What is the key to happiness? Happiness is a state of being that differs for each of us and to know what will make us happy, is to know ourselves. What does it mean to know thyself? Does it mean having a strong sense of self? Does it mean to know what our preferences are, our likes and dis-likes, strengths and weaknesses? Is knowing the self knowing what we value in life? Is it all these things?
When getting to know ourselves we first need to know what belongs to us and what we have borrowed. As children we have our parents, teachers and other authority figures instil their beliefs within us and we used them as a guidance system. We knew what was accepted as good or bad, right and wrong and our behaviour was rewarded or punished accordingly. As we get older these beliefs may not be as useful, in fact they may be crippling. A perfect example of this is the person who suffers with body dysmorphia, the original idea of healthy or beautiful was planted in the mind through the belief of those around them. Now the self worth of the person suffering body dysmorphia rests upon how they look, not who they are or what they do. Therefore to this person nothing will be good enough until they achieve the body shape they think is acceptable to those around them. Until this person gives up the idea that their worth rests upon how they look, they will always be lacking in their own eyes.
This is just one example of conditioning that can be formed in the mind and there are countless. We see the world around us and we form our beliefs about ourselves and our world based on our experiences within it. Although this is natural, it can be detrimental to our well-being when our interpretations find us lacking in comparison to what we see around us. So how do we begin to change our internal conditioning? How do we become our ideal self? We look at our belief system and we challenge what is no longer working for us. We ask ourselves why we are holding onto something from 15 or 20 years ago, is it really still relevant now? When we think in these terms, it is easy to see how our inner growth and truth evolve by the un-conditioning of beliefs that we borrowed and forgot to return.
There comes a time when we need to stop looking outside ourselves for the answers and begin to look within. We all have an inner guidance, it is the intuition that comes from deep within the psyche and it expresses itself though our five senses. Clinical hypnotherapy and Cognitive Behaviour therapy will help those inner resources come to the surface, enabling you to lead a more satisfying life. Learning to un-condition the mind is not hard but it takes understanding, repetition and perseverance. Love for the self is the key.