At the heart of every person who is not aligned with himself/herself (and thus has issues of low self-esteem, low confidence etc) is the thought pattern of “guilt” about aligning with their joy. Feeling guilty about being oriented towards one’s joy, or pleasure, is at the root of all inner conflicts and misalignments. It’s so common to find people who are focused, all the time, on catering to someone else’s approval instead of having the courage to line up with their own joy.
People who try to please others while denying their own interests may try to justify their behavior by labeling themselves as being “Selfless” but that’s just a cloak of denial they are hiding under when in truth they are just lacking the courage and understanding to align with themselves. If you feel guilty about pleasing yourself it’s a given that your present reality is not one of joy or abundance but one of struggle, lack, neediness and conflict – this is not a guess but a fact, because law of attraction can only respond to your inner vibration and a person who feels guilty about orienting with their joy is always vibrating in “lack” or fear.
Sacrificing your joy is not a noble way of life
It seems like our society panders to the notion of being “selfless” enough to sacrifice our joy for the sake of others – they deem such behavior as noble or elevated. But if you really look within you will notice that such a behavior reeks of a dis-connected way of living where you are going against the natural movement of your mind (which is always towards its own well-being/joy) to give pleasure to others, or to make someone else feel good. It’s one thing to help others because it brings us joy, and it’s totally a different thing to help others while sacrificing our joy. You need to be authentic/honest within yourself to know if your behavior is tuned towards your joy or towards a disconnection with your joy.
Whether you like it or not, the natural make-up of your mind is wired to selfishly look out for its joy – if it was not selfishly oriented it would stop making an effort to survive, it would stop seeking to eat or breath or procreate. It’s only because of its selfish orientation to want to survive, and enjoy itself, that it keeps the body together.
People seem to find the word “selfish” extremely negative but if you look realistically, you will notice that each cell in your body is “selfish” or else it will stop seeking nourishment for itself and it would stop wanting to thrive or survive. The reason why people find the word “selfish” as being negative is because they immediately assume that selfishness entails causing suffering to others in order to please oneself. But in truth, if someone feels bad because you decide to line-up with your joy, it just means that they are disconnected with themselves and are trying to victimize you for their happiness. Also, exploitation of any form comes from a hate based vibration within, and a person who is aligned with his/her joy does not ever vibrate in hate.
It’s people who try to act “selfless” that are usually passive aggressive within and carry a victim mentality. They are usually rooted in low self-esteem and try to compensate for it by getting approval from others by trying to please them. In truth, they are just not “self loving” enough to align with their own joy and so it’s easy for them to sacrifice their joy for others – there’s nothing really noble about it. Such people are quick to point out that it’s “bad” to align selfishly with one’s joy because they feel guilty within of orienting with their own joy. To orient with one’s own joy is a highly positive behavior and it always attract a reality of abundance and well-being towards such a person.
The mindset of a victim behavior
A person who is a “people pleaser” is always rooted in a victim behavior and if you ask him/her they would tell you their “victim story” quite freely. They would tell you how ungrateful people are, they would tell you about how much they have tried to give pleasure to others but were never reciprocated in the same way, they complain about the unfairness in this world, they would wallow in self-pity, they would tell you of their failed relationships where they sacrificed their happiness to please their partner who never seemed appreciative of it, they would tell you of how they always get cheated on and how they are “used” by others. They fail to realize that they are attracting such realities onto themselves because they are disconnected with their own “self” and are trying to compensate for this disconnection by seeking love/approval outside them.
If you try to please others, while sacrificing your own joy, you will live out a life of feeling victimized and exploited, because that’s the only reality you can attract from such a vibrational stand point. It’s not your job to make others happy, it’s their job to find their happiness, your job is to align with “your” happiness. Only when you are aligned with your happiness can you be an expression of happiness into this world – this is what true “benevolence” is all about. You can never bring benevolence into this world by focusing on making others happy while denying your own happiness. If you are not happy, you really have nothing to give this world anyway because you will only be perpetuating your unhappiness into this world.
It’s totally okay to give pleasure to others if doing so gives pleasure to you, but just make sure you are not hiding under the cloak denial where you are trying to please others at the cost of your own happiness.
Being oriented to your joy does not entail exploiting others
A person who is truly in love with himself/herself would never seek to exploit someone else because an inner love always manifests as outer love. It’s only a person who feels fear/hatred within that tries to exploit others under the false hope that he/she would somehow be well off from it. Your joy is not dependent on exploiting others, your joy will come forth in abundance from the universe if you line up with it. You don’t have to make someone poor in order for you to be rich, that’s just a highly naïve and misplaced thinking based in “lack” and hate. Richness, in every aspect and form, will come forth from this universe once you line up with your joy in a simple state of self-love.
The paradox is that when you become selfishly oriented towards your own happiness/joy, you automatically become a source of joy for others. The abundance that you attract from this place of joy is something that everyone around you can share in, but this abundance can’t come forth if you are not oriented towards your joy in the first place. Orient yourself towards pleasing yourself first instead of focusing on pleasing others, align with your interest first instead of looking to fulfill other’s interests. If you are not lined-up with yourself, you cannot ever bring forth your natural expression into this world and thus would never feel successful or fulfilled within you.
A lot of people try to give the example of “Mother Teresa” to defend the behavior of sacrifice. It’s important to have a clear perspective on this. Mother Teresa helped the impoverished children because she found joy in it. This was the work that brought her joy and so she immersed herself in it. She was not sacrificing herself but rather expressing her joy, and living her joy, through her work. One just had to look at her to know that she felt truly joyful about what she was doing and there was no sense of “sacrifice” in her. Stop using her as an example to defend sacrificing your happiness for others because it would be a “misplaced” interpretation on your part. Do what brings joy to you, don’t do something just to please others – it can challenging to orient with your joy if you’ve been brought up in a mindset of sacrifice, but this is a negative mindset that you need to let go of to allow a deeper alignment with yourself.
How do you really start?
It’s all about aligning with yourself. To do so you need to really get to know yourself in every aspect, by bringing in a deep awareness into your inner space, and allow an alignment with your mind/heart. It’s a love affair with yourself, a deep unconditional alignment with the natural make-up and orientation of your human expression as this physical being. This process of alignment can be quite challenging because one needs to shed a lot judgments and limiting external conditioning to really line up with one’s heart and also to line up with the movement of your life stream towards the manifestation of your desired realities which are congruent with your way of being.
Once more: Thanks!!!! I needed this. I was brought up with this wrong notion. My mother even mentions my grandfather that married a woman that he didn’t love (never loved until his death), leaving his great love behind, because his parents didn’t like her and her family. My mother mentions this as something “heroic” to strive for….really sad.
Thank you for clearing my mind in such a powerful and yet simple way!!!!
Hi, Sen,
I led a painful life as a people pleaser for 40 years. Until last month I found out the word ‘people pleaser’ and after doing some research realized that this is a disease. And I could not figure out what is wrong with my life and how I get this kind of mentality and behaviour. Sometimes my behaviors is very obsessive and compulsive. Have no way to escape out even with suicidal thoughts. Could you guide me how to get out of this night mare? How to align with myself?
Thank you deeply.
Jane
Jane, a few posts you can start with to gain an understanding of the process of allowing (which is needed to release the mind momentum) are as below
http://www.calmdownmind.com/reaching-a-place-of-total-allowing/
http://www.calmdownmind.com/allowing-the-release-of-suppressed-energy/
http://www.calmdownmind.com/healing-the-imbalance/
http://www.calmdownmind.com/overcoming-obsessive-thoughts/
You can read these posts plus others on this blog and thus gain an understanding of the mechanics of mind/emotional momentum which is the cause of fear-based behaviors like being a people pleaser. With the right understanding you will be in a position to start bringing the required inner balance.
What if you refuse to feel pleasure because you think it’s something not allowed by God ?
Adara, you just need to have the openness/courage to want to explore the reality/truth of life, instead of finding refuge in a certain belief system. This openness becomes available to you the moment you develop the choice of consciously letting go of clinging to a belief system, out of fear. However, it’s still a choice on your part, you can retain the choice of holding on to a belief system. A simple pointer towards recognizing if a belief system is not aligned with life is to see if it’s fear-based – a belief system that’s not aligned with the truth of life will always create some form of suffering in you.
Hi Sen,
Why do you think people sacrifice their own joy in order to help others? It interests me as to why society accepts and encourages this behavior when it does feel so unnatural and negative to the mind. I’m currently unrooting these deluded thinking patterns in my mind and I’m trying to understand why for so long I (and so many around me) feel guilty when I see those less fortunate and feel I need to help them. I’d love to hear your take on this question.
Thanks.
Nick, to be “totally selfish” or to be “highly selfless” are both extreme stances and a part of imbalance, the former is a dark nature imbalance and the latter is a light nature imbalance. The delusion is that light-natured imbalances are usually not seen as being directly “negative”, by the outside – quite simply because people who are imbalanced in light-nature are easy to deal with. In fact its easy to manipulate, exploit and take advantage, of a person who is imbalanced in light-nature because it’s easy to make them feel guilty about not serving, and it’s easy to influence them by appealing to their sympathies – so such a person is never a threat, and hence is seen to be “ideal” from an outside perspective, this is the reason why the society can appreciate the “highly selfless” people after all they it’s easier to leech out of them, plus they are not a threat in any way to the system. However, an imbalance in light nature is a source of suffering for the person involved, they feel helpless to their own goodness and over-sensitivity.
Also when you are imbalanced in light nature, you will tend to help people from a place of seeing them as broken in some way and thus you move from a place of inner suffering (pity always has a negative vibe, and actions coming from this place will contain this vibe). This is the reason why such a “help” seems to backfire in all cases, or creates new problems worse than the one you tried to solve.