humility

"We cannot always get that which we want. Selfish desires and glamorous ideals are endless and are only stopped by the purifying power of spiritual realization and love. Humility is the act of admitting that we have problems and sincerely want to overcome them. Humility helps us to begin to understand and overcome these endless narcissistic selfish desires, and allows us to develop other spiritual qualities primarily those of God realization, soul realization, love, wisdom, and goodness."

Humility helps us to accept the life we have, the person we are, our gifts and our faults, and stops us from being greedy and resentful.

HALF FULL OR HALF EMPTY?

We all know how easy it is to relate to our lives as "half empty." Sometimes everything in our lives seems wrong. We feel tired and depressed when things are not going the way we expect or want. It is at these moments when it is good to stop and think about all those whose lives are far more difficult and for more unfair. This is humility. This is when we can take stock of everything that makes our lives "half full." Life is like a ring doughnut - we can choose to focus on the hole in the middle or the fullness of the cake.

Nobody has a perfect life because life, by it's very nature, is imperfect.

Try to look at what you have got, how you can improve things, and how to make the most of it.

 

KEY TO PROGRESS

"Rome was not built in a day."

Humility is an essential key to help us out of the darkness of our ignorance. Humility is the ability to acknowledge that we have problems, faults, pains, make mistakes, act in ways that we don't want to, say and think things that we know are not good, etc. Humility is acknowledging how we actually are today. Without honest self knowledge, how can we begin to improve?

Humility teaches us how to be with our pains and disappointments without trying to escape from them. How can we escape from a prison if we don't first admit that we are a prisoner? How can we run if we cannot even walk? How can we solve our problems if we don't acknowledge that we have them? Humility saves us from arrogance, false pride, and projecting our own problems onto other people.

Humility allows us to seek answers to our problems and solve them. We can ask people whom we trust questions concerning our problems, we can listen to the answers and reason whether we feel them to be appropriate.

Humility helps us avoid becoming or remaining as an arrogant and ignorant person. Humility helps us solve our problems. Humility gives us the patience, tolerance, and the will to understand ourselves that is necessary to begin our self-healing and further growth.

"Take it easy, but don't be lazy."

Humility is a necessary quality for self-study, honest self-inspection, healing, and growth. Humility helps us to understand our limits, abilities, strengths and weaknesses, and boundaries, and to respect these limitations in our lives so that we don't arrogantly harm and mislead ourselves and others. We can get on with our life in a quiet, sensible, and appropriate manner.

Humility helps us to realize that others don't necessarily perceive and live life in the same way that we do. If our own lives are not working as we hoped, we are frustrated, disappointed, we have no life-meaning, we are bored, and perhaps we are unhappy, then with a touch of humility we don't go around assuming that everybody else is in the same boat. We realize that there are many different approaches and outlooks to life that are different from our own.

Humility allows us to realize the limitations of our own small mind and shows us that if we admit this then we can learn to understand other approaches and attitudes. Nurturing and cultivating humility is a first step in reducing our egotism which allows us to move out of our self-perpetuating psycho-emotional prison of conditioned life perceptions and responses.

Humility is closely linked with APPRECIATION. We learn to appreciate life. We learn to enjoy that which is in front of us. Appreciation is a great quality to nurture for it allows us to enjoy life and leads us to satisfaction and contentment. Without humility and appreciation we run the risk of being overtaken by endless selfish desire and aversion, unable to find satisfaction in any of them however hard we try. Then we get restless, frustrated, disappointed, upset, and unhappy.

So let us nurture humility within ourselves and overcome our ignorance, narrow mindedness, and discontent.

 

ACKNOWLEDGING PROBLEMS

Along with humility, we need to learn to acknowledge our lives as they are. This will help us to think deeply about and come to terms with all the aspects that make up our lives (the integration of the seven chakras); Family, Relationships, Occupation, Health, Past events, Success and Failure, Problems, Positive and Negative qualities, etc... We make a commitment to accept that "This is my life."

Without accepting how are lives are today then we cannot begin to hope to understand, enhance, improve, and transform our life. We must start somewhere. People who keep running away from their lives tend to never get started. They go from one thing to another and their lives become an unbearable chaos. Some people even spend their time judging and finding fault in others without even attending to their own honest analysis.

Acknowledgment and acceptance helps us to ground ourselves into our life. We stop pretending to be someone that we are not. We get grounded. We get real. We take the necessary first step in self-knowing. We acknowledge the conditions, people, events, and influences in our lives. We acknowledge our past and present circumstances and this allows us to bring understanding, depth, quality and transformation to them.

We need to accept our lives as they are - however painful our current circumstances may be - so that we can then begin to apply some real changes, and these things take time.

By acknowledging our conditionings and inherited personality we can work to transform them into something more desirable and useful. No acknowledgment = No possibility of change.

Neurosis and depressive illness occurs when our negativity - our pains, fears, shames, guilt, embarrassments, mistakes, disappointments, despairs, angers, hates, etc - begins to control our daily behavior. Our repertoire of life responses is severely restricted by this build up of negative energy which can sometimes, if left unhealed, eclipse our health and happiness.

Then we become ill.

Then we begin to respond to life through these many filters of negativity.

Then we make more mistakes which adds to our negativity. We may become depressed and nihilistic. We may fall into not caring about ourselves and others (as within, so without). Our disappointments lead us to take the attitudes of; "I don't give a damn", "I just don't care", "Why should I care?", "What's the point", "My life is meaningless so I'll do whatever I please regardless of others." These thoughts become our negative mantras. As this negative mind begins to gain strength within us, then we are at an even higher risk of making serious mistakes with our life. It is at the lowest points that we need to be the most careful. This is also true when we are at our high points too. We need to become aware of the extremities that our mind can swing to, and we need to learn how to attain to the balance, "The Middle Way" between the extremes. To do this we need first to understand our minds. This is quite simple if we use the seven chakra system as a holistic mind map.

When we are really low, we can do anything, we can justify any behavior, we can take up damaging and unhealthy habits that will ruin our lives, we can harm and abuse ourselves, we can make a cognitive decision (form a conclusion in our mind) that "life is shit and then we die", "It's me against the world." At our lowest points we are definitely not in our "right mind." Activity based upon this negative (tamasic) state of mind can surely only lead to further negativity.

We can get caught up in "the vicious downward spiral" as each decision and thought is being created by a negative mind. We become more and more frustrated with ourselves. We project this pain outwards at others and can easily get caught in the blame cycle. Our personality can begin to form itself around the negative mind and we get a lifelong negative personality. Then we can't understand why nobody likes us, hires us, or wants to know us.

It is at these points of intense disappointment and negativity that we really need the humility to acknowledge that we are simply not happy. It is this humility that prevents the next depressive stage which begins with frustration and anger, and can end in violence, self-harm, and even in death.

If we humbly realize that "I am simply not happy" then we have made the first step towards understanding our problems and getting well again. The path out of the negative cul-de-sac begins with the humility to admit "I have problems. Whatever the cause of these problems, where-so-ever they have come from, they are now my problems. I cannot blot them out or escape from them. However painful my life is at the present moment, I can begin to deal with these problems one day at a time. In this way, I will one day be free from this negative condition."