Lies
Posted: December 20, 2013 Filed under: Meditation, Yoga | Tags: Asana, blogging, compassion, cycling, exercise, failure, freshly pressed, friends, gluten free, happiness, health, kindness, love, lululemon, marathon, meditation, motivation, musings, natural, nature, Omaha, paleo, passion, pilates, Practice, running, Self-compassion, Self-esteem, Self-Help, Spirituality & Religion, whole foods, WordPress, yoga 8 CommentsFailure is the condiment that gives success its flavour-
Search “self-help” this morning using your WordPress reader, and you are likely to find a billion posts listed under “self-esteem.” Let’s be fully open and honest – The sole purpose of these posts is to not only tell you why your self-esteem is suffering, but rather to guide your delicate heart to more of it.
Why is this so?
Self esteem is considered the pinnacle of true individual success. How can we possibly get ahead of the next person in life, unless we intimately believe we are perfect, and perfectly awesome!
In order to be perfectly awesome? We live in quiet terror of making mistakes in life, and we feel utterly devastated when we do. Our defense mechanism is to refocus our attention on the “things” we do well …
Stroking our own ego, relentlessly until our hearts forget this horrible episode of not being “awesome” and moving on to “something” more satisfying.
How does this relate to yoga practice, cycling, running and whatever else?
It’s important to understand, when I discuss self-compassion during a post … I’m discussion what self-compassion is not. Some folks like to think self-compassion is giving yourself a break, taking it easy. In essence self-compassion is simply accepting responsibility for, YOU. The difference lies not in where we end up during a flow of poses (the flow of life), but in how we process the ups and downs of the journey, our path in life.
Self-compassion is a willingness to look at our own mistakes and shortcomings with kindness and understanding – To err, is indeed human.
Daily Meditation:
The “trick” in life is to allow ourselves to make mistakes without feeling humiliated … Tune in and take notice of your abilities, your actions, and evaluate what needs to be done “differently” next time around.
CultFit 
Completely disagreed with the first half… And then you knocked the second half out of the park! Awesome post brother.
Being awesome does not mean the lack of humanness, or being perfect. Being awesome MEANS accepting that we are human and therefore make mistakes, owning that, making amends for those mistakes when necessary and doing the best we can with what we’ve been given… At least that’s my definition of awesome. I have a feeling that would make an interesting lunch discussion one day.
Interesting indeed, we witness this all the time in professional sports. Stars who are fading, trying to live up to past glory. We also witness athletes who are frigging awesome – get injured and then struggle to adjust afterwards. Baseball: Pitchers and Tommy John Surgery … The amount of concussions across all sports. Man, this discussion could carry over into dinner and then some! I hope you guys have a brilliant weekend, take care!
Glad I’m not alone in saying I disagreed with the first part. I believe that what has gone on in humanity for eons is degradation of the self. Even many religions are based on being a sinner to start with, suffering, etc. We have been taught to accept we are less than, a failure, even often a burden to society and families. So my focus in life and my work, has been to assist people to rediscover their power, their divinity, what is “right” about them..not from an egoistic place or to stoke the ego but to bring the person back up to the truth so they can move forward in celebration of who they are…warts and all.
I am grateful that we can broaden this conversation … I think what I was trying to convey was self-esteem as it relates to performance and expectations. I witness a lot of people who are really good at, lets say running – So good that they become complacent, fragile to events changing around them. Their age, injuries etc. This is where I like to talk about self-compassion, accepting responsibility and then moving on to greater heights, greater accomplishments. Its the old “hedonic treadmill” … We believe we are perfectly awesome, until sadly we are not – Its really hard for folks to accept this, to step off of the treadmill, to treat themselves with kindness.
I hope you have a beautiful weekend and please take care!
I understand the point you are making, I just don’t perceive what you are describing as issues with “self esteem”, or I don’t call an athlete getting complacent as having issues with self esteem. To me that would have more to do with lacking in self awareness perhaps or complacency itself.
I know I’m just sensitive perhaps to the term self esteem used in this way or stated as people having too much of it, due to my experience that society has not done ANYTHING to build up the self esteem of the typical person and has in fact done much to undermine it with regular use of violence, abuse, bullying, advertising manipulation, etc.
I spent a good deal of my life doing inner work, with help sometimes, rebuilding my self esteem after a lifetime of rejection and criticism and part of my work over the years has been rape victims, people abused as children and immigrants who suffered through torture and wars.
I see life and its difficulties a school. Our imperfections make that school possible.
Excellent perspective, take care this weekend!
I dwelt on your words about success, and remembered a sign by the health stores I saw this week…
2 rules to succeed –
1. Never tell what you know…
I laughed seeing this, I laughed at the simplicity of its truth. Most of the time we deem success as having your name proudly displayed or known somewhere. We define our success when we hear the applause… say hi to ego then…
This is a quote from Bob Proctor ~ “There’s something so magnificent about you. I have been studying me for forty-four years. I wanna kiss myself sometimes! Because you’re going to get to love yourself. I’m not talking about conceit. I’m talking about a healthy respect for yourself. And as you love yourself, you’ll automatically love others.”
That’s the truth to success… falling in love with yourself. =)