Humility: What Is It And Why Should You Have It? Is being humble the same as being Meek? Powerless? Stupid?
Get Ready To Be Surprised!
More often than not guidance comes from a student or client request.
Today I heard from a long time client who never managed to go from A to B… despite the many courses she attended.
She had a difficult time accessing an activator, part of the Second Phase Activators (I downloaded more than 100 activators in that course!).
I listened to it and it dawned on me that without activating humility, of course you’ll never learn anything. Anything new, anything different… You won’t be able to replace your fixed meaning with a more wholesome one. You won’t be able to change your mind. And you’ll be stuck with what you think you KNOW that is not true, not empowering, not useful.
This is where humility and flexibility is a team… while arrogance and rigidity is the opposing team.
Here is the article I wrote at the time, and in the meantime I am trying to rescue that video: given that it is the cornerstone of all learning, all growth, all evolution, of raising your vibration. If necessary, I’ll dedicate another webinar to the topic…
In the meantime, here is the original article from 2012.
On Humility
Most humility that we know as humility is a pretense. It is designed by us to dupe people into thinking that they don’t need to beat us over the head for us to get what they say or to think well of us, blah blah blah. That humility is an outside job. Real humility is an inside job. And real humility is very very very selfish! (Did I tell you to prepare to be surprised?)
Real humility (I should be an expert on this, after all this is my soul correction!) is very different.
Humility is a great hearing aid for helping us to become open to guidance (from Source, from Soul, from feelings, from other people).
Sometimes we don’t hear because we have a process to go through. And sometimes it’s the process that creates the humility to hear.
Most people need to be broken BEFORE the messages can enter.
Why would being broken work?
The ego that wants you to stay the same, that wants to perpetuate the status quo, good or bad, useless or useful, has to wake up to the new reality: you are beaten, you are broken, ego needs to allow change.
Does it always work? No. Unless there is support from your conscious mind, from your subconscious mind, from your soul, this is going to become an ‘oscillating structure’ where you are going to go back and forth… from improvement to back where you started.
The ego is going to create a Sisyphus ‘syndrome;’
Sisyphus’ story is part of Greek Mythology. The myth is that this dude, Sisyphus, was condemned to attempt to roll a huge boulder to the top of the mountain each day, only for it to roll back to the bottom at the end of the day. Others say that Sisyphus is a symbol of the sun that rises every morning, and sets every night…
But the popular interpretation, what I am really referring to here is ‘starting and starting and starting and never accomplishing anything…’ nasty stuff.
So what can you do instead, so you can grow, so you can become all you can be?
In one training on training I participated in back in 1987, we were taught that you needed to declare yourself incompetent in order to be trained.
Am I saying you are incompetent? No. I am asking you to create the condition in which you can be trained. In which you will allow something new, something different to come in.
You need to create yourself an empty vessel, an empty cup, so you can be filled. You can sort through the new stuff after the training is done.
Is that humility? Yes, that is humility of the highest degree!
You disengage your know-it-all, your 3-year old. Have you noticed that you can’t explain anything to a 3-year old: they already know everything. The next know-it-all stage comes when they become a teenager… there, for most of us, it stays. Even the best of us can’t hear anything the way it is said, the best we can do is
- agree/disagree,
- like/not like,
- judge the new information as true/false, and if it passes our muster, if it is compatible with what we already know, then we’ll fit it into the brick wall of what we already know. So, in essence, you are stuck with what you already had… what got you where you are, what made you read an article, or do a course… Nothing.changed.
Why doesn’t this method work?
One: we are not listening. We are not hearing. We are busy thinking about what we heard.
That is how arrogance expresses itself: by thinking that YOUR opinion is more important than what you read or hear.
This is why most people never learn, consciously, anything new. Unconsciously, of course, you learn all kinds of useless garbage. That unconscious garbage is going to form the basis of your judgment to accept or reject the new knowledge.
Which means:
Unless you raise your humility you will never raise your vibration, you will never become a happier human being, no matter what someone teaches you.
And you may even like the person’s style, their smile, the teaching, it will not matter. You won’t learn, unless you consider, for a brief time, that your likes, dislikes, your opinion, and even your current knowledge doesn’t matter.
Lots of people come here, people who actually like me. How many actually learn something instrumental?
I emphasize ‘instrumental’ because the type of knowledge that just sits in your head making you an even bigger smart-ass won’t do you any good!
Just listen to some students spouting words, like ‘distinction’ and other jargon words… smart ass covering up not having learned anything.
How many actually learn something instrumental? One half of a percent, maybe.
Lots of people come here who don’t like me. They like somebody else. How many actually learn something instrumental from those teachers? One half of a percent, maybe.
Humility is what’s missing. Humility is saying:
‘What I already know got me to where I am.
If what I already know can take me where I want to go: what am I doing here? Let’s get out of here… I don’t need anything else.
If what I already know got me here, but won’t take me where I am going: let me empty my cup and hear if this takes me further. Maybe it will take me backwards for a little bit, to a point where I chose what I know that got me here but it can’t take me further.
And if I don’t like where I am at: I am definitely going to empty my mind, empty my cup, and get what’s here, in its entirety: I can always get rid of it, if it doesn’t work. I did it once, I can do it again.’
If you are smart, you print out this part… and carry it on your smart phone… wherever you go.
Now, the real question is: do you have this much control over your mind? I assert that you probably have NO control over your mind at all. Try to stop your thinking. Now! How did you do?
You have no control over the voices in your head, whether they are yours or whether they aren’t. The only thing you have control over here is your attention. Where you put it.
There is a law in the universe… it says:
only one thing can occupy any one space at any one time.
Whether that thing is physical, energetic, it doesn’t matter.
You can only have your attention (energetic) on one thing at any one time. If you put it on the voices… you have scarcely any life remaining for you.
You can put your attention on what you are doing, or what you hear, or what you read, and ignore the voices. And start having a life, start having humility, start being able to learn, to change your mind, to be the captain of your ship…
This is what we aim to practice in the Reality Challenge.
But alas, before you can ignore something, you need to distinguish it.
So the program asks you to catch and document your shoulds, and should nots… what you hear in your head…
Once you are good at it, you can start ignoring the voices.
Does it work? It does and it doesn’t.
One needs to have an honest desire to learn something new. And some urgency.
If your mind says: I don’t have time for that! then you won’t learn.
If your life expectancy, according to your parents, is 90 years, then at 50 you will have the feeling that you have time.
That’s where urgency comes in. I didn’t mean emergency: we all know that emergency makes us do things we would not consider without the emergency.
Urgency is a caused, a self-caused inner phenomenon.
You say to yourself: I can die at any minute and I can be sure of only one thing: I am alive this minute. And this minute I will go full out, and even if there are no more minutes left, I will do my life’s work in this one minute. I will do my soul correction, fully, completely, no holds barred.
Putting aside all you already know, all that who you consider yourself to be, all that got you where you are, all that has kept you safe… Putting it aside for what’s possible.
THAT IS HUMILITY. Moment to moment.
You brought up the point that people have to be “broken” before they will learn or listen. I noticed as I’ve read numerous articles about the law of attraction (in particular about prosperity) that the people writing them often don’t take into account that the people who are reading what they are writing tend to be reading them because they are desperate, and running out of options.
I say this as someone who was pretty desperate a couple of years ago. Desperate enough to start reading articles that I thought were insane at the time. The way I had to start with to really think about it was hypothetical, and remembering a lesson that I had learned from watching way to much Star Trek (all 5 series) my whole life, just because the idea is insane doesn’t stop it from being the right idea.