When we consistently suppress and distrust our intuitive knowingness, looking instead for authority, validation, and approval from others, we give our personal power away. -Shakti Gawain
I’m on the patch right now. Where it releases small dosages of approval until I no longer crave it, and then I’m gonna rip it off. -Ellen DeGeneres
What have you done in your need for approval? How have you twisted and contorted yourself to meet what you thought another wanted in you or from you? How did you agree to forget your Self in the hopes that another would love you or deem you fit to be loved? Come on, we’ve all done it at some point in our lives. Some of us more than others depending on the dynamics of our family of origin. What is this need for approval really about? It happens when you aren’t in touch with who you really are underneath the personality structures you’ve created to get by in this world. Or maybe it is that need for approval that causes us to forget who we truly are under the personalities. Either way we only have a need for approval when we are not in remembrance of our powerful truth.
If we knew the truth of how perfect we are, how powerful we are, how absolutely whole we are, nothing missing, nothing broken, then we would have no need to engage in the approval dance. It’s a circular dance that never ends and we never lead. It’s exhausting trying to make other people like you, love you, validate your worthiness. Why give so much power away when you have access to all the power there is? Why don’t we know solidly that the seat of our true power is within? Isn’t it obvious that everything in our lives reflects the level of power we are in touch with? How much of our greatness we know on a visceral level is projected outward and meets us face to face in the form of our life experiences and relationships which reflect our greatness back to us. I engage in it as much as anyone else. I see where I get caught up in whether another person will like what I’m doing or if they’ll think I’m lame. Where I’m embarrassed when I’ve been myself but then second guessed it, waiting for the rejection. I spent a lifetime trying to perfect being what I thought others wanted but it never got me what I thought it would. It was always me thinking that if I could just do this or that just so then they would finally love me and find me worthy. It never ever worked. Not ever. Really, all it accomplished was that I vanished from my own sight. I couldn’t even see my true self anymore. And truthfully, there was this inner knowing that I had to veer left even though someone else thought I should go right. So, I couldn’t truly get rid of that inner compass that said “you are not going to do it their way.” When I was true to myself, even though I had a great time and knew deep down I did what was right for me, I always felt shame and doubt when it met with criticism or dismay by those I wanted to love me. I spent so much of my life giving my power away in this manner, leaking my valuable life energy to make someone else feel more powerful than me. My healing has been in slowly gathering myself up, piece by piece from all those places I left me behind. Gathering up that life force energy and bringing it back to the seat of my power within. I’m making myself whole again and I’m re-membering myself, fragment by fragment. Giving my Self back to me is the gift of love I need right now. No one else can ever give this to me and no one else ever needs to. One day I plan to feel free of “need”, and until then I practice daily to touch the place in me that has no personality, needs or missing pieces. That whole and perfect place within me, my essence, my spirit, my Divine Self. The ego/personality will have you thinking that you need others to validate your existence. Delve beneath that surface level of understanding of yourself and you find the place in which your existence just is, and then you understand that no one can take the immense power inherent in that fact away from you. I’ll promise to visit that place more often and I hope you will too.
