Self-Esteem

Well, aloha, and welcome to The Secret Art of Huna Live. So today I’m talking about self-esteem. It’s funny how these things happen, because I try and do a video every week if I possibly can for the Facebook group and the Facebook page.

And this week I’ve been struggling a bit because I couldn’t think what I should be talking about. I kept thinking, what am I gonna talk about? What am I gonna talk about? And I put it out there to the universe.

Please give me something, give me a clue. What am I gonna talk about? Now it so happens that if you sign up for the free meditation on secretartofhuna.com page, you will be invited to answer a questionnaire with the opportunity of having a free email consultation.

I don’t respond to them all. I read most of them, but I don’t respond to them all. There’s not enough time to do that. But I do respond to ones that are particularly interesting or particularly powerful.

Anyway, of late, the question, the number one issue that seems to be coming up with all these people who’ve answered this questionnaire is self-esteem.

So I thought, that’s it then. That’s what I need to talk about, self-esteem. Now why would self-esteem be important to you on a spiritual path? You might ask that question.

But I think self-esteem is really, really important on a spiritual path, because very often, when we’re on the spiritual path, we start to gain new intuitions, insights, sometimes even voices in our head that, things where we don’t know where it came from.

We can’t give it a logical explanation. And if our self-esteem’s not high, we can start to really doubt ourselves, doubt our own intuition, doubt the insights that we’re having, and even doubt that we’re on a spiritual path at all. That can become a real challenge.

So the better or the stronger our self-esteem, the stronger our self-consciousness, and the stronger our sense of ourself, confidence in who we are and who we’re becoming as a result of being on a spiritual journey, then the easier it is to cope with the insights, the voices, the questions that arise as we’re progressing down the path.

Now if you suffer from low self-esteem, you probably won’t even need to answer the question, why is self-esteem in general of interest? Why should we be thinking about low self-esteem? If you’ve never suffered from low self-esteem, you might be asking that question.

The challenge with low self-esteem, one of the challenges with low self-esteem, there are many, but one of the challenges with low-esteem is that is does seem that it can be quite closely related with psychological disorders.

So for example, for some people, if their low self-esteem becomes too much, they start to suffer anxiety, and some may even suffer depression.

People with low self-esteem tend to have a much stronger inner critic. You know that little monkey mind that goes off in your head? “Oh, you’re too such and such.” “You shouldn’t be doing this. “Why are you doing this?

“This was a mistake. “This is not a good idea. “You’re not clever enough. “You’re not intelligent enough. “You’re not talented enough.

“Nobody’s going to listen to you when you say,” that kind of thing. If you’ve ever suffered from low self-esteem, you’ll definitely recognise that one, the inner critic.

And when your inner critic kicks off, it can be really, really hard to deal with, particularly if your self-esteem is at a low ebb. As a child, I didn’t have a lot of self-esteem.

I definitely ran the imposter syndrome. I pretended that I did have high self-esteem. I pretended that I was confident. People believed that I was confident.

But inside, very often, I was dying. I was cringing. But I pretended. I acted as if. And sometimes I was quite successful. But it also left me with feelings of shame, a sense of not being authentic or true to myself.

As I grew older and I left the bullying environment which had kind of instigated that low self-esteem, that low confidence, my confidence genuinely did start to develop. Things started to improve.

And at a certain point, I got bullied again at work, and my self-esteem crashed again. And this time I didn’t know what to do. The imposter no longer worked for me.

It was too much of a lie. I’d done the rebel as a child. That’s another strategy for dealing with low self-esteem. I’d done the rebel.

I pretended that nothing mattered. I was treading my own path because I was a rebel, and that made me special. And to be honest, I fell into a period of victimhood. I stopped taking responsibility for myself.

I gave responsibility to events, to situations, to other people. I expected people to come and rescue me.

Now that’s not a very healthy place to live, partly because people get tired of rescuing you, or some people get tired of rescuing you, and partly when you spend all your time putting the responsibility out there for your wellbeing, you disempower yourself.

You have no control over your life. And that can become pretty anxious-making and depressing as well, because you fall into this spiral of, I have no control. I’m no good. Nobody loves me.

And as the song says, “Nobody loves me. “Everybody hates me. “And I’m going down the garden to eat worms.” But it becomes a vicious cycle.

So what can you do to look at self-esteem? One of the things I think that you can do is firstly to look at your own self-care.

Now when you’re in low self-esteem, that can be hard, because very often, the pattern that runs is I don’t deserve to take care of myself because I’m not worthy, and it’s not self-care.

It’s selfish. But actually, when you start to take care of yourself, when you start to be kind to yourself, then a lot of things start to change, because you have more energy.

You have more capacity. You have more ability to take on things. And actually, if you’re doing the victim thing, taking care of yourself starts to help you move out of the victim.

Another thing that you can do is to start visualising and focusing on what you want. Now again, that can be a challenge for people with low self-esteem, because if you don’t believe you deserve it, then sometimes it’s not that you can’t visualise it but you can’t believe that it’s possible.

“What do you want in, “where do you want to be in a year’s time?” I say to my clients. “Where d’you want to be in three years’ time? “What d’you want from life in five years’ time?” And they’ll say, “I don’t know.”

The truth is, they do know. But because their confidence has hit rock bottom, they can’t believe it’s possible. And because they can’t believe it’s possible, they can’t articulate it as a possibility. Why speak it? It won’t happen.

So if you can, start baby steps of visualisation. Envisage those little things that you know are possible. Envisage the things that you know will happen tomorrow that will be fun, that will be pleasant, that you’ll feel a sense of joy about.

Because another thing with self-esteem is, again, when you’re in low self-esteem, very often, the joy can go out of life.

So making little baby steps in visualisation, little baby steps in thinking about the future, thinking of something you can do tomorrow or the day after that’s gonna give you a buzz or a bit of pleasure.

Another thing that you can do is release work. I do a lot of release work with clients. Typically, we’ll release feelings of angry, sadness, fear, guilt, and we release limiting beliefs, limiting beliefs like I’m not good enough.

Because if you run a limiting belief of I’m not good enough, you probably are gonna experience low self-esteem, low confidence. I work with clients as well on developing their sense of self, developing who they are.

So what are your strengths? What are your talents? If your self-esteem is at rock bottom and you can’t identify your strengths and talents, ask your friends.

Ask the people you love and who love you, what is it they value about it? Where is it they think that you do well? And take those and really take them onboard. Hear them, see them. Step into them. Enjoy the feeling of them.

Many times our feelings of self-esteem are set when we’re, oof, under the age of five. Walking around, we’re little sponges, and we soak up everything we hear.

So if there are parents or friends or relations who constantly criticise us, then it’s very easy to fall into low self-esteem.

So if you are a parent or a grandparent or a uncle or aunt or godparent to young kids, when you’re dealing with young kids, be kind to them. Talk to them about the things that are good about them.

If they’re wearing something that looks good or if they’re playing with something that looks good or if they’re doing something that’s really rather cool, praise them.

Because actually, in those little throwaway remarks, that desire to make them resilient, you can really, really devastate somebody’s self-esteem and devastate it for life.

So I hope that’s been interesting and useful, and look forward to talking to you again very soon.

Love to hear your comments on the Facebook page or in the Facebook group, The Secret Art of Huna for Powerful Transformation.

And if you want to book a one-on-one call with me, then go to secretartofhuna.com/diary, and we can talk further one-on-one.

Take care now.

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