…" What is required to participate more fully in our own health and well-being is simply to listen more carefully and to trust what we hear, to trust the messages from our own life, from our own body and mind and feelings." …
" Developing such an attitude means authoring one’s own life and, therefore, assuming some measure of authority oneself. It requires believing in oneself. Deep down, sadly, a lot of us don’t.
Mindful inquiry can heal low self-esteem, for the simple reason that a low self-estimation is really a wrong calculation, a misperception of reality… Our esteem problems stem in large part from our thinking, colored by past experiences. We see only our shortcomings and blow them out of all proportion. At the same time, we take all our good qualities for granted, or fail to acknowledge them at all. Perhaps we get stuck in the often deep and bleeding wounds of childhood, and forget or never discover that we have golden qualities too. The wounds are important, but so are our inner goodness, our caring, our kindness toward others, the wisdom of the body, our capacity to think, to know what’s what. And we do know what’s what, much more than we allow. Yet, instead of seeing in a balanced way, we frequently persist in the habit of projecting onto others that they are okay and we are not.
I balk when people project onto me in this way. I try to reflect it back to them as commonsensically as i can, in the hope that they will come to see what they are doing and understand that their positive energy for me is really theirs. The positivity is their own. It is their energy, and they need to keep it and us it and appreciate its source. Why should they give away their power ? I have enough problems of my own."
from “Your Own Authority” In Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn