The Evolution of my Self-Esteem | Dealing with Toxic People | How to Understand Pride

[Keryo Koffa]

Warning, the following post contains very long sentences, upgrading your awareness RAM is recommended.

In this scenario, pride came from addressing core motivations and maintaining composure and awareness while learning how to deal with toxic people. It also came from understanding the core neurosis of their motivation and through continuous good faith, ruling out and confirming the nature of their engagement, ruling out the existence of any constructive criticism and being able to dismiss them finally, not succumbing to their attempts at reducing my self esteem, which throughout my childhood has become eroded since I have always acted on good faith and hence found myself to be solely responsible for any and all misunderstandings and problems. But now my self-esteem is building up much further than its ever been, and I understand that the judgements of others are most often negative self-projections. The pendulum swing towards deconstructing their perspective, engaging in debate, and fighting them off leaves me feeling empowered and it seems I finally learned to fend for myself and take care of my own needs and self-esteem, finally opening up to be positively polarizing with my authentic understanding, likes and dislike, individuating in the process.

Simultaneously, I am recognizing that the act of engaging with others who operate in bad faith is itself a rather useless endeavor when their paradigm lock prevents them from any and all discourse which could affect their understanding, and they need a deeper self-reflecting personal experiential transformation to overcome it. But I also simultaneously realize that it's not by job and duty to solve all the world's problems, for me to feel bad about. I understand that any and all neurotic behavior arises out of ignorance, so in truth I cannot even blame them, and it doesn't even make sense to fight them, but experientially speaking I feel like I still need this time and experience to truly integrate and validate my understanding and integrate all the past shame that has been subconsciously building up by my own self-judgement that has been the result of of not standing up for myself. Realizing that, I can shortcut the process and minimize the time I spend being angry and instead transform it into understanding that naturally and intuitively integrates to the degree that experientially the need to react will not even arise.

My immediate reaction to pride is that of question, but maybe I should accept it, it points to the accomplishment of setting boundaries, as long as I don't fall into misusing it for fighting worthless battles and fueling resentment. I am reminded of a quote

Iroh: Prince Zuko, pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame.

But then again, pride comes in variations. It's a pointer and messenger. I'm getting into the habit of not wanting to feel emotions, since I correlate them with falling into traps, but I do want to feel serenity, joy and other high vibration emotions, I feel like by being as sceptic as I am, I am needlessly stopping myself from feeling them. Help me out here

[Evelyna]

Hi

sounds to me like you are a very good analyser of yourself, and maybe it feels like this now because this is your path way to understand and discover more of yourself and it’s just a part of the process for you. From my own experiance I know that emotions are inherently interconnected, and attempting to selectively experience only positive emotions can sometimes lead to the suppression of necessary and natural emotional processes, like for example natural reaction fight or flight would be determined by certain uneasy emotions we otherwise wouldn’t want to feel at all, but this uneasy emotion at the same time helps us in situations of danger, just as an example. 
I think what you feeling is normal for human being maybe take the opportunity in this to really look at all of the emotions as a collective and needed, maybe assign a function to those emotions you find you don’t want to feel and therefor make them more of a necessary tool to determine better judgement of any situation and actualy for those being helpful rather then unnecessary. Fear is very helpful I find so is anger, anger in my personal experience shows me that of what I really don’t want , like an alarm system and I can take a lesson from that for the future but not necessarily react to it. 
As to pride , in myself I have swapped the word pride for accomplishment  sometimes changing the name of the emotion helps me, in other words it is something that makes me feel good about decisions I’ve made. 

Edited July 5 by Evelyna

[Keryo Koffa]

@Evelyna Thank you. Indeed, it seems that what I am to do is expand my understanding and awareness of all emotions, what they point to and their interconnection. Until now, I could easily get trapped in the sensation itself or act on it rather clumsily. I am reinterpreting it as a system to make me aware of potential danger, balance in behavior, contradictory beliefs and an exploratory means. I just have to be more attentive to what they point to and how they work. I've picked up quite a bit by watching Leo's early videos, so much counter-intuitiveness or opposite of how I previously perceived.

[Evelyna]

@Keryo Koffa May your new system serve you well, and I truly mean that. It has changed my life since I’ve been using emotions as an early warning system or a confirmation for a long time now , and it is a great teacher, for example I understood that love means to be happy with someone or something, when I am happy I love when I love I am happy 😊 

 

ps. With practise it will automatically let you know and you will understand it instantly, and practising it you will be surprise how fast it gets installed within you, like a program on the computer ☺️☺️

Edited July 5 by Evelyna

[Keryo Koffa]

@Evelyna I have been releasing so many pent up emotions and being honest with myself over the past few days, engaged in countless contemplation and posts and quite obsessively skimmed through endless lessons, gaining a lot of insight in the process, but later realizing a certain vanity in the need to express a perspective when the next moment it is recontextualized through a new one that almost inverts previous understanding.

Just now, I have gone through many of Sadhguru's videos and changed my breath to a very long and slow in and out, doing it consciously over the past whole hour with 2/3 breaths a minute. I have made some decisions on what I seek to experience and focus on. I thank you for your posts including the one on the meditation topic I posted, I agree with the experiential nature, the need to know truth has been a rather obsessive aspect of mine that I am only now transmuting into a more exploratory way.

Edited July 5 by Keryo Koffa

[Evelyna]

@Keryo Koffa Oh I like Sadhuru’s teachings and his charisma , his videos always make me smile. No need to thank me I am only expressing my simple understanding of the world. I know a lot is possible in this life for everyone. I have studied many different cultures, religions and philosophies , I’ve spent time with different cultures of the world , learned what I could and came to certain conclusions which made sense to me. I am happy I can share my experiences especially if this information helps others in their own journey, that’s wonderful to me. I have one particular experiance that had tremendous impact on the way i view life, but it just gave me an idea for a post so I decided to write about it in a post ( thank you for prompting this , yes you have prompted it) I think you are about to embark on a journey so exciting and full of new discoveries and experiences that you can’t even yet imagine. You have given yourself a great opportunity and are allowing yourself new adventures now there’s no more to do then experiance it. Enjoy!! 

[Keryo Koffa]

@Evelyna The amount of empathy and love I feel emanating from you is amazing, the way you write is very open and explorative. I've recently stumbled onto the topic of Non-Violent Communication in a post and realized many patters and its value, Leo's videos also helped me grow. I'm deeply appreciative of your encouragement and reflect it back at you also. 

Edited July 6 by Keryo Koffa

[Evelyna]

6 hours ago, Keryo Koffa said:

@Evelyna The amount of empathy and love I feel emanating from you is amazing, the way you write is very open and explorative. I've recently stumbled onto the topic of Non-Violent Communication in a post and realized many patters and its value, Leo's videos also helped me grow. I'm deeply appreciative of your encouragement and reflect it back at you also. 

❤️

[Rafael Thundercat]

 

[Breakingthewall]

brilliant! Learning to deal with "toxic" people unlocks all the toxicity that you have absorbed in your life, which being a person of high nature as is the case, is always a lot.

I say toxic in quotes because more than toxic it is normal. Most people are toxic in the sense that they compete and lie. For them, their self-esteem is always in check. As you have rightly said, the origin of shame is pride, and its cure is humility. That is genuine wisdom that helps you live cleanly and fully. 

[Joshe]

Thanks for sharing. It’s adds to comfort that there are others out there! I love how you articulated the situation. 

I deal with the same problem, but I’ve wondered, am I inherently prideful or does the pride manifest from engagement with lower energies?

I ran a thought experiment and imagined a world in which everyone valued truth and were not egotists and could easily revise their perspectives as reality gave them new information and in that world, I didn’t feel antagonistic. I actually felt at peace and happy. I would love nothing more than for others to arrive at truth on their own without my involvement, so am I inherently prideful or is the pride manifesting from engagement with lower energies? IDK. It seems the pride would never come into existence in my thought experiement.

Regardless if this is true, the pride is still in me and it’s my responsibility, so I’m not blaming the lower energies on why it would arise in me but rather, if this is the case, I have a choice of continuing the engagement or abandoning it. It seems that if you want to transcend the lower energies, the only way is to abandon them, which, in my case and seemingly yours, would entail surrendering all cynical thought and negative judgement towards others. 

This is just where I’m currently at on this same problem and I’ve yet to commit to the solution, which makes me wonder, what if I am really just prideful and don’t want to let it go. But then I remember how I am, and I know that’s not right. I think I’m just too lazy to begin reprogramming the decades worth of conditioning. 

[Keryo Koffa]

@Joshe I've been exploring. Emotions seek to expand our agency and awareness. Negative ones are a defense mechanism against limiting beliefs. We're intended to master them becoming more resilient and healing. Through the outside world, we're communicated the source of behavior and how pain perpetuates. We often mistake them with objects they point to, but it's always a deeper understanding being conveyed. Ultimately, they seek to dissolve into harmony and come up when change is needed. Pride isn't a singular thing, it can stem from shame or alignment, but its the belief behind it that ought to be reconciled, since it points to a contradiction in values. Any emotion points to the exploration of the aspect it relates to, an open investigation. We're taught to do the opposite of what's healthy, to avoid the negatives, but they arise to reconcile a source of tension, discontent and stress that limits us from living our life to the fullest.

Imagine being content with abuse by blocking out all emotions, now that would be unhealthy. Getting angry is natural, learning how to use it and change one's life to the better, that's the essence. There are many possible decisions and we can more deeply explore those, lashing out itself is still healthier than doing nothing, but one can learn many higher strategies to deal with its root cause, which is the situation and lack of agency it points to, to transform oneself into someone who takes action and is independent and moves away from toxic environments. Pride can be a sign of strength, but its arising points to a circularity of the external that perpetuates it, to be addressed. Pride can also be a suppression of shame, in which case, it is one's inauthenticity itself that needs to be addressed. Either way, they are catalysts for change, and ideally lead one to expand one's self-understanding to the point of being flexible and confident enough, for them not to need to arise.

Edited July 7 by Keryo Koffa

[Joshe]

@Keryo Koffa That gives me a lot to ponder. Thank you for elaborating. 

I know this is off topic, but if you don’t mind, maybe you could expand my understanding of what pride and shame are. What are your thoughts on this:

Two people are in an intense argument and things are heated. Both people deeply want the other to see their own position is right and the other is wrong. Eventually, one person delivers a line of reason that completely nullifies the other position. In this moment of victory, pride or something arises in the victor. But is that pride-alignment or pride-shame or is it even pride at all?

Excluding the very advanced, nearly everyone would experience some sort of positive emotion in that hypothetical, just from the tension being relieved, and I think that could easily be misidentified as pride when it might not be. I can even see in some situations it being closer to love than pride. For example, when a teacher who has been struggling for some time to get a student to see something finally has a breakthrough and she witnesses the moment the student realizes the teaching. There’s a positive emotion that something good has happened. If I were the teacher in this scenario, the pleasure I would feel would come from something good happening, not from the idea that I was the one who made it happen. 

Imagine the detriment to the person who is not experiencing pride but rather, a desire for good to prevail, but that person misidentifies that in them which is inherently good as something that is inherently bad and needs to be worked on or removed. It could be the case that it just needs reframed. Just thinking out loud. The ego is tricky so maybe all this is bs, but maybe it’s not.

You said that you, even as a child, always acted on good faith and it became clear that the majority did not. This seems like a battle of good and evil and evil has the numbers. There are more of them than there are of you. This creates anger and resentment at the injustice of it all and one wants it resolved. In the resolution, one might think their negative emotion stems from something broken in them rather than a right frustration against that which tramples upon good. Again, just thinking out loud.

Seems like a slippery slope but maybe there’s something there.

 

Edited July 8 by Joshe

[Danioover9000]

@Joshe

On 2024-07-08 at 1:33 PM, Joshe said:

@Keryo Koffa That gives me a lot to ponder. Thank you for elaborating. 

I know this is off topic, but if you don’t mind, maybe you could expand my understanding of what pride and shame are. What are your thoughts on this:

Two people are in an intense argument and things are heated. Both people deeply want the other to see their own position is right and the other is wrong. Eventually, one person delivers a line of reason that completely nullifies the other position. In this moment of victory, pride or something arises in the victor. But is that pride-alignment or pride-shame or is it even pride at all?

Excluding the very advanced, nearly everyone would experience some sort of positive emotion in that hypothetical, just from the tension being relieved, and I think that could easily be misidentified as pride when it might not be. I can even see in some situations it being closer to love than pride. For example, when a teacher who has been struggling for some time to get a student to see something finally has a breakthrough and she witnesses the moment the student realizes the teaching. There’s a positive emotion that something good has happened. If I were the teacher in this scenario, the pleasure I would feel would come from something good happening, not from the idea that I was the one who made it happen. 

Imagine the detriment to the person who is not experiencing pride but rather, a desire for good to prevail, but that person misidentifies that in them which is inherently good as something that is inherently bad and needs to be worked on or removed. It could be the case that it just needs reframed. Just thinking out loud. The ego is tricky so maybe all this is bs, but maybe it’s not.

You said that you, even as a child, always acted on good faith and it became clear that the majority did not. This seems like a battle of good and evil and evil has the numbers. There are more of them than there are of you. This creates anger and resentment at the injustice of it all and one wants it resolved. In the resolution, one might think their negative emotion stems from something broken in them rather than a right frustration against that which tramples upon good. Again, just thinking out loud.

Seems like a slippery slope but maybe there’s something there.

 

   First off arguments in it's foundation are not about wanting the other to see you as right, but rather making your view and your position the right one, more right than the other, and in some case to humiliate the other's position by persuading and convincing. To do that you have to have a position on some conflict of interest between you 2 or more sides to a resolution, then you argue and list your reasons why, and provide evidence. That's a bare bones as you get with arguing, plus you're ability to string together fallacies and convince more people to side with you is what really matters. The emotions and feelings come second.