Asking for what I want and need to be happy.

Do you remember being a young child? Do you remember what things were important to you? What were the things you protected?

If we are going to be who we really are, we have to make it safe for the child within us to be who they are.

If the child within us finds it difficult to play, have fun or be assertive when it is important to, we can give them a hand by doing the exercise that follows.

Every child has a legitimate need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously and respected.

When we were very small the face of our parents was our mirror. We wanted to look into it and see how wonderful we were. We wanted to feel the world was a safe place where our parents rewarded themselves for being loving parents, with good feelings.

If we looked into our parents faces and saw their expectations, plans and fears instead, we had a difficult time seeing unconditional love.

Our parents may have been insecure and needed their own reassurance.

Experiencing our own emotions and needs as natural gives our inner child self esteem.

If we experienced our own emotions, needs and desires as less important than making a person that takes care of us comfortable, it may have been uncomfortable for us to experience being who we are.

What was lost, was the unconditional love and acceptance we would have acquired for being ourselves.

We may not have been unconditionally loved but instead admired for our achievements, qualities or talents. Admiration is a poor substitute for love.

It is time to have real love for ourselves now. Real love is something we always want to have.

The child within us still wants to be unconditionally loved, heard, seen and enjoyed. Our inner child still wants to play, have fun and have emotions.

We are the adult that has the power over our inner child now. We may have blamed someone else before but we are the caregivers for the child within now. What is our excuse for not doing more?

Admiration is not the same thing as love, it is a substitute. We want to give ourselves real love now not just admiration.

When the authenticity of our own feelings, good or bad, is the most important thing for us we begin to respect who we are. When we respect who we are, we begin to give ourselves unconditional love.

It is not the possession of certain qualities, achievements, or talents that makes us lovable, we are lovable because of who we are when we are authentic.

Self esteem begins when we stop suppressing our feelings.

We are much more creative, powerful, alive, passionate, playful and strong being who we are when we are real.

We know we are being ourselves when we are able to reward ourselves, for being authentic.

Many of us still look into another adults eyes for admiration.

We are our own parent now. We need to be good to our inner child, that is a large part of who we are.

We can look into our own eyes and give ourselves real unconditional love and admire ourselves for having the self esteem to do that.

Many people have been abused. If we have been abused it is hard to know when we are safe. We may feel safe when we are making someone that has power over us comfortable.

If we become hyper vigilant in situations where we have control, we continuing the cycle of abuse. We want to feel safe in situations we are safe in. We have the ability to open our heart and give love to those that care about us.

In order for us to feel safe in safe situations, we must know when we are in an unsafe situation.

The first step is we want to be able to feel assertive when it is appropriate. Enlightenment is about clarity, not seeing bad things as good.

We do not want to feel we are safe in a situation where someone has taken our power. We do not want to do exercises to feel safe in an unsafe situation.

Just as we only feel tension from a hard days work after we get home and relax, we may not feel unsafe until we are in a situation where it is safe for us to feel. We relax in a safe situation and feel the feelings we have suppressed. Until we are actually safe all the time, feeling safe in a safe situation is not truly possible.

We want to have clarity, authenticity of our feelings and admire ourselves for our courage.

Being assertive and taking back our power are good things. We want to empower ourselves, we want to make our feelings, our ideas, our happiness, important, just as we wanted to as a young child.

We do not want to feel comfortable making someone that wants to take our power comfortable, we want to feel we can be assertive.

When we can differentiate between someone that has taken our power and someone we want to give our time to because they have earned our respect, we are able to see clearly.

We want to do the feeling safe exercise when we are able to be safe.

These exercises are about empowering ourselves.

Exercise One- Is it safe for me to be myself and happy in all the situations I am in? We are going to find out if we feel safe asking for what we want and need at work and at home.

Click on the above exercise.

Exercise Two- I am safe asking for what I want and what I need to be happy.

Click on the above to hear the exercise.

Automatically preparing to receive the things we want and need to be happy, because we feel good about asking for them, allows us to ask for them in a way that makes it possible to have them.