Category: Self worth

What is self- worth?
The dictionary defines self-worth as “the sense of one’s own value or worth as a person.”

Self-worth is the most critical component of our ability to truly believe in ourselves and live our life aligned with our best qualities. Without a healthy sense of self- worth, doubts and fears can overwhelm our true potential, greatly impacting the quality of our life experience, as well as sabotaging our life’s dreams, vision and purpose.

Although some of us may not be consciously aware that what is keeping us up at night is a sense of self-worth that needs improvement, I am here to tell you that if you and I can focus on one issue with the highest return on your investment, it is self-worth.

The story of how we develop or do not develop self- worth can be a long and painful one.

Join me as I make every effort to organize where your story of self-worth begins, and how we can make the ending the happiest one possible!

Energy Efficiency

It seems that there is a concerted effort to improve our energy efficiency, including by targeting more sustainable resources and by rewarding consumers with rebates, discounts, and tax credits. I have invested quite a bit of time myself identifying improvements in my energy usage and potential energy leaks in my house. I am updating my twenty-year-old attic insulation and my pool pump, and I am going solar.

But all of this work to improve my home’s energy efficiency got me thinking -Why aren’t we investing time in identifying the optimal flow of energy in our precious body, mind, and spirit?

I recently had an unexpected health scare that led me to an endless series of tests to rule out serious issues. My lack of personal energy efficiency has come with a big cost in my life. Hence, I decided to dedicate this week’s blog post to compiling the biggest energy efficiency lessons that I have gleaned through my successes and failures.

Here they are:

  1. We all have a finite amount of energy every day.

When we put our energy into people, places, and things that do not return at least the same amount of energy that we expend on them, we end up with an energetic deficit. In order to keep up with our daily activities, we then have to turn to our own body tissues for an overdraft to cover the energetic debt, which leads to a great amount of dis-ease in our bodies. Its not very different with the way we make deposits and withdrawals in our bank account. Prudence is required as to where we allow our energy to flow. It is part of life that we may sometimes lose energy, for example, when we nurture relationships with people who fail to show up for us when we need an energy boost ourselves. However, when we point out this energy imbalance to them, and we do not see a change in the energy exchange, it is time to reconsider if the investment in the relationship is worth it.

2. Energy is power.

Power is often defined, incorrectly, as having influence over others. When we look at the dictionary for the definition of power, we realize that power is also defined as our ability to do something effectively. If and when we find ourselves drained, a sure way to get our power back is to fine-tune how effective our approach is at arriving at our desired outcomes instead of worrying about others’ mishaps and ineffectiveness. Is there a part of your life that you feel that you need to become more effective at? You, and only you, have the power to change that aspect of your life. All it takes is mindset, commitment, and practice.

3. Negative emotions, situations, and people are big energy suckers!

In fact, it is scientifically proven that when we allow unhealthy and toxic habits, people, and behaviors into our life, our metabolic energy will be hi-jacked from our essential, higher structures and functions and redirected to our large muscle groups to address the threat posed to our internal integrity and balance. Furthermore, if we allow this emotional hi-jacking to go on for too long, we are subject to long-term damage to essential organs and functions, congruent with the impact of chronic stress. This is now well documented in scientific literature. The term, allostasis, coined in the mid- nineties by scientists, McEwan and Stellar, describes the long-term wear and tear on our body when we willingly expose it to chronic stress. This wear and tear is the ultimate price we pay for not practicing energy efficiency in our own body systems. Yet it is completely within our control to improve our energy efficiency. All we have to do is to look for the gold in unexpected situations and set firm boundaries to protect us from people and situations that cause us unnecessary stress.

4. One of the greatest energy leaks for each and every one of us happens when there are misalignments between thoughts, words, and actions.

Whether we are the ones that don’t have synergy between our words and actions, or whether important people in our life present us with differences between what they say they are going to do and what they actually do, the energy cost to our brain to reconcile these differences is great. It is important to recognize and take corrective action to ensure harmony in the flow of thoughts, words, and actions. Mahatma Gandhi defines this harmony as happiness. Neuroscience can certainly back up that claim!

5. We are the most profound source of energy and power for ourselves.

Although we have adopted the societal view that external things (money, titles, accomplishments, people) will give us power, if and when we get all of those things, we arrive at the most noble truth: Nothing can match the source of energy and power that only we can grant to ourselves through investing in our own self-actualization—healing anything that holds us back and cultivating a profound, deep-rooted sense of self-worth. Trust me. I know this very well from my own life story. What is it that you can do within your control that makes you feel whole? If you are waiting for someone to treat you how you deserve to be treated, how can you generate this love for yourself today?

6. Taking responsibility is one of the most immense sources of power we can ever claim!

We have been conditioned to blame external circumstances for anything that is not going according to plan in our life. We blame our parents and our humble beginnings, or the economy, or our boss, or our corporate culture, and the list goes on. What we overlook every time we blame others is how much power we are actually giving away when we essentially say we have no ability to change the outcome of a situation that we are not pleased with. Instead of blaming others, we can recognize that we are in charge of the reality we create, being accountable for when our actions do not match our desired outcome, and choosing what we will do different to get to the end result we want. When we do something differently, something magical happens: we get different results!

7. Becoming more energy efficient means getting a better sense of what is associated with us gaining or losing our personal power.

We can start by paying attention to our thoughts and where we spend our energy. Instead of mourning our losses or failures, we can look at all of our life’s twists and turns as exactly what we needed to experience in order to be where we are today. Every single mishap, difficulty, and challenge has served its’ purpose as a guidepost to highlight new truths that we had to learn. Maintain an ongoing inventory of how your body feels based on what you do, when you do it, and who you do it with. Regardless of how intelligent or well-educated we may be, our humble biology—our own bodies—run amazing surveillance on what is good or bad to optimize our systems. All we have to do is be still enough to listen!

We go through life driven by internal forces that propel us to get closer to pleasure and stay away from pain. Yet we seem to overlook the fact that all of life’s experiences require energy that we often lose when we attempt to fill up our energy reserves through external sources. We are in charge of organizing our life in a way that works for us. It takes discipline to learn how to be in our own power and become our core source of love, approval, and acceptance. We may not know where to start to fine-tune our relationship with energy.

Working with an intuitive energy healer may be a great start to help you identify where you may be losing your energy and to help you create a road map on how to claim it back. My own work with Sarah Grace, sarahkgrace.com, was an invaluable beginning for me in learning how to take small steps daily that helped me heal my past missteps and become better at claiming and taming my own noble power. This work led me back to my true, authentic self.

There is never a better time than now to claim some of your power back. If you wish to change anything in your life that is not working for you contact me for a free check up. (tzeli@myndzen.com)

We can all place our energy on so many different things, but the one thing I can promise you is that committing and incorporating practices to improve your energy efficiency is one of the most profound changes you can make toward living the healthy, wholesome, and joyful life that you want.

Are you afraid of your own shadow?

Have you ever found yourself-acting out of character, doing and saying things that did not take you to your desired outcome, and that you later regretted?

If you have, you are not alone. There seems to be something in us humans, which we are not aware of, which is a major obstacle in our quest to achieve all great human pursuits.

Could it be that the problems we face and our never-ending energy spent in trying to control situations, people, and things are a manifestation of a dance of opposites inside ourselves? Could it be because we don’t yet know or have power and control over our own dark side—our shadow?

When we break our challenges down to the basics, we can see that anything that presents as “an issue” in life is a never-ending battle between darkness and light, good and evil, fear and love.

We have adopted the stance that only we are good, and the bad or negative parts of our human experience are others’ issues or are outside of our control. However, our state of health, our relationships, and the discord in our smaller and our global communities reflect that we could be missing the boat by not making amends and working with (instead of against) our dark side, our shadow!

This may be the perfect time to realize the impact of fully recognizing and embracing our shadow—the one thing that stands between us and our ability to reclaim our personal power and change the trajectory of any aspect of our existence.

What is our shadow?

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the father of psychoanalysis and world-renowned for his theory of individuation, described the shadow as “any unconscious part of our personality that we do not identify in ourselves.” The shadow is the collection of the parts of us that were rejected, not rewarded, or not acknowledged by our environment during the early years of our life. We therefore hid those parts away establishing them as “unacceptable” and rejected. But what happens with all that stuff we put away deep in our unconscious?

Imagine if while you were sleeping at night, there was a stranger walking through your house. How would that feel?

What if instead of a stranger, your significant other is in your kitchen cleaning up after your wonderful dinner while you are given the luxury of some needed self- care before retiring to sleep at night? How would that feel in comparison?

All the things we have disowned in ourselves formulate a stranger, or shadow, that we carry along in all that we do and which, without our permission, runs our life on autopilot.

But our shadow is also the ultimate ticket to our personal freedom from everything that does not serve us.

Getting to know our shadow and bringing it to the light is kind of like replacing the sensation of a stranger walking through our house with the sensation of a person we love and trust, whose actions are predictable, tried, and true and aim toward the best outcomes for us.

Shadow work involves the exciting discovery of what we don’t yet know about our self and bringing back to the surface that vulnerable part of ourselves that was unprotected and unrecognized when we first formed our inner self.

How do we know when our shadow runs our life? What can we do about it?

The shadow is a universal element among all of us. I have one and you have one too. However, since our shadow is comprised of all the things that we stashed away throughout our life, by default, most of us are not aware of its existence. We work hard to maintain a self-image that is acceptable to the status quo and that provides us with the biggest rewards and acceptance from our environment. But what I have learned from deciding to venture down the path to make friends with my shadow is that our shadow is truly the biggest saboteur in anything we ever strive for.

Here are some ways our shadow sabotages our life without our permission until we choose to invest in the work to blast it with light:

  • We find ourselves wasting a good chunk of our energy in judging others.

According to Carl Jung, anything that we have established as unacceptable and we do not yet recognize in ourselves, we unconsciously project onto others. Projection is a defense mechanism where any of our intolerable thoughts, traits, feelings, or actions are ascribed to other people as an attempt to establish a false sense of superiority for ourselves and to continue to deny their existence in us. Judging others as a way of finding relief with the things we have not yet processed and made coherent stories of in ourselves creates major issues for us.

The problem:

  1. It deprives us of the opportunity for change.
  2. It alienates us from others, disrupting the sense of trust and authentic connection, which is hardwired into our DNA.
  3. It forms a lifelong source of unnecessary suffering.

The solution: If you find yourself choosing the path of defining another’s experience by subjecting them to your disapproval and judgments, take a step back and instead of judging them make a list of all your judgments. This list presents an incredible key to unlocking the secrets to what it is you judge unconsciously in your self. Ultimate freedom is when we are free of judging others, which is a clear indication that we have come to the point where we love and honor ourselves, and our relationships are defined by empathy and goodwill, even when we have to communicate unpleasant emotions.

  • We have a hard time being accountable.

Saying or doing something that hurts another’s feelings is part of our human experience. A problem arises when we are made aware of the impact of our actions and are not able to take responsibility. Instead we shift the responsibility onto the other person. We have mastered the art of acting as if we were accountable, for example by saying “I am sorry,” but we don’t blast with light what was the true force behind our actions. We apologize for the way the other person feels, instead of acknowledging how, momentarily, we disrupted connection with them through our own actions.

The problem:

  1. We continue to disown the one thing we have control over and perpetrate a behavior that does not serve us.
  2. We allow our shadow to keep us imprisoned in unconscious games of manipulation.

The solution: The next time you find yourself in a position where someone is brave enough to hold you accountable for your actions, see it as an invaluable pearl of knowledge toward the incredible adventure of discovering your true self. After all, our behaviors are born from our state, which is driven by our emotions. Recognizing the negative emotions that propel us to not want to take responsibility for our own mishaps, which sabotage our efforts toward anything noble, is a powerful way to carve the path ahead towards self-mastery!

  • We work so hard to present a positive self-image, but deep down our fears drive our ship.

Fear is a powerful human emotion and one that has kept us alive for millions of years. However, there is a healthy dose of fear and an unhealthy dose. An unhealthy amount of fear has a tremendous impact on destruction of ourselves, our community, and the world we live in today. We are afraid of our own brother and sister; we are afraid of our differences; we are afraid of losing what we have; we are afraid of things that are not here now.

The problem: “Whatever we focus on becomes our reality.” Neuroplasticity, which is the greatest neuroscience discovery in the last 150 years, has proven this statement with hard-core science. When we look at ourselves, our fellow human beings, and life situations from an unconscious stance of fear, we not only operate at diminished capacity, but we continue to aid in the development of nerve cell connections in parts of our brain that are associated with weaknesses and not with inner strengths.

The solution: The next time you find yourself experiencing physiological arousal that relates to fear, such as increased heart rate or defensiveness, recognize it and chose to put your attention on something neutral, like your breath. Once you reinstate your internal state of balance, you can spend some time exploring what it is you are truly afraid of. The practice of challenging our challenges by having a dialogue with ourselves is extremely powerful in dismantling emotional bombs of self-destruction. Then we can have a fair battle and defeat the imaginary culprit called fear, that is ever present when we don’t own our own shadow.

  • What we say, what we think, and what we do are not in alignment.

We say we are fine when our body language shows we are obviously upset. We say we want true, authentic connections, but we aren’t brave enough to let others see who we truly are. We think that we are “easy breezy” and that we need nothing from others, but then we are upset when our needs are not met. We love someone with all our heart, but we don’t do the small things often that build the foundation of safety and trust. We deny and challenge reality when someone points out our incongruences.

The problem: There is a tremendous amount of energy that is used up by our body and mind trying to reconcile differences, both practically and from a neurobiological perspective. Many of our physical and emotional health issues are a result of our inability to practice energy efficiency in ourselves. Internal misalignments clearly are the result of the disruption of the dance of the opposites within us—our shadow self and our true self.

The solution: Chose today to be the day you commit to recognizing and making friends with the parts in you that lead to any and all misalignments in your life. One of the biggest parts of our shadow is its’ bratty nature and the collection of ways it will act up when ignored and unattended, such as: manipulation, entitlement, self-righteousness, taking everything personally, criticism, stonewalling, contempt, and much more. Lighting up the candle of knowledge by simply recognizing the ways we ourselves are incongruent is the most important step toward creating harmony, first and foremost, within ourselves. After all, we cannot receive anything from the external world until we master it first in ourselves.

For the greatest part of my life, I thought that my path to wholeness was all about reaping the fruits of my labor to be a good citizen to the world I am blessed to live in. But when I found myself at the peak of my outward success with no fulfillment, accompanied by unexplained health complications, I was finally set free to see the truth:

True mastery can only be found when we dare to consciously face the dance of opposites within our true self, and are brave enough to get reacquainted and make amends with the dark aspects of our being.

When we have the courage to take the journey into discovering the parts of ourselves we have disowned and end the facade of our false self it is unnerving and challenging. However, this journey truly is the greatest adventure we can ever possibly take.

Things will continue to happen that challenge us. But freeing ourselves of the fear that comes from what we have forbidden ourselves to see and, finally, not being afraid of our own shadow is the first step toward entering the grace of our unlimited potential, our true divinity, and being the change we want to see in this world.

The great big fall

Fall is my favorite season!

There is something special about the smell of the earth after the first raindrops of the season. I am enamored by the way the foliage gets washed away by the rain to make space for new beginnings. The temperature drops, inviting us to make a fire and snuggle up to our favorite person while eating slow-cooker delicacies.

But I also love fall because it reminds me of an undeniable part of our human experience: the regular and never-ending points in our journey when things “fall” apart in our life, and we experience a significant amount of discomfort and suffering. Our automatic response is to think that “when such and such a thing happens, when we arrive to a certain outcome, when we realize a specific goal, then we will no longer suffer.”

However, the truth is: we cannot go through life unless we experience a significant amount of suffering. After all, there are many things in life that we cannot control that impact the fiber of our life and experience.

The question then becomes, what do we do when things fall apart?

  1. What if we temporarily make friends with pain and let it tell us its’ secrets?

One of the human choices that often leads to things falling apart in life is betrayal. In its simplest form, as our dear Brene Brown says, betrayal is “to choose to not connect with someone when the opportunity is there.” The secret the pain of betrayal opens us up to is that betrayal is the mutual choice between two people to feed a lie. We humans can only behave based on our level of consciousness at a given time. It’s nothing personal. But we too, play an active role in any betrayal in our lives. If we focus on what is within our control, we can use a betrayal as an opportunity to address and question what it is deep down that we were afraid of. We can look at what it is that we wanted that compelled us to play a part in this story. Although betrayal leads us to doubt ourselves and our choices, it is a great opportunity to identify illusions. When we use painful experiences of betrayal to uncover what it is that we were truly afraid of, we slowly but surely learn to neutralize our fear, harvest its pearls of wisdom, and open up to the possibility of learning to trust in ourselves again.

2. Challenge yourself to identify the little things that give you comfort during difficult times.

When things fall apart, we tend to hide our pain in ways that are not conducive to our wellbeing. We tend to withdraw, get down on ourselves, maybe drink an extra glass of wine, or lose sleep by mulling over the specifics of the disaster we encountered. It is important to keep an ongoing list of things, situations, and people that provide us with a sense of goodness for when difficult times show up in our lives.

This could be a walk in nature; listening to a positive Ted Talk; cooking your favorite, wholesome meal; creating a little piece of art; or committing to a daily, loving kindness meditation.

But most importantly, during difficult times, we need to resist the urge to stay isolated, and instead connect with people that make us feel cared for. Social connection is one of the most compelling antidotes to the toxicity of discomfort and one that is abundantly available to us, as long as we are willing to nurture it.

  1. Focus on taking just the very next step.

When things fall apart, our automatic response is to feel helpless and let our internal resources be used toward imagining a catastrophe! We don’t consciously realize the power of our mind to hi-jack our nervous system and shut down our ability to access the executive part of our brain. For example, studies show that rejection and toothache both activate the exact same region of our brain (anterior cingulate). If we focus on simply determining what is the very next step we can take to turn a situation around, we can slowly but surely disengage from operating from a threatened, defensive state and turn on our executive part of our brain, activating the reward centers through action (pre-frontal cortex). Mastery is the result of consistent small steps daily. Don’t worry about the imaginary disasters that could come, but focus on the very one thing you can do now to move you toward the direction that will bring you back to balance.

  1. Remember the impermanence of everything, and practice being comfortable in discomfort.

Whether you pay attention to the changes of colors in the trees around you, the challenges you have already overcome, or a memory from childhood, everything in life is a temporary perspective.

Nothing lasts forever. Regardless of how challenging an experience may be, simply remembering that nothing lasts forever can be just the ticket to calm our nervous system down and feel comfort at times of discomfort. A realistic outcome to shoot for to ensure that the trajectory of our life remains positive is looking for growth in discomfort. Breakdowns in life can be profound moments of breakthroughs, much like the seed that has to break through the earth to bring forth beautiful blossoms in spring.

  1. Accept that some days will be dreadful no matter what we do.

We can do all the right things, take all the right steps, incorporate powerful daily practices, and yet we will never be able to avoid experiencing moments of ultimate disappointment and dread. We could get laid off, lose someone we love, or experience an ultimate betrayal from someone who we thought was our number one confidant. Life is an incredible adventure of never-ending highs and lows. Embrace the fact that some days will be a complete disaster no matter what we do.

I can’t say that the series of victories and unfortunate events don’t leave a lasting mark on our life experience. Yet the miracle always happens.

Tomorrow morning, the sun will rise again, the school bus will show up in time to pick up the kids for school, and you will encounter your neighbor’s good morning wish as you take your dog for a walk.

Despite how bad a great fall may seem, every new day gives us the opportunity to start over and change our life—one decision, one choice, and one step at a time—bringing along fresh perspectives and ingredients: new leaves on the trees, new loves, new joys, new sensations.