How to create a loving relationship with yourself, with others and with life
To be authentic means to remain true to your own being. Be truthful to yourself. You are not needed to change others or try to teach others according to your ideas, expectations or ideology. If you change, that is enough.
How to remain true? There are four things about authenticity: remain true to your own being and listen to your inner voice; learn to listen to yourself and your feelings; learn to trust yourself; and learn to love and accept yourself.
• Remain true to your own being and listen to your inner voice — otherwise your whole life will be wasted. The first thing is your being. Don’t allow others to manipulate and control you. Many people try to control you and want to change you according to their ideas, ideals and ideologies. Remember: be true to your inner voice.
To be authentic is to be true to oneself. Always listen to the inner voice, and don’t listen to people who want to control and manipulate you. Just close your eyes and listen to the inner voice. That is what meditation is all about: learning to listen to your inner voice.
• Learn to listen to yourself and your feelings. The hypocrisy of society is its desire to teach you to not listen to yourself, to your feelings, and to not show your true face. So each individual becomes like an island, closed and separated.
From early childhood, we have been taught to suppress the real. In unconscious and mechanical ways, we go on suppressing, without knowing what we are doing. Listen to the heart, and whatsoever is true, bring it out. And once you know how to be true, it will be so joyful and beautiful that you will never go back to being false.
Be true to yourself: that is the basic responsibility towards yourself. You are answerable to your own being. This is the whole problem: how to be yourself. Then life becomes a beautiful mystery to be loved, and not a problem to be solved.
• Learn to trust yourself. If you trust yourself, you can trust other people, and you can trust in existence. But if you don’t trust in yourself, then no other trust is possible. Society destroys your trust at the very roots. It does not allow you to trust yourself.
Society teaches other kinds of trust: trust in the parents, trust in the church and trust in the state, but society destroys basic trust in yourself deliberately, because those who trust in themselves are dangerous for society. They are independent. Society needs dependent people, who are easy to manipulate and control. This is why society destroys the trust in yourself, because an individual who does not trust himself is shaky and afraid, and then he is controllable.
Start trusting yourself. It is the fundamental lesson.
• Learn to love and accept yourself. If you love and accept yourself, that is the beginning of accepting all. Then all is good as it is. In that experience life takes on a new joy, a new gratefulness. If you reject yourself, you are rejecting existence. If you accept yourself, you have accepted existence. Then life is good, and you feel grateful. Then whatsoever happens is good, because it happens out of the whole.
But you have been conditioned for centuries not to love and accept yourself. Nobody has ever told you that you are good as you are. Once you are incapable of loving yourself, you will never be able to love anybody.
You can love others only if you are able to love yourself. A person who loves himself sooner or later starts overflowing with love.
If you don’t love yourself, nobody else will ever be able to love you. You cannot love a person who hates himself. How can you love a person, who is condemning himself? He cannot love himself, so how can you love him. He will not believe you. He cannot allow anybody to love him, because he knows that he is unworthy of love.
And you know what you are: worthless. That is what you have been told by parents, priests and politicians. Nobody has ever accepted you as you are. Nobody has given you the feeling that you are loved and respected, that you are needed and that this existence will miss you, that without you this existence will not be the same. Without you, this existence will lose some joy, love, beauty, truth and poetry.
Love and accept yourself, and relax into your being, for you are cherished by the whole. Once you start feeling this love and respect of the whole in you, you will start growing roots in your being. Only then can you love other people — and love the trees and the animals.
Love is only possible when there is a deep love and acceptance of oneself, of the other and of the world. And then you will be surprised: life is always ready to shower you with gifts. Life is always ready to give abundantly, but we cannot receive it, because we don’t feel that we are worthy of receiving it.
Accept yourself, love yourself, for you are God’s creation.
