I don’t know why I’m telling you this because it has nothing to do with today’s post, but when I was a third year resident in Internal Medicine at UTMB Galveston, there was one day when I was post call after a hideously brutal day and night. To have a little respite, I decided to treat myself to a few hours on the beach to read a book or better yet, to do nothing at all. Since it was a Monday, the beach was empty. I mean NOBODY was on it despite the gorgeous day. As I was relaxing, this creepy looking dude approached me. He was bald on top and had scraggly long hair and terrible teeth, many of them missing. I sensed evil in the guy, and my stomach filled with dread. When he got to me, he kneeled down and offered to massage my thighs. I knew that if I refused, he would go ballistic, and since I felt he was a dangerous man, I let him massage away. (He made a comment about my cellulite, which I thought was extremely rude. Note to self. Stop eating those cream cheese danishes in the call room.) 

Then he asked me what I did, and I told him I was a physician and a karate instructor with black belt in karate. (I don’t even know what the Harai Te move is. Of course most of you probably don’t. I had to look it up on the web under “karate moves.”) When I told him that, he looked clearly intimidate, got up and quickly waked away, eyes a little wider than when he approached me earlier. Once he was on the Seawall, I gathered up my blanket and book and hurried to my car.

Years later, I watched the news which reported the arrest of a serial killer. I gasped when I saw the picture on the screen. It was him! Since then, I reflect on that scary encounter and think about all the life I would have missed had I been one of his many victims. No husband, no kids, no blog. Although I wouldn’t have had to experience Erik’s horrific death, at least I would have enjoyed 20 years with him. Each day is a blessing. Now go sign up for Karate lessons. 

Me: Erik, can you tell me about the loss of self-esteem from a spiritual basis?

Erik: A biggie for a lot of people is that they have their own definition of perfection. When you don’t accept things as how they are, like things don’t always go according to plan the way you want, that keeps you in the state of perfectionism. “Gotta go this way. Step one, step two, step three,” and if anything doesn’t follow that pattern, then it’s like, “Argh! It’s all fucked up!” The way it can affect our self-esteem if we start judging ourselves because we aren’t perfect. What the fuck is perfect?

Me: Really!

Erik: Who are you to say that because something didn’t play out the way you organized it and expected it to be, that makes it imperfect? Life isn’t meant to flow in that way. It’s not meant to be coming from a place of control.

Me: To me, what’s perfect about life is that it is imperfect.

Erik: That’s exactly right. Imperfection and perfection are both just labels humans put on things because sometimes they want to have a reason to judge something.

Me: Mm hmm.

Erik: So if you’re into that whole perfectionism thing, you’re going to eventually judge yourself.

Me: What if you have a poor self-esteem but aren’t a perfectionist?

Erik: I’m getting to that. Perfectionism is one of those things that you can be very aware about, but you might not label it as that, like you might not consider yourself a perfectionist, but then other times, it can be more of an unconscious thing. If you think about perfectionism on a deeper level, it’s really rooted in an expectation of something or an expectation from someone. If you don’t identify yourself as a perfectionist, then maybe you’re unconsciously living in a place of expectation—wanting to be a people pleaser, wanting to live up to what a family member says you should be—

Me: It seems like there are two levels. On the surface, there’s perfectionism. Everything has to be tidy; everything has to be on time; everything has to go as expected, but then there’s the deeper, subconscious perfectionism where you want to be perfect by pleasing people, living up to the expectation of other people, etc. You don’t consciously pursue perfection. It constantly pursues you.

Erik: Right, and that brings me to something else that can make people become aware of another thing rooted in perfectionism. There’s perfectionism, and there’s expectation, which feeds into perfectionism, but then there is control. “I have to control the situation;” “I have to control who I am;” “I have to control who someone else is;” “I have to control this outcome so I feel good about myself.” It’s all about controlling in a way that makes you feel good about yourself, and that’s just fucked up.

I chuckle.

Read this poem to understand the below:

Uncertainty is the root of fear

Distrust is the root of uncertainty

Scarcity is the root of distrust

Hostility is the root of scarcity

Sorrow is the root of hostility

Attachment is the root of sorrow

Fear is the root of attachment

Chaos is the root of all

Harmony is the equal opposite of chaos

Erik: There’s an element of attachment in this because if you weren’t attached to it, you wouldn’t be pursuing it or trying to maintain it. You’re attaching to the belief that you have to be this person you can be proud of. There are several other things, although attachment is the big Kahuna. Scarcity is involved because if you weren’t living in scarcity, then you would already know you’re enough or that someone else is enough or that the situation is enough. Perfectionism and self-esteem is all wrapped up in fighting against that notion of scarcity. “Gotta be enough. Gotta be enough. People have to be enough. My life has to be enough.” Hostility is the third thing because you get hostile toward a situation or a person when you don’t think these meet your expectations, and, of course, you’re hostile toward yourself because you don’t meet your own expectations. That’s where self-loathing comes in, and the more and the longer you hate yourself, the lower your self-esteem becomes. Fear is another one. You fear losing yourself. You fear not being enough, shit like that. But attachment is the root, and all these other things feed into that. These other things—scarcity, hostility, fear—are some of the ways that attachment gets manifested.

Me: So, these are the causes of a low self-esteem. What are the results?

Erik: It’s more complicated than that. The causes and the effects can be interchangeable. Who’s to say what direction the flow is or if there is a flow to begin with? For instance, hostility can cause a low self-esteem, but it can also result from it. It’s more like a web rather than a flow upstream and downstream, cause and effect. The cool thing about cause and effect is that it goes in every direction, not just up, down, to the left, to the right, before and after. It goes 360 degrees like the ripples from pebble tossed in the pond.

Me: Okay.

Erik: Bottom line: There’s some sort of emotional attachment to a label you have for yourself. People often ask, “Who am I?” So in order to know who you are, you sometimes have to label yourself and whatever.

Me: Like the label of being a doctor?

Erik: Yeah, that’s a functional one, but I’m talking about labels that are based in emotion.

Me: Like, “I’m a bad person?”

Erik: Yeah. “I am a bad person. I have a low self-esteem,” but all of those manifest themselves as emotional actions, which create the kind of language that you use for describing yourself. The actions I’m talking about are like if you isolate yourself; if you shy away from making new kinds of friends, all those kinds of things. But it’s all rooted in attachment to something.

Me: So why would you shy away from friends?

Erik: Well, in this case, you might be attached to the label that you’re not good enough. “Who the fuck is going to want to be around me?” This fear of judgment makes it hard to expose who you really are. The more you hide yourself, the more you lose yourself. The more you lose yourself, the weaker your sense of self-worth becomes. Let’s use an example. You go to school, and you get bullied. Later in the day, your teacher comes down on your ass. Then you get home, and your parents say something that makes you feel like shit. Do you focus on the good things that happened like how much fun you had at recess? No. You focus on the bad stuff because that’s what you’re attached to. You’re not attached to the positive. There’s a reason for this. In the physical world, like everywhere else, everything is energy, and energy vibrates at different frequencies that produce different densities. That density creates the physicality. If you’re immersed in physicality, denser emotions come out of that. That’s why humans think the worst-case scenario when an unknown is involved. They gravitate to the negative. I never really thought about what I was attached to, emotionally. What made things so hard for me was that constant rollercoaster—lower frequencies, higher frequencies, lower frequencies, higher frequencies. A lot of people are on a seesaw trying to find that perfect balance. My seesaw never found a point of balance. It was so fucking hard. That’s what I became attached to, the lack of a sense of balance. I was attached to randomness. I didn’t want to accept myself if that was who I was in this life. That cross was too heavy to bear. I sometimes had to step back and just watch for a while.

Me: Yeah. When you were in that observer state, you came off as being lonely.

Erik: That’s one of the reasons I wanted to be a guide when I came back. I observe, then guide. That life prepared me for what I’m doing now. But when I was observing people in my life, I’d compare my observations to how I was, what I did and how I felt. I’d judge myself. It made me feel so lonely.

Me (sadly): Yeah.

Erik: I thought, ‘Everyone else is happy. Everyone else has friends. Everyone else is connected.”

Me: Yeah. I got the feeling that you were disconnected a lot.

Erik: All the time. That’s because I was never balanced on that seesaw. You can’t connect to something that’s constantly moving.

Wow, reading this again gives me chills. What a powerful post. Good job, Erik!

I know this seems a little non sequitur, but be sure to follow me on Twitter! @channelingerik You’ll get a lot of profound Erik quotes! Also, some of you have had trouble getting your Erik encounters to post. It might be because you didn’t log in so be sure you do! Please share those encounters!