, and/or pills to put you to sleep and an alarm and coffee to wake up.
If we do not know and honor our own needs, how can we assume we know what others need?
If we do not listen to ourselves and respond to what is right for us, how can we listen to others?
If we neglect, ignore, deny, delay giving to ourselves, how can we be truly responsive to others?
If we use compensations, quick fixes and distractions, do we use substitutes for others needs?
When we know what we need to be our best, we must honor ourselves in the best way possible.
When we know we are hungry, we need to eat.
When we know we are tired, we need to rest.
When we know we need love, we need to love ourselves.
In natural cultures, people learn to be self sufficient quickly, because they are self aware.
Animals are self sufficient because they instinctively honor their basic needs.
Children can be self sufficient when parents listen and trust them to honor their needs.
We all can do a better job in listening and loving ourselves well.
***Consider the possibility that when we are hungry, tired or feel neglected, ignored, denied or not heard, we feel unloved and behave with crying, whining, tantrums and emotional upset, sickness, defiance, rebellion, aggression, addiction, self destructive behaviors and other cries for positive attention and loving help. All lack of love is a call for love from ourselves to ourselves.
Let’s wake up and love ourselves by listening within to our own needs, and responding with compassion and willingness to satisfy and love ourselves well.
Let us forgive ourselves for believing others know best.
Let us forgive ourselves for expecting others to care for us, because we care for them.
Let us give ourselves the best, because it is best for others.
Let us remember Our whole life is our soul responsibility.
Loving me and you,
Betty Lue