Doing Your Best vs. Doing Your Best Make Loving Choices

When does doing your best for others intersect with doing your best for yourself?

How can we balance between the two?

Others will always have their perceptions of you doing your best and you will have yours. How does it work, if by doing your best for others you are letting yourself down? And vice versa?

It’s sometimes hard to see that when you are honoring the choices that are in your own best interest, you are actually making the choice that also be in the best interest of everyone else. There have been many situations in my life and probably in yours as well where people have seemed selfish and, in their selfishness, we were hurt. Or perhaps, we judge that in certain situation we acted selfishly and feel guilty about how it affected someone.

If we stand in the victim archetype, which we all have, then we can take on an awful lot of anger from these situations. But, there is another way of looking at it. Perhaps, their behavior provided an opportunity for us. A chance to stand up for ourselves. Either in that moment or because we experienced the trauma, it magnified something even deeper inside that was brought forth for healing at a later time.

Or not.

My point is that we just don’t know. Our energetic systems are so complex. Our lives are intricately connected with so many other lives on so many karmic levels, it is impossible to ever wrap your mind around why something happened. Why did that person hurt you? Why are you where you are?

You simply are where you are.

And, in order to move forward on your soul’s path, you will have to grow. There is a reason for the phrase “growing pains”. You will experience hardship. You will also experience joy. You will feel so much joy.

Keep listening.

Keep making loving choices for others, but most importantly, for yourself. What we put into one, we put into the whole. You are the entire universe. By loving yourself fully, you are not being selfish. I will say that again. By making loving choices for yourself you are serving the world. You cannot wrap your mind around how important you are. It is not selfish to own your importance, to bathe in your own light. 

When you shine, you will be a beacon for others. Everyone is happier when we are loving ourselves, because only when we feel nourished can we truly nourish others. Otherwise, there is an agenda. Nourishment with some expectation of return. When we nourish others with hopes of approval, acceptance or some other gain, or compromise ourselves in a way that is out of balance, we are doing no service to anyone. We are simply depleting our own energy stores in hopes that someone else will fill them.

This is not how it works.

It’s actually exactly the opposite. When we fill ourselves up, we overflow to everyone around us. You really cannot give what you don’t have. Fill yourself up. Become so full that your light, your love spills out all over the place and people will say what are you doing?

Yes. There will be some that say it with a different intonation. Don’t mind them. Eventually your light will spill over to them, if it is meant to. At some point, they may remove their sunglasses and allow themselves to see their reflection in your eyes.

Because once you are able to look at yourself and honor and value your own needs, then, you will be able to truly see others and truly honor and value their needs. And in that seeing, others will see themselves, and if they are ready, perhaps they will begin to fill themselves up so that they can be a loving mirror for those around them and so on and so on….

Doing your best is important. 

Just remember that as you strive to do your best at all the many things you do….

In that striving, do your best to make the most loving choices for you.

Sending you much love,

Sri 