Self Respect: The Foundation Of Life

Without an exchange of respect a relationship will not be an open and harmonious communication.

But sometimes we confuse respect with fear, a lesson usually learned in the playground at school. So we think we are respecting the other but don’t realize the subtle presence of fear. And it is this fear that stops the relationship from flowering even though we may believe we are being respectful. Somewhere in our past we learned to be fearful of ‘the other’. We learned that it was possible to experience loss and when we believe in loss we create the emotion of fear. Worry being one of the most common faces.

That was then followed by the perception that ‘other people’ are responsible for our losses and so we perceive others as a threat and so create fear in certain relationships thus blocking or distorting the flow of energy in the relationship. Although it’s not hard to follow this trail in theory it’s tricky to see it within our self in our daily reality. It tends to be a subtle, automatic reaction we have been creating for some time. It is a reaction that we have programmed into our own consciousness. The only way to ‘cure’ it, is to realize we have nothing to lose or, to put it more accurately, there is nothing of ‘real value’ that we can lose.

Only then is a fearless response possible, only then can we hold the other in the highest vision and not as a threat, only then is real respect possible, and only then can a relationship, any relationship, blossom to its full potential.

So lets back up a little and explore what’s really going on within our self when we find it difficult to respect the other.