This is a transcript of the video above.

Why am I like this?

When you think of how often your thoughts about yourself are critical, and sometimes even abusive, you might start to wonder, what is the matter with me?

There are emotional, spiritual, and physical factors that are unique to each of us.

I'm going to start with some examples of what created the you that you are.

I'm also going to go into a lot of the factors that were well beyond your control that put thought patterns and beliefs into your head that may or may not have Been the truth, coming from Love, or any benefit to you at all.

And then I'm going to lay out some steps that you can start to take that help you start to uncover yourself and dig out from a lot of the overwhelming emotions of fear guilt shame that make keep you and a cycle of sadness, anxiety, or seem to be a continual struggle to get out of.

The combinations of what created what we are always different. That's why you may have tried a program that works well for others, but does nothing for you,

It's not necessarily because the program didn’t  have good ideas or methods that can work very effectively, it's just that it may not have touched the right part of you or the thing that is going to resonate and have a deep impact on you.

One thing I can tell you after having done this work on myself for so long, and have helped so many others is that it starts at the beginning.

I Personally feel that’s where many of the programs that don't seem to resonate or work may fall a little short. They propose a lot of solutions without addressing a lot of the core issues.

It's not because something is wrong with you, it's because that may not have been a fit for you. You are unique and special

A major issue is that when we read these programs, we are trying to get someone else's results. Very often if the results that we think society wants us to have. We may think we're trying to achieve these results all of our own reasons,  but when we look deeply, we find it's often because we're trying to fill a void with somebody else's solution. 

What does that mean?

Deep inside of you, deep inside every one of us, are all of the rules, values, and expectations that have been drilled into us by countless outside influences and factors that  told us that we are supposed to be a certain way.

We spend our lives trying to obtain someone else's results while at the same time ignoring a lot of the amazing results that we are already getting but we don't recognize because we're not seeing ourselves through our own eyes and through our own love of ourselves, we're seeing ourselves through the expectations and judgments of other people.

So where does that leave you? It leaves you with the step of trying to  understand what the best version of yourself actually is.

And that best version of yourself is based on your own beliefs and expectations, not those of other people, organizations, or groups that you may belong to or follow.

We can take this to an extreme, and this is a perfect example, when people spend an incredible amount of time and energy tryihng to be what their parents told them to do and be. At forty or fifty years old, they achieved the success their parents told them to achieve and are still feeling miserable.

Others reject everything their parents told them to be as a way to rebel but stil are carrying the emotional baggage of the parental relationships throughout their adult lives.

And if you keep asking yourself why do I want to be like my parents told me to be? Write down those answers, it often comes down to the final statement I don't think I'm good enough as I am.

And that is where a lot of the core issues we all have start, which lead us to a deeper bottom line, and that is we don't feel loved by others because we do not love ourselves.

In my own work it is when I finally started loving myself for who and what I am and not for who or what I thought I was supposed to be that I had amazing changes in my life.

In other videos, I shared my of my story of falling into the depths of alcoholism. For me it was a way to numb myself and avoid myself because I felt I was not worthy of love. 

It was during my recovery when friends and family members were there to provide incredible support that I became aware of the number of people who loved me and that gave me the first deep understanding but I was worthy of love.

When my sisters would call me and say, I just wanted to check in on you and be sure that you're doing okay and let you know that I love you, I started believing I could be loved.

When my sisters gave me a gift card 2 a nice restaurant so that my wife and I could go out to dinner  and enjoy ourselves without having to worry about money, I was believing but I could be loved.

When a friend mailed us a $50 gas card to help out,  I was believing I could be loved.

Want another friend reached out to let me know that she was saying a prayer for me every night because she loved me, I was believing I could be loved.

Those are just a few of the little things tht others did that were massively important to me that started making a big difference and how I perceived myself.

It was also during that period that I was going much deeper into my spiritual studies and getting a deeper understanding of what I was. There are certain books the dramatic Lee changed my perspective.

Books like The Four Agreements, conversations with God, Anatomy of the spirit, and the one that probably had the biggest impact, A Course in Miracles.

It was through the eyes of others and stories of others that I started seeing myself from a different perspective. And that is what I am here doing with you today trying to shoe you a different perspective to look on your past and your present so your future can be one that is built around the love that you can have for yourself and the love that you can start to see in every aspect of your life.

So, that's another thing that brought me here to you today. I'm talking about these things and sharing these stories with you to help you realize that no matter where you've been or what you've done, you are worthy of being loved. 

When you can start to see a lot of the small things that are happening around you but you can appreciate, you start to see but there are actually a lot of things that are going your way. 

This is the essence of what I  teach and communicate to my students and clients. I help them see through the fog and through the mists of illusion that they and others have built around themselves for an entire life.

When do you get to the point where that starts being uncovered? When your  life becomes one of love and filled with possibilities? 

It begins once you allow it to begin.

First, I’m going to talk a bit about the world that you grew up in.

How did it all get started the got you feeling the way you're feeling?

 I love the way that Don Miguel Ruiz describes it at the beginning of the Four Agreements and he calls the process domestication and the dream of the planet

He teaches that what you are seeing and hearing right now is nothing but a dream oh, it's an illusion. Many teachers throughout the ages have taught the same thing as well, that we are  living in an illusion. 

And, in this dream, in this illusion, everybody is looking at everybody else  thinking they should be different and they are. They're telling them what they are supposed to do and be in order to be the proper member of society.

When we were born, we were open to anything and everything, all we wanted was love, our minds were open to all kinds of possibilities,.

Before we were born, humans before us created a big outside dream that he calls society's dream or the dream of the planet which is the collective dream of billions of smaller personal dreams. those off the family, a community, a city, and finally a dream of all of humanity,

But the adults around us taught us  what to believe, and how we should see everything around us,. new ideas were put into our heads. We were taught different types of fears. Many of those fears such as don't touch a hot stove and be careful of heights, were there for protection but many of the others had nothing to do with protection and only were the result of what those adults who are teaching us we're taught by the adults before them.

We were taught what is good, and what was bad, we were taught certain types of people we're bad for ignorant or stupid and they were different from us and should not be trusted. Many were taught the girls were supposed to be a certain way and boys were supposed to be a certain way, all of that was based on what the people who are teaching us we're taught by the people who taught them.

There were so-called truths that we're certain a few years decades or centuries before but we're completely untrue Now.

When you went to school, a teacher taught you certain things that were based on stories that were taught to them. I 4 example, was taught that Western European beliefs, Sciences, and history, was the most important and the correct history.

I was taught that black people were inferior to me because I was white. I was taught that Jews and Protestants were inferior to me because I was Catholic. I was taught that by being strong and athletic I was Superior to others. I was taught that Native Americans were savage Indians that were rightly conquered During westward expansion of so-called civilization.

 I was taught that Earth was filled with natural resources and it was okay to extract and exploit those resources no matter what the impact on the Earth or the people who lived in the area surrounding those resources.

I was taught the strong had the right to exploit the weak.

However, all of my lessons were not about dominance. my parents also taught me to be there to help friends and people in need. When a friend or neighbor or someone in the community needed any type of assistance, I was often sent over to help them out.

At the time, I didn't necessarily appreciate the fact that my Saturday afternoon was going to be spent helping someone I did not know, however, looking back, I am grateful for the lessons that my mom taught me about helping them.

What I'm getting at, is that as children, we did not get to choose any of our beliefs. They were passed down to us by their parents and their parents parents before then going back many many generations.

That's what happens when we're children we believe everything adults teach us and everything they say. As a result of that they become our belief systems. Everyday we are taught how to live what to do what to say and what kinds of behaviors are acceptable I learned how to be a man and what I was supposed to be.

When you look back, you can actually see that children are very often taught the same way that we teach our pets. It is through a system of reward and Punishment. If we do what we're told, were awarded with love affection and very often gifts or recognition. If we  didn't do as we were told, the opposite was true and we were  punished.

So what we did, what are the things that got us awarded with and we avoided the things that got us  punished. That's the way it was some of the time Because many of the things that we are punished for, we enjoy doing!

 We learned about the word no.

We learned to judge. We learn to judge others and, more importantly we learned to judge ourselves. it was the birth of the inner judge and the inner critic. everything we do is subject to the approval of the inner judge.

Every Time we go against our past beliefs, there is a twinge of guilt or an overwhelming wave of guilt. Because we are judging everything paste on belief systems that were domesticated into our being through our entire existence.

It is this judge that is there and is based on past beliefs whether those beliefs are true for us or not.

How do we know which of the beliefs are true?

From my perspective, it is the beliefs that are based on love, compassion, joy and happiness that are the beliefs that are going to bring us the happiness that we seek.

One of the challenges we encounter on a spiritual path is the  realization that we do not believe the belief systems that were put in our heads by others as truth for so many decades.

Another challenge is that when we start to change these belief systems there is often that deep voice of the ego or the inner critic that is saying this is wrong.

And so, we continue to judge ourselves and judge others. We pay for one mistake many times sometimes thousands of times sometimes many times a day we are paying for a mistake that we made  years ago. We judge ourselves and find ourselves guilty of violating the rules and beliefs that were  given to us by others

Sometimes, we may try to forgive ourselves, but then something happens that makes that memory resurface and we feel guilty again. Sometimes, in our own guilt, we make others pay for our mistakes. We may be feeling a certain way or angry about something that happened in our own lives, and we take it out on another person. Very often a loved one such as a spouse or children, brothers, sisters or parents.

We make them pay for our mistakes and we make them pay for their own mistakes many times over. That makes us rather unique in the animal kingdom. We are the only species on this planet that I am aware of that will punish another member of our species repeatedly for something that was done once.

What happens?

People as individuals live in fear and they live in violence. 

We can see what happens when this is carried out on large-scale. 

We see violence and neighborhoods, we see violence in cities, States, and between nations,.

People see others as the enemy. They elect political figures who succeed by creating fear of people who are on “the other side"

"those people are different." they are not to be trusted, they are meant to be feared. We see a society ruled by fear oh, one that seems totally insane. and we see this and our own fears increase.

But, deep down oh, we are all searching for inner peace, for inner Truth, for connection with others and with our creator.

What Can You Do?

It starts with the willingness to recognize and challenge the belief systems that are in our heads and determining our actions and behaviors.

We have to be willing to look at ourselves and others in a different way.

We cannot continue to look at other people with beer and we cannot continue to look at ourselves with criticism and judgment.

So what then is the next step?

It does start with a recognition of where these belief systems came from. 

When you recognize where they came from and there is nothing wrong with you, you’ve stepped onto the path of Liberation. 

You realize that when you Have the power to change your belief system, you have the power to change your life.

You realize and awakened to the fact that you have given your power to outside influences, to people, to outside belief systems to others and Society.

It's important to understand how your inner judge came into existence. You created it to please others and protect yourself. Its power came from things that are no longer exist, except in your memories! 

A Course in Miracles teaches us a miracle is a change in perception from fear to love and, "By releasing your mind from the imprisonment of your illusions, they restore your sanity."

It is now time for you release your mind and to reclaim your power.

One of the things that's really exciting is that you always have the power to begin changing yourself. And I'm not talking about just small changes. You can make dramatic changes and shifts In every aspect of your life in a relatively short period of time.

Here’s a tremendously important and powerful exercise: