On a Wing and a Prayer: Lessons in Self-love & Trust

On a Wing and a Prayer: Lessons in Self-love & Trust
By Gilbert Ross • Sep 29, 2018

We’ve all heard incredible stories of people who pushed through and succeeded against all the odds and the hardest adversities life could throw at them. People facing the slimmest of chances of surviving against horrible atrocities and injustices, yet despite living their last moments on a wing and a prayer, they somehow saw the light of a new day. These are the exceptional life stories that inspire us and remind us that nothing we go through is unsurmountable. Whatever we go through, we can rest assured that other people have made it in harsher climates and times with many more odds lined up against them.
Many researchers and authors have studied and interviewed hundreds if not thousands of such people who survived the impossible to try and understand the underlying commonalities or traits that make some people succeed and some others succumb to their external environment. Some strongly suggest a strong will and the ability to keep seeing the ‘end goal’ in mind even if everything seems to be pointing against it. Others mention perseverance and determination sprinkled with a dash of luck. Perhaps it’s all of the above but I believe that there are two other very important factors, not always mentioned, which are common among people who survive and thrive in life – Self-love and Trusting in oneself.

Building up Momentum

Lack of Self-love and Self-doubt very often go hand in hand. When people do not think highly of themselves, or do not feel worthy, will also probably doubt their abilities a lot. These two traits are very much intertwined. If you do not love yourself or do not trust yourself, you lack the very basic resource to get unstuck and move forward from any life situation, no matter how easy or hard. Both Self-love and trust are the keys that start everything else in motion.
Now everyone knows that It’s hard to trust when you have been hurt or afraid and conditioned by yours and other’s pain & fear for too long. You need to get over it. Any meaningful change needs to happen by first willing yourself to overcome doubt, fear, heavy conditioning and past emotions. You need to get unstuck from the past first which is where most people are on a day to day basis. Your mind and body are both conditioned by the past and literally live in the past by keeping those memories encoded. If you let this go by unnoticed, whatever you see, experience, decide or project in your life will be heavily determined by what happened to you in the past until you consciously decide that this should not be so.
Yet to come to a point where you shift from being stuck in the past to choosing and creating your destiny in the present, you need to allow your mind and body to feel trust and love first. You need to drip feed this slowly until your mind-body-energy starts reconditioning itself and accepting love and trust as a real possibility. Given enough momentum, a tipping point or shift will happen where you will start believing enough in yourself to move past and beyond your current circumstances. You will no longer feel victim of it or bound by the dictates of the situation because you trust you have the inner power and resources and love yourself enough to allow it and receive it with grace.

Suspending Judgment

You know how it is. It’s easier to judge oneself and others than be free of judgment and think or feel in a neutral and unbiased way. Why? because it’s a natural habit that stems from deep evolutionary programs based on self-preservation. In order to survive in hostile or dangerous environments, the brain needed to come up with quick judgments and decisions which in turn trigger a cascade of chemical processes in the brain and body. In our present day world, where life or death decisions are not that frequent, we still feel the urge to judge ourselves and others and the collateral damage to this is that we adjust our life, avoiding the most important thing we should be doing: Loving, trusting and giving ourself worth.
There is a beautiful thing that happens when we suspend judgment for a while. An opening in our mind-body-energy field happens. We shift from contraction to expansion and allowing. Our thoughts get less stifled and our we are more calm and focused in general. When we starve off the mind from the deep habit to judge, we become more free to stir our life where we want it to. There is more manoeuvring space because we are not so bogged down by constantly judging and labelling what is happening to us. Suspending our judgment, even if in short bursts, can create a profound change in us owing to the fact that in that space we open up we now have the chance to replace judgment for trusting.

Self-importance is not Self-love.

Self-love is pretty misunderstood. It is often misinterpreted as egoism or self-centredness, but most of all it is wrongly seen in its exact opposite – self-importance. What we mostly see in others, and do not notice in ourselves, is self-importance, arrogance and ignorance but this has nothing to do with self-love except of it being diametrically opposite to it. People think they love themselves by constantly demanding they are put in the centre of the Universe. Self-love is about letting go; Self-importance is about grasping to straws – to false identities and assumptions.
When you respect and love yourself, you are determined to give yourself the best possible thing you could ever give – freedom from judgment, illusion and useless hanging on to pain and fear. Self-love is the liberation army breaking down the cage of self-importance and illusions of the ego.

It’s not that Hard

Self-love is not as hard as we think. Believe it or not it’s a habit and an attitude just as trust is. It becomes easier as we try along. It’s a muscle that needs to be developed. The hardest part is the resistance that comes from the subconscious mind attached to run the same patterns of shame and guilt that have been imprinted in us since young age. Once that inertia is overcome with will and resolve, it becomes progressively easier to change. We become less afraid to try and open up ourselves to further change that entails doing things we were not so accustomed to such as a healthy dose of Self-love and unshakeable trust.

You have Already Got it!

Self-love and trust go together. Trusting the Universe can only happen if you trust and love yourself and realise that you are a creative part of the Universe and everything. You have in you all the resources to realise any possible you. You already have the winning stuff and you should start being grateful for having these possibilities in the here and now even if you still haven’t realised any of those possibilities yet.
Believing in yourself and losing your self-doubt is definitely the most powerful transformation that could happen in any lifetime. Believing in yourself, unleashes your power in full force by aligning your inner resources
And one last tip – regardless of what they tell you, just believe more and more in yourself. Never stop; never look back.


Thanks to: https://soulhiker.com