The key to your happiness rests in one essential principle:
The way you treat yourself determines everything about what you’re open to receive.
In other words your relationship with yourself - how you treat you, tells you everything you need to understand about how you will allow others to treat you. It sets up what you expect life to hand you. Determines where you accept assistance, help and guidance and where you refuse to let anyone else in.
Your relationship with yourself is the first and last place you need to look when you aren’t happy. Since your eyes face outward, it's common to perceive the external world is the problem when you aren't happy or don’t feel safe, secure or positive. However, the reality is your feelings are happening inside yourself. Those feelings are brewing based on your perception of what you are experiencing.
Reflect A Moment
Do you walk down the street and feel a deep sense of belonging or do you feel like a lone wolf destined to be alone? That inner sense of your place in the world is determining how you experience the people you encounter. Do they smile and exchange pleasantries with you or do they ignore you and not even notice you?
The way you treat yourself is literally the key to unlocking your happiness in deep and profound ways. What you say to yourself and how you perceive you is literally the most essential element of life - and yet, that inner clarity isn’t something people are taught about or trained to understand. That’s why at christi international we teach you the Christi Standard of Living.
The Christi Standard
Our rose gold standard revolves around this first principle:
What I’m open to receiving from myself determines what I’m open to receiving from others.
The profoundness of this single principle is life altering in the most magical and extraordinary of ways. Regardless of how many times we say it, the depth of your understanding of this will continue to evolve which is why every time you experience it in your life, you’ll need a friendly reminder - what’s happening inside me, is how I treat myself and that treatment is affecting me in ways that are creating an invisible chain reaction.
Case Study: Gary
We have this client, I’ll call him Gary. Gary was born to a teenage mom who was more concerned about partying and having fun than raising a child. Because she wasn’t given proper instruction, guidance or training and she lacked maturity - Gary didn’t receive the emotional support he needed. When he was upset or needed comfort he was encouraged to ignore his feelings - turn to drugs, alcohol and other substances as solutions for numbing himself. He started doing drugs at a very young age.
He never felt that his mom loved him or that he was a priority to her. Even though she tried her best, he was more like her parent than her son. So it wasn’t surprising that he was tending to her financial needs in the present or that when she needed help he was always the person she turned to. Without a father figure in his life - he wasn’t sure how to be a man. Wasn’t trained how to take care of himself. He’d been neglected for so long he had no idea that it was a problem. Until his girlfriend was so frustrated with him and their relationship she gave him an ultimatum. We meet with Christi together or we’re done.
Gary had a heart of gold and it was evident from the moment his girlfriend got upset. The second she started crying he was apologizing, his arm was around her and his heart was on his sleeve. If he was so demonstrative of his love and affection - what was the actual problem?
Gary's Actual Problem Wasn't Cut And Dry
He never received validation of his feelings. He wasn’t familiar with being accountable for himself because he was a people pleaser and a self-sacrificer who was trained to worry about others instead of himself. So when he needed something he was an assh*le. He was irresponsible, and worried about himself with selfishness and self-righteousness.
That wasn’t who he was - it was how he learned to treat himself based on a lifetime of neglect. So in his pain, he showed up the way he was treated - as if the world revolved around himself. The way his mom modeled behavior all the years he was growing up. The problem wasn’t cut and dry. Gary had the most kind, gentle loving heart and it was closed when his pain was present. When his heart was closed that love and care was replaced with anger and animosity that he was being ignored, his needs weren’t met and it had nothing to do with what he was experiencing in the present. it was how his brain perceive the current situation.
As we worked step by step training him how to have accountability - he noticed that his life was improving in dramatic ways. He was getting more respect at work. He was hearing more accolades from his clients. He was connecting more with his own son. And his relationship was improving. Then, he texted me this - "For the first time ever in my entire life I woke up to a text from my mom telling me she loved me and was proud of me! That's never happened before!" He was floored!
Gary had to improve his relationship with himself and recognize that the anger he carried internally was affecting his perception of his worth and value. And that was impacting what he heard and saw in his relationships with others. The key to opening Gary’s heart was addressing his feelings because they were forming his perceptions of the present - yet they were all based and rooted in his past. All those early experiences created the mainframe - the foundation of how he thought about himself, what his brain connected and the information it processed.
Every aspect that he addressed internally to build his relationship with himself, to respect his own feelings and the clues they were providing enabled Gary to open his heart to himself deeper and deeper. That’s why learning how to recognize your feelings and becoming aware of them is the key to understanding yourself.
All the feelings that are negative and cause you to spin in cycles of helplessness, hopelessness and powerlessness are clues that you have inner turmoil that’s negatively affecting you in the present. It’s not necessarily rooted in what’s happening now, but stems from experiences so common in your history that you don’t identify them as problematic now. And since you can’t actually see them because they’re internal, you have to practice being accountable for how you feel. And have an open mind to consider what I feel is part of how I treat myself.
Where I’m unhappy is rooted inside myself and I’m responsible for getting to the bottom of what’s blocking my happiness today.