Or sharing the different ways in which I lived the opposite of humbleness, an initial attempt of being humble and the current application of this word in my process
§ Continuing from: 530. The Secret Behind Attraction
When looking at the word humbleness what first comes up is how I’ve been integrating this word as a key element in my process in relation to considering others and being able to relate to others from a humble approach.
What do I mean by this? I have had the tendency since I was a little girl to be ‘ahead’ of the class most of the time. I’ll be the one in the class that would always finish whatever we had to do much earlier than the rest and had to wait for everyone else to finish or catch up with something. I have been the person that would start learning a new language with a group of people and drop out after the first few lessons because ‘everyone else was going so slow, I got easily bored.’
I have generally existed within a very ingrained perception towards others that had a tinge of superiority that I would not see or define as ‘superiority’ itself, because I deemed that there was ‘something’ – like some kind of ‘special ability’ – in me that facilitated certain things in my life in relation to studies, processing of information or learning stuff, which surely are skills that can be useful – but I did allow me to think better of myself in that regard and create a distinction between ‘me’ towards the rest of the people.
I always assumed ‘I knew better than everyone else’ and I’m speaking of a perception that I had as early as my first day in a social environment with ‘fellow beings’ in kindergarten, where I remember all the kids cried when leaving their parents for the first time and I decided to not follow the trend and ‘stand strong’ and didn’t follow the crowd with the crying choir. From that moment on, I considered that I was superior/better, more ‘mature’ or ‘evolved’ than the rest of my peers – hell, sometimes I even thought I could see through the teachers or ‘knew better’ than them, lol – but, interestingly enough all of this even if I could not verbalize it as I am doing it now, led me to eventually create a point of isolation based on separation and a general sense of ‘specialness’ as self-definitions wherein I created my own bubble of ‘I’m an outsider, I’m better than everyone else,’ while at the same time not dealing with the actual issues I had in relation to being able to see past my judgments towards others as ‘inferior’ or ‘unknowledgeable’ and learn what it would mean to truly be humble towards others.
When noticing this, I tried to find ways to not stand ‘above’ the rest but ‘mingle more’ in the midst of it. Sure I’d get along with people, but there was still a very subtle yet ever present regard about myself as ‘knowing better’ than others – which I also consider is more common than we’d like to admit in a lot of people, it’s the typical mind programming where we believe we are the center of the universe instead of learning to consider others as equals to us as life itself.
The way that this lack of humbleness would come through in me over time is through an experience of exasperation, impatience, only considering ‘my understanding’ and not really being willing to ‘slow down’ or ‘walk with’ at the pace of others at all times. I did try and help them through for example assisting with studies and such, but other times depending on the people, I’d use this ‘superiority’ as a way to cope with experiences of the opposite polarity as inferiority that I didn’t get to question at first.
I got to a point during my teenage years and early adulthood wherein I perceived that most people were simply ‘different’ to me and were not really ‘worth my time’ to interact with, preferring to always get along with those that I deemed ‘equal’ to me in terms of personalities and intellectual capacities, in essence becoming an elitist of sorts while still presenting myself as the opposite of that many times, which is also an interesting feat. However in self-honesty one cannot continue deceiving oneself where we know we are putting a ‘show’ towards others, but haven’t really dealt with the source of our actual discomfort, annoyance, irritation, impatience or judgments towards others, which are all in my case a result of having lived in a very confined self-definition as ‘superior’, even if I would have most likely said ‘not at all’ to this latter assertion back when I was shaping myself as this personality in my early teens.
This perceived ‘knowing better’ experience led me to generate an ‘elevated’ separation towards my peers. I truly got to think or perceive that I was simply placed in the wrong planet, at the wrong time and that I simply didn’t deserve to have the life that I had, lol. So, one can get the idea of an ever-present layer in me as a personality that at the same time was co-existing with a deeply rooted sense of inferiority, a sense of worthlessness ‘beyond my intellectual capacities’ which I actually ended up creating as a definition onto myself that I blamed other people throughout my life for, in the sense of ‘them’ only ‘appreciating me’ or ‘regarding me’ as a piece of walking-intellect rather than actually getting to know me as the real being and person – but, the reality is that I was the one that was very quick to label and cage everyone else, being very quick to judge and assess who I would ‘want to get along with’ and who I would simply not treat as an absolute equal – even if being in good speaking terms with them.
It’s definitely interesting to realize how one is the discriminator when one believes that ‘others are not embracing me for being ‘sort of different’ while I made it a point to go ‘against the tide’ most of the times which implied by default that I would do things and behave in ways wherein I could come through as pedant, offensive at times towards certain kinds of people and transgressive if not attackative at times, which was my way of compensating for an actual sense of inadequacy experienced while growing up, where the only ‘forte’ I had was a certain set of intellectual skills or capacities that I could use with ease to get me through in ‘good positions’ in schools. But, I also got tired of this and wanted to be more than just a perceived ‘intelligent’ person that I believed no one was really caring to ‘get to know’ about, but in reality I was probably the one that would be quite reserved based towards others to begin with, wasn’t as ‘open’ or affable but mostly had a ‘protective shield’ which probably could scare some people away lol.
Many times I considered that others were discriminating me for ‘who I am,’ but I never dared to really look again and see how as much as I wanted to get along with everyone, this underlying judgment of superiority within me sustained at the same time by a sense of inferiority kept me limited and defined by my own acceptance and allowance of judgments and values placed on top of who I really am, which is life, which is equality.
Fast forwarding from those times to where I am now, I’ve definitely been able to deconstruct and understand why I created such personalities around people, why I would keep a sense of ‘intellectual superiority’ in order to compensate for a sense of inferiority and how all of this currently translates in my life wherein I work with people, I work in assisting others to walk this process from consciousness to self-awareness as life. And this has been – and still is – quite the perfect position for me to be at considering all of this background that I’ve just shared about wherein I had not admitted to myself that I was in fact throughout my whole life ‘setting myself apart’ through a sense of superiority and specialness, sustained by the opposite polarity that I perceived at the time as ‘the real me,’ the ‘human flawed me’ – which I used as a way to ‘equalize’ myself to people, believing that in order to get out of my ‘tough-headed’ personality as an ‘all-knowing’ person that became a tad arrogant with people, I would have to get along with troubled people, people I considered were suffering in ways that I had no context to in my personal life, and in my quest to understand and help them, I would create friendships and relationships with people that signified – at the time – my desire to be humble and consider others’ misfortunes – and in a way challenge my seemingly ‘perfect’ life where nothing seemed to ever be a real ‘drama’ or ‘go wrong’ in a real way.
This path of seeking to be ‘humble’ through diminishing myself in such relationships wasn’t the way either, because I deliberately fed my character weaknesses like the emotional self that would come through as experiences of depression, worthlessness, inferiority, invalidation – all of this I created and believed was ‘who I really was’ so that I could have something ‘in common’ with the people that I was interested in getting along with and understanding in terms of their troublesome self-experience and lives.
Well, I ended up realizing that it was not really about ‘them’ but about me and my desire to be apparently ‘normal’ by experiencing the troubles and flaws ‘with them,’ instead of having seen how I allowed myself to go into a superiority, a separation, a ‘thinking better of myself’ type of default experience towards others which then led me to go riding through the ups and downs believing that life wasn’t really about all the good and fortunate positions I had been in my life, and so I kind of had to become ‘flawed’ in order to get along with what I deemed ‘the real people’ and no longer be deemed as the ‘perfect’ one that ‘never makes a mistake’ and instead, I created a personality within me that I knew could get along with or attract the kind of people I was interested in understanding and getting to know, ‘troubled’ people that I believed I could help out yet deemed ‘cool’ for daring to not go through the ‘seeking happiness at all cost’ attitude, but stood ‘true’ to themselves in their emotional experience.
Of course all of this that I explain was the way I would reason it at the time, which is not at all how I would see things today.
I realize that the truth of ourselves is what we make ourselves and our lives to be, which is visible in everything we think, do and act upon. And that we are the only ones that can define what’s supportive, what’s acceptable and what’s not in our lives – it’s not about considering that those that suffer are ‘more real’ than those that are constantly on the winning side, or that I had to ‘step down’ of my perceived ‘perfection throne’ in order to ‘get more real’ with what I considered more ‘real people’ that had ‘real life problems’ unlike me. That’s where I realized that people get along with and feel comfortable with whoever shows to have the same flaws or difficulties and at this stage, I cannot be entirely sure if I ever was then that kind of ‘troubled’ person in nature or if I made it all up for the sake of making myself more ‘normal’ or ‘humanly flawed’ in order to fit in with those I deemed as the ‘cool and real troubled people.’
Regardless of the order of that, it was self-created and I ended up becoming –or getting lost into- my character to such an extent that I stopped being able to differentiate the act from ‘the real me’ and ended up really getting ‘what I wanted’ from the specific people I wanted to be close to, whom I made myself to have something ‘in common’ with, like emotional experiences of inadequacy and depression, worthlessness or a lack of joy for living – which yes, led me to meet interesting people that I now see also allowed me to get to know about the diversity of ‘life’ as it exists in this world that I would have otherwise been oblivious too if I had not become this ‘tormented character’ that shaped my life for quite some time.
Now, all of that process of becoming a certain ‘flawed’ personality in order to be able to connect and also ‘assist’ others was a misconceived form of ‘humbleness’ that wasn’t real humbleness, I was trying to do the empathy game where I reduced myself to a level of experience in order to relate to others, instead of rather being able to understand others through first understanding myself.
Of course at the time I didn’t have the tools that I have now to be able to even word all of this out, and in a way it’s not like I could have done it any differently because that particular path led me to where I am now, eventually getting a bit too lost in this process of ‘seeking a truth’ separate from myself and getting lost in my own emotional characters that I’ve had to understand and debunk throughout these years, eventually all of it becoming actual habits and patterns that have taken time to stop and ‘rewire’ within myself, lol, I realize I did it all to myself and very consciously so.
But even if I was aware of what I was ‘reducing’ myself to in terms of my life and the personalities I became, my flawed sense of life-worth led me to stick to my perceptions at the time for a variety of reasons that were related to being able to stand out of the crowd, going against the tide and creating a form of specialness and separation through self-definitions that ended up becoming my very own cage.
Currently humbleness in my life/process is the ability to consider others’ lives, processes and awareness, it’s a word I constantly use to not forget the process that I’ve walked within Desteni in order to get to understand all of this in my life as my own creation and be able to step back from the programming and see it for what it is =a self-creation that we can decide to change and stand up from with actual work and living words in practice.
Doing this can become a second nature after some time, but in no way must it become yet another source of superiority and personal-accolade where even the act of supporting another could become another way to continue living out this subtle ‘superiority’ or ‘knowing better than others’ and feeding my ego about it, but this is precisely one of the key points in my process that I’ve been quite diligent and careful to not fall into – meaning, not falling within the perception that ‘I know better’ or placing myself in a superiority stance because I am aware of how that backfires in self-limitation – yet it can be a very subtle ‘constant’ in me if I don’t constantly also decide to remind me of living humbleness and equality instead.
This comes in very subtle ways that at times they might completely go unnoticed within me because of how Ingrained this perception has been throughout my life, and this is where I can remind myself that whenever I am seeing ‘ahead’ of another and start getting desperate, exasperated, frustrated and generally ‘bothered’ by the level of awareness that another person might have in an interaction with me, I have to embrace the word humbleness to truly ensure every time that I am in such position of providing assistance and support that I am not acting out of a sense of superiority, or that I am not placing myself on a ‘superior’ or ‘advanced’ position in relation to others, but instead remind me how this is a self-created perception wherein I cannot really ‘know’ ahead of anything other than what is evident in the moment, and so stop feeding any form of ‘being ahead of the game’ perceptions I may have at times.
There are layers of physical experiences that I see come through at times when being amongst people, wherein upon listening to them and getting to see ‘where they’re at’ in their life, I have immediately gone into the labeling or tagging of ‘who the person is’ according to the level of self-awareness I perceive/believe they can have – which is a source of separation and knowledge-based type of assumptions.
What I would definitely like to learn to live is real humbleness where I can truly be devoid of self-definitions or any form of ego-interest and stand completely clear and stable within me when interacting with others and simply be there as a point of support, a voice of experience based on my own process and ensure that no matter what, I always s remind myself of our equality, of eating my ‘humble pie’ whenever I see myself going into any shift in my mind that perceives anything or anyone else as more or less than who I am.
This is all easier said than done, but it truly has been a process of learning to deconstruct these ingrained yet subtle traits that I deemed as ‘normal’ in me, experiences that still might come through at times when talking or assisting people directly, which is where I have to direct myself to embrace the other person, to step out of the inferior/superior paradigm and learn to see another as an equal, to walk with and side by side, to remember my own process that has led me to be where and how I am today and that this is what the real meaning of humbleness is for me, it’s all about recognizing our equality yet our specific lives, positions, allocations, life contexts and potentials wherein I can stand in a position of assisting others that also want to assist themselves in the same process I’ve decided to live and apply in my own life.
More to open up….
Thanks for reading.
Join us in our process of Self-Expression as LIFE
-
Free Online DIP Lite Course
-
School Of Ultimate Living | Facebook
-
EQAFE.Com : SELF Education and SELF Awareness Store
-
7 Year Journey To Life Process : People Sharing their Processes of Self-Forgiveness and Self-Correction
-
Desteni Forum : Discuss and share with us
MarlenLife's Blog 
March 27th, 2017 at 3:45 pm
[…] § Continuing from: 546. Exploring Humbleness […]