What Does It Mean To "Self Improve?"
Self Improvement has become mainstream. In the last few years,
since I have been writing articles and submitting them to
article sites, I've noticed that the category of "Self
Improvement" has been showing up lately when it was never there
before. To me, this is very good news.
But what does it really mean to "Self Improve?" What are we
really improving when we self improve? And what "self" are we
improving?
We each have two "selves" - our wounded self and our core Self.
Our core Self is our true self, our natural soul self - our
essence. Our core Self is our passion, our joy, our gifts and
talents, our ability to love, our creativity. We come into this
life as our core Self, and when this Self is loved and valued by
our parents, we continue to naturally grow our God-given gifts
and talents and manifest the fullness of our beings. This Self
wants to improve by learning the skills necessary to fully
express itself.
But when this Self is not seen and valued in the way we needed,
we create an alternative self, a self we hope will have control
over getting the love we need and avoiding the pain we can't
handle - a self to help us feel safe. This is our false self,
our wounded self, our ego self. This self is filled with the
false beliefs that we absorbed as we were growing up - beliefs
that end up limiting our true, core Self. This self does not
needs improving - it needs healing.
The term "self improvement" can sometimes be a bit misleading,
because we do not want to improve our wounded self. We do not
want to improve on the ways we lie, manipulate, and avoid in our
attempts to have control over getting love and avoiding pain. We
don't want to improve on our many addictions to substance and
processes. We don't want to improve on our anger, our
compliance, our withdrawal and our resistance.
We want to heal it.
Healing and improving are not the same thing.
We can certainly self-improve when it comes to skills. We can
improve in sports, in art, music, writing, cooking. We can
improve our health and wellbeing by improving our diet and
exercise program. We can improve in the knowledge we need to be
more successful regarding work and money. We might be able to
improve our relationships by learning new communication skills.
But what if acquiring new knowledge and skills does not improve
our health, or our ability to earn money, or our relationships?
And what if learning new skills does not bring us more joy and
inner peace? It may mean that we need to heal the underlying
fears and false beliefs that cause us to be anxious, depressed,
stressed, guilt-ridden, shamed, withdrawn, angry, blaming, or
sad.
Sometimes Self Improvement just means practicing a skill, and
others times it means that we need to participate in a deep
healing process. For example, many people try to improve their
health by losing weight and exercising. But if their food
addictions are covering over unhealed pain, they might not be
able to just change their diet. They might need to open to a
healing process in order to eventually improve.
If you are really trying to self improve but find yourself stuck
and unable to progress, or find that you have no joy or inner
peace, you might want to open to the possibility that unhealed
pain and beliefs are blocking your progress and causing your
pain. It is easy to improve yourself when there is nothing
blocking the way. But if you have old false beliefs about your
adequacy and worth, these beliefs may be blocking your ability
to take loving action in your own behalf. All your efforts to
self improve will not bring you the satisfaction you are seeking
if you have beliefs that are keeping you limited in fully
expressing your true, core Self. If you are stuck, then you need
to seek out a healing process, such as the Inner Bonding process
we teach, that will move you out of the fears and beliefs that
limit you. Healing these fears and limiting beliefs will open
the door to improving your life in all ways!