Newsletter 18

Top Drawer, Bottom Drawer.

Let’s spend sometime thinking about our relationships and feel into our behaviour, or the behaviour of our partners. And - be honest – we often find ourselves complaining silently or not so silently about how our partners don’t seem to fully give to us. However if we take the time and honestly look at how much we give to our partners we find ourselves wanting. It is as if we expect top drawer from them but in fact we are only giving bottom drawer.

Often we are not aware of this behaviour and for me the place I notice it most is where I demand good service at restaurants, at hotel check-ins, by my chosen airline, etc etc. I find I become offended if they don’t instantly snap to attention and treat me like the Queen! And yet if I was in service to them what would I really give? At home I find myself in much the same predicament, happily demanding full attention and satisfaction and yet how often do I give to such a level that it brings about their/her total satisfaction? Maybe not very often is the answer to that.

So what drives this behaviour? The answer seems to be a deeply hidden place of feeling as if I have little or no value, so in order to compensate for this lack I demand value from others. But as I am already starved of it I am unable to give value. To compound the problem, no matter how much other people give value to me I don’t recognise it because we can only receive as much as we give.

All of us have compensated for feelings of valuelessness, mostly by keeping busy or working hard (two of my favourites). It appears as if the busyness is saying, ‘Look I have value, look what I can do! So you have to keep me around and keep reminding me how many uses I have and how indispensible I am’.

All this just covers our own deep sense of valuelessness and accounts for why so many people die after a life of busyness soon after their retirement. That is if they truly retire, for most people continue to work just as hard after retirement as before because if they did not then these feelings would begin to surface, and when we feel valueless we just want to lie down and die.

For women, the onset of menopause can be a trigger for feeling as if the ‘valuable’ part of life is over. Then if we confuse the end of fertility with the end of libido we reinforce our sense that we have little to offer.

Of course nothing could be further from the truth, as we all have fantastic value, but we have been tricked and we do need to relearn the lesson. While that might seem to be a hard task, there is an easy way. To follow one of the great principles, in order to have anything in your life, give that very thing yourself.

So in order to feel value, give value. Give value to everybody you meet. Look for the value in them and recognise it, appreciate others for what they have come through. Appreciate our partner that he or she has still chosen to be with us. And as you give others value you will begin to feel and know your own and we all move to top drawer.

Love
Jeff and Sue Allen

A poem from Hafiz

The Gift
Our
Union is like this:

You feel cold
So I reach for a blanket to cover
Our shivering feet.

A hunger comes into your body
So I run to my garden
And start digging potatoes.

You ask for a few words of comfort and guidance,
I quickly kneel at your side offering you
This whole book -
As a gift.

You ache with loneliness one night
So much you weep
And I say,
Here’s a rope,
Tie it around me,

Hafiz
Will be your companion
For life.