Connecting with yourself is more important than anything else. How can I make such a statement? What does it mean to be connected with yourself? Or, rather, what does it mean to be disconnected? Ultimately, disconnection from yourself will negatively impact all areas of your life.
It Impacts Your Health
First, when you’re disconnected from yourself, you’re disconnected from your body. You don’t have good communication with your body, making it difficult to determine what it really wants, which is health. “Please make me healthy,” our bodies say. But often it’s easier to follow the voices of our desires and emotions than hear the voices of our bodies. That’s why, when under stress, so many people overeat or stuff themselves with sweets. For the same reason, we also spend too much time on the internet or procrastinate on important projects. Caught by stressful emotions, our brain ignores or no longer hears our body’s voice.
“I’m feeling stiff and sore right now,” our body may also say. “Don’t just sit there, get me some exercise.” But we often ignore these demands as well. Irritable and lazy, the brain gets used to not moving all day, letting us sit there snacking and gripping the TV remote control whenever there’s free time. The brain gets completely lost in TV shows, with sweet and greasy foods close at hand, so there’s no way it will hear the body’s voice. Occasionally relieving stress this way is okay, but making it a daily habit leads straight to obesity and disease.
With the mind held by things outside the body, the body’s sense for health and balance is gradually numbed. The more we lose self-awareness, the more we disconnect from our body and our true self inside.
It Affects Your Relationships
Once you understand this concept, you can see that even problems in your relationships are often due to issues with yourself. If you look closely and honestly, you’ll notice that your relationships with others reflect your relationship with yourself. You can love others only as much as you love yourself, and you can understand and tolerate others only to the extent that you understand and tolerate yourself. Even when people talk about sharing unconditional love, they often expect something from the other person—affection from others to fill the emptiness inside themselves.
Restoring your relationship with yourself determines how much your relationships with others can improve. If you focus solely on your relationships with others, neglecting your connection with yourself, sooner or later, fundamental problems emerge. You can be led about by other people, doing as they want to make them happy and receive their praise. But, when you don’t get the hoped-for reaction, you blame everything on the other person. If you are well connected with yourself, however, you can achieve balance in your relationships because you have a solid center—even if the other person hurts your feelings.
It Influences Your Work
Being disconnected from yourself impacts the work you’re doing, too. When you have no passion for your work, it loses its novelty, and you find yourself repeating the same pattern every day. People in this situation commonly think that the problem is the work itself, so they look for new work that they can be passionate about.
It would be great if they got lucky and found work in which they could excitedly immerse themselves. But many people, once their newfound work becomes familiar, again end up going through the motions. If you keep repeating this pattern, then your work itself isn’t the problem. You are the problem. Passion is something you pull from within yourself, not something someone brings you from the outside. Work feels hard because your connection with yourself is tenuous; it doesn’t engage you on a deep enough level to bring out your passion.
How can you bring joy and passion to your work when you’re disconnected from yourself? How can you be excited without knowing what it is that your heart really wants? We have a hard time finding meaning and motivation in work when we haven’t discovered the meaning of our existence. When you know what you really want, you can realize that the work you do is a precious opportunity and a means of expressing and actualizing it.
When you are connected with yourself, you can find the work you really want to do. Sometimes, though, you must do a certain job just to make a living. In that case, you can make an effort to create change where you are. If you look carefully enough, you can find meaning in any situation. You can create little things that make a big difference in people’s lives, one day at a time, such as having a positive attitude, opening your heart and smiling more, or trying to come up with creative ideas. If we have a solid connection with ourselves, we never squander our energy, no matter where we are or what we are doing.
Work also feels hard if we’re faced with a situation in which we have to accomplish a task that feels beyond our abilities. Those who are positive and filled with confidence will see this as an opportunity for personal growth, boldly taking on the challenge. Conversely, those who don’t have this attitude, who are instead scared, will shirk from accepting the work. Determining their own limitations, they stay within the boundaries of their expectations and don’t even make an attempt.
It Determines Your Courage
This passive, defensive attitude isn’t limited to work. In various aspects of life, people bind themselves with fear. But that fear is a delusion, a virtual self-image we’ve created. Breaking out of that image, like a chick breaking out of its shell, is the beginning of self-transformation and innovation. This is not something anyone else can do for you. You must find the courage to go into your inner world, face it yourself directly, and shatter those images.
As we have seen, when we look deeply into most of the problems that worry us, we realize that their causes and solutions are found in our connection to ourselves. If you are connected with yourself, with all the delusions surrounding you laid bare, you have nothing to fear in this world.
If you find yourself in a troubling or chaotic situation, instead of blaming your circumstances, look at it as an opportunity to meet yourself. Growing distant from yourself, you suffer from confusion—which is bound to produce a fervent, do-or-die desire to escape from that distress. At such times, turn your eyes inward instead of finding fault in your abilities, your environment, or other people. The more you understand the importance of connecting with yourself, the more you draw near to hope.
“Connecting with myself is more important than anything else!” If this is how you feel, you’re already starting to commune with yourself. Consider that attitude precious, and go within yourself; everything begins with you. No other life will be more meaningful, fulfilling, or moving, for you will be living as none other than your authentic self.
In my next three newsletters, I will show you ways to connect with yourself through your body, your soul, and your divine nature. If you are not signed up for the newsletter and would like to receive these messages in your email, please sign up below.