APPROVAL
All conditioned people have desire for approval. That is how it works. Conditioning is an establishing some conceptual ideal within our thinking mind, and then we are measured by others and our self, as to whether we live up to that idealized idea. The range of the “ideal” is very wide based on the culture, religion, family, nation or other collective we live in. To be sure, if you were raised by humans, you were conditioned and now you have desire for approval.
We can think of our need for approval as being on a continuum. On the left side, is no desire for approval, and on the other is a complete need for approval. If we generalize this, I would say that the normal curve of need for approval is somewhat skewered to the right side. You can generalize this for your life, but it is more telling to look at specifics to put ourselves on this. In other words, most of us could care less if we have approval for various specific sets of skills or attributes. We don’t care if no one approves of our ability to do advanced math calculations. Or whether we can dunk a basketball, or cook a gourmet meal. But, of course, there are those out there that live or die by those approvals.
The more you let go of conditioning, the more you find that approval means less and less to you. Trying to convince yourself that you are “OK” without letting go of the underlying conditioning, is simply lying to yourself. If the conditions exist, you will seek some kind of approval. It is how it works.
I was lucky enough to unlearn a lot of conditioning when I was fairly young. Now, if that sounds like bragging, it is not. Unlearning conditioning when young, means going thru some painful experiences and being able to reflect on what is going on in me. Going beyond your conditional state, is going to the essence of your ego self. All ego is conditioning. All ego pain is lack of approval. Letting go of that conditioning, is letting go of a bit of who you are. It is how it works.
I would not put myself on the far left of that continuum, but I would guess that I am more on that side than most. Much of what I did in my professional and personal life, got many people to look at me with looks of ‘ what the hell is he doing?”. I got used to it. They called me “Teflon Tom” in my corporate job. And as freeing as it is to be out of the grasp of the need for approval, you quickly get that most people like that others want you to seek their approval. Especially, when they are in positions of power. And the need for approval really likes people in power. Or more accurately, loves to hate those in power.
At a personal level, the need for approval becomes less about our skills and abilities, and more about our attractiveness, our personality, our character, and other very vague qualities about our being. We may often not understand our discomfort by some minor slight, but there it is, nagging at us. “Why do I care about what so and so thinks about my tastes in furniture?” That is how we find out about our conditioning. Our emotional reactions do not lie, as much as we may like to about our self. Emotions come from our conditioned being, and when that is abraded, we react, we cannot help it, we find our being in a state… A state of lack of approval.
This is our life work, to use our need for approval to un-condition our being. I still find so many times that I am surprised with a reaction that is keyed to some unseen need for approval about some deeply held condition from so long ago. Instead of fighting it, take a moment to meditate on that, and separate your awareness from your thinking, and observe what that may be about. Seeing it clearly, is how it goes away. If you get a glimpse of that conditioning and begin to fight it, or deny it, then you are just attempting to get the approval from your own judging self that tells you that ‘you should be past all that”… Haha. We are not, if we are reacting.
Self conditioning is the most difficult to confront. When we cannot separate our being from our thought about life, we sincerely believe that we are all those conditioned states, and we are always our most severe judge. And we will never, ever live up to that judge. Tlane 4/18/16
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