Shall We Walk the Talk?

I decided to finish my gym party with my body balance class. You need to know some context here:

My coach was giving her 3rd class after two cardio ones. She is so passionate. She’s not only divine in coaching; she also brings her heart to the class.

After a few tracks, she asked whether everything was okay. We were about 60. She got only ONE answer. She turned to me and said “Thank you!” with her usual grace accompanied by her gorgeous grateful eyes. My heart was bleeding. It would have taken nothing to answer her question. She was extremely tired; still committed to delivering her session in the highest quality, and she was! She only had a moment of need: she needed to be recognized for her efforts; she needed to be seen; she needed to feel we also do care.

If I was not there, her question would have stayed unanswered, her need unfulfilled, her heart disappointed – very legitimate, and that would have been truly ugly…

We tend to have so many big confusions… Many would have told me: Well, a giver doesn’t need our recognition! They are doing what they’re doing selflessly without expecting anything in return! What is the root cause of such a confusion? The myth around the expectations in the sense that we need to avoid having any, since they the source of all our hard feelings! They definitely are when being “unhealthy”. Does this mean there are two kinds of expectations? Bingo! That’s the reason why there are toxic and healthy relationships – the latter group being, unfortunately, the minority…

This is explaining my tendency to separate between “love” and a “relationship”. Love –the genuine form — is a free emotion we can give to a complete stranger, to animals, to a flower, to a beautiful rainbow. You guessed right: pretty much anything!

Your center is the foundation of your love manifestation. If your center is your children, the love that manifests from that will exclusively benefit your children. If your center is the ‘Principles’, the manifestation of your love will benefit the universe.

A relationship though is a completely different story! It takes two individuals, and what would be defining its nature is how much emotionally healthy each party is in the first place. A person’s expectations can tell a lot about their emotional balance. An insecure person still navigating life with a huge package of limiting beliefs and emotional scars, who has never had an opportunity to become aware of their conditioning’s outcomes or who was not able to get out of their denial circle would have such unhealthy expectations:

Expecting the person to fix them, to make of them the center of their world, to understand them even when they don’t understand themselves, to forgive all their endless reactivity, to make them happy even when they’re doing everything to stay in their victim position their unhealthy ego loves so much…

An emotionally self-reliant person – or at least who is on the path of becoming one — on the other hand would expect the following from a relationship:

To be actively listened to – instead of listening to respond, we listen to understand; instead of listening to the words, we listen to the body language and emotions; instead of listening with the ears, we listen with the heart. How is that even possible? Thanks to a mindset shift namely “Seeking first to understand, and then to be understood”. What does it take? Having already moved – at least partially – from the biased personality sphere to the character arena; from the unhealthy ego to the healthy one (aka self-love); from the distorted centers to the original one; from the limiting beliefs to the truths fueled by the principles.

An emotionally healthy person also needs to be seen, recognized, encouraged, challenged, celebrated.

They also need free acts of kindness and generosity. They need the roles in the relationship to be clarified. They need people to keep their promises. They need them to apologize quickly and sincerely whenever screwing things up — like we all do anyway! In one word — or maybe more, but who cares – they need to be in a relationship where the other party is also living wholeheartedly!

To come back to my coach story, the point here is that it is so easy to talk, to preach kindness, to promote the most amazing virtues. Anyone can do it. The old miserable perfectionist me was also guilty of it. She was desperately looking for some external worth since her intrinsic one was discriminated. But, when the situation required showing up for others and proving the virtues she was bragging, she was remaining self-absorbed and neutral…

She was trying to heal while a narcissistic psychopath noticed her and decided she would be his victim. She was almost killed.

Having started the illusional self-development journey helped drastically! She became compassionate, generous, eloquent, healthy — all that she could ever wish for herself to make it short — until an incident (or maybe 2 in parallel) happened and destroyed her fragile balance… What happened? Her ingrained limiting beliefs succeeded in overriding all her fabulous positive affirmations she spent months mapping… That’s when she started questioning her worth, doubting herself and adding even more insecurities to the long list. She was trying to heal while a narcissistic psychopath noticed her and decided she would be his victim. She was almost killed. At that point, it became extremely clear how much she was lost and she had only two options: either committing to the real journey of literally reinventing who she was or dying. Luckily, she went for the latter.

More to the point, the virtues are not mapped. They are acquired when we do our homework when we decide to pay the price and stay with the pain long enough to transform. I can get really pissed off of some ego’s shows which could, unfortunately, fool many folks who are eagerly looking for some light… This is basically why I’m always emphasizing on the importance of developing one’s critical thinking. There are manipulators everywhere going from the fame slaves – with average IQ and EQ – to the psychopaths showing an extremely high level of intellectual and emotional intelligence used to destroy and create chaos instead of uplifting the world! In between, we can find the extremely smart manipulators, but who don’t survive on hurting others like the psychopaths. They just manipulate to reach their selfish goals and guarantee they always win, and they do it extremely well.

Take Hitler as an example. He was a visionary (IQ), he was so disciplined (PQ) and he was so passionate (EQ) about his vision! What was missing? The most important form of intelligence: The Spiritual one (SQ) fueled by the Principles Center. Instead of being principle-centered, Hitler was an ego-driven individual so disconnected from his inner world.

To give you another example from our daily life, I once saw a video that collected probably thousands of reactions on LinkedIn. I was feeling disgusted not only watching it but also witnessing the huge number of people who were fooled by the fake kindness. The actors are a heterosexual couple. The woman knocks the door of a family. A mother appears accompanied by her kids. The woman is holding an amount of money and moving it to make sure it is well captured by the camera. Without taking even a second to build a rapport, she announces to the mother this gift is for her. The mom is confused. The actress is faking being moved by her reaction – without tears. She only has words. Everything is filmed. End of the story.

I really sympathize… We all want to be appreciated and get some external worth. The pleaser I was is so familiar with this pattern. What we are ignoring though is that we are not doing ourselves a favor through instant gratifications.

Yes, we could trick our system for a period of time to release the Dopamine. But, that’s how the addictions are created: cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, video games, exercising, meditation, even to people! We could also trick our brain to produce the Serotonin – the chemical of status and pride. That’s the reason why we can feel great when we buy a fancy car or house or yacht or whatever, and that everybody is talking about it and impressed. The thing is when people stop mentioning it, we feel like s*it again and buy the next fancy thing to trigger our needed dose… People in this category are centered on “Money and belongings”. Since we get our internal security and sense of worth from our center, this could be explaining why we hear about someone who commits suicide when losing one’s wealth. They become nobody…

What I’m saying here is that mapping could work until a trauma happens. Tricking could work until our coping mechanism is not available anymore. They are reversible simply because they are only tools. And tools don’t transform; they only numb.

Don’t get me wrong. I am definitely not saying stop using healthy tools and habits. I will never encourage you to stop eating healthy, taking enough rest to regenerate your cells, exercising, practicing your passions putting you in a flow state, meditating to shut down your subconscious mind whenever your self-awareness exercise — meant to face your limiting beliefs and distorted algorithms and re-write them in alignment with the principles — becomes too painful to bear with.

I am only saying the tools are far from being enough to unbecome the filter and meet who you were at the moment of your conception by your parents: the servant leader reconnected with the divinity granted gifts and talents they would be progressively developing, who does not need to prove anything to anyone or promote any virtue; simply because they are already living them every single day!

Shall we walk the talk? Are you tempted? I hope you are. Those crisis times are your best chance to make it happen!

With love, Myriam