Believing in Yourself, Succeeding and Making Dreams Come True

I have been thinking about aspiration and survival. Take a family and community whose culture places massive value on aspiration and the qualities of life that nurture it - protection, promotion, love and respect, nurturing. The right to believe in yourself; making dreams come true, being real, succeeding, finding fulfillment – without paying a huge price - is an integral part of that culture. Survival is presumed.

Then look at a culture where pain and suffering are elevated to the status of the only worthwhile human experience. The most important person is perhaps the son of God, who ended up on a cross, being tortured to death out of love for ordinary folks. Perhaps each person is born with a brand of sin on their soul, and if they get it wrong in life they end up in hell. Sex is dirty. Poverty, suffering and self-denial are saintly virtues.

Combine that deadly, asphyxiating, soul and heart-destroying culture with perhaps a family one driven by a parent whose needs are paramount, who will even fake crises. Add a dash of molestation or worse to the mix and you end up with a somewhat minimized capacity to survive in the world let alone develop any aspirations you may have.

In such an environment, everybody is trying to survive - and learning from the parent how to do it at the expense of others. If there is a child with talent or strong aspirations, the family will stifle it, and they are unlikely to be aware of what they are doing. The message on the surface may be "we love you" but the real one is "drop dead, there is no ways we are going to let you get ahead."

I had aspirations of what I wanted to do from a young age, but I had a jealous parent and siblings and there was not even enough attention for me to learn how to survive in the world. So I have spent my life wrestling with just survival, when inside my heart and soul I have been longing to fly. My aspirations have always burned from within. But if you do not know how to survive, you can forget about being able to develop your aspirations. I have often felt like a wild animal thrashing against the bars of its cage.

The good news is that you can work with what you were exposed to in the past to change your life forever. I know, because I am doing it; building self-esteem, entitlement and emotional fluency and correcting misshapen beliefs and myths about life and who I am. What my family and my culture could not do for me I am learning to do for myself. Survive well, and flourish, without compromising myself.  I am changing my life and stepping out of history.

I reckon next time I am born it is going to be in a nurturing family culture, with lots of love, emotional fluency, lots of celebration of aspirations, great generosity of spirit - which would be cosmically stepping out of history I guess!


Courtesy ArticleBase