Not about Your Value, But about Your Experience.
What is the greatest gift I could ever give you? It wouldn’t be money, because I’ve seen people who have a lot of it and yet are miserable. It wouldn’t necessarily be time, because unless you have things at peace in your soul, time is just an extension of your suffering.
Without a doubt, the greatest gift I could give you while you spend your days in this temporal world would be an understanding of who you already are, and how that equates to the thing you probably spend a lot of time worrying about.
Your worth.
Because we’re conditioned by the society and the cultural patterns in which we grow up to believe that your value, the worth of your soul, is questionable. There are many different thoughts on this, as there are many different beliefs about our universe, and these thoughts are usually based around the idea that your choices determine your value.
And so we wonder, and stress, and suffer.
Unless you were either born incredibly fortunately, or significantly narcissistically, you’ve probably spent a great deal of time worrying about your value, and your place in the world, the universe, the heavens and everything else in between.
Chances are, at some point in your existence, (and possibly even now) you’ve allowed the thoughts of others, based on the choices you’ve made, to determine your sense of worth, and felt that incredible pain that comes from feeling that you are worth nothing, and have no gift of any value to give.
My guess is that you’ve felt that way once or twice in your life. I know I have.
And so as human beings we spend our days wondering if this choice or that choice is the ‘right’ one, whether this outcome or that outcome reflects on us in a way that increases our perceived value, or takes away from it.
I’m guessing you’ve probably wondered what someone else thought about you, and felt the soul crushing despair of believing that someone who’s opinion you value and desire actually thinks you are worth nothing.
And in your sadness, and in your grief, you believed that thought to be true.
If any of this has sounded in the least bit familiar, I’d like to offer you a different way of thinking to try out. Much like the test drive of a car, you can return it if you’d like to, but I’d really like to see if you could spend a few minutes today, when faced with a choice, deciding not about whether a choice or an action determines your value, but how well it lines up with your principles.
Because interestingly, you’ll find that if you make your choices based in principle, rather than in personal value, many of your doubts, fears and insecurities will just melt away.
And you’ll understand that your value is not about the choices that you make, but about your ability to chose.
Because life, in itself, is the greatest value of all.
If you can question, even for just a few minutes, that this life might not be about your value but about your chance to experience, you’ll come to see that you don’t have to live in a way that creates stress and suffering in your life, or in the lives of those around you.
Once you stand firm in the knowledge that your value is in your existence, not in your strengths and weaknesses, you’ll be able to cast off the judgments and pressures that you subject yourself to every single day of your life.
Once you see that you ARE more valuable that you can ever imagine, more incredible than you’ve been led to believe, the rest just becomes about living for kindness, for peace, for joy, for happiness and for wonder.
Once you know your own worth is independent of your circumstances and choices, then you can begin to live from a deep well of peace within your soul.
And in my experience, people coming from that place are the ones who share peace and love most wonderfully.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings