Recently, I have been fortunate to experience the offerings of the The Best Year of Your Life summit 2022. This has been an opportunity to tap into wise counsel, to feed my mind with contemporary wisdom in so many of the matters that vitally interest me and which touch on our work at my manifesto.
A particular speaker I would like to allude to in this blog is the Rev. Alfreda Lenoix, whose talk was entitled, Improving Your Relationships: Get to Know Yourself Better. I was particularly interested in the notion that ‘knowing yourself’ was integral to improving your other relationships. At the heart of my manifesto is the precept that self-knowledge provides the foundation for a life lived authentically. Accordingly, we have developed a structure within which to ‘hold you’ while you undertake the work of ‘knowing yourself’. Our work is consistent with the belief that when we more fully understand and accept ourselves, we are better positioned to make the choices that serve us and to live an intentional life.
Apparently, the additional benefit of undertaking the work of self-inquiry is the flow on to our other relationships. To reiterate: the key to improving our relationship with others is improving our relationship with ourselves. Rev. Lenoix stated, “The extent to which we relate to ourselves, is the extent to which we can relate to others”. Many of us are raised to look outward, to look to loving and caring for others as the way to live a good life. The converse, look inward and love yourself first in order to love others better, is an all-important reminder. Without self-care accompanying self-knowledge, our relationship with others will be as limited as our relationship with ourselves. The work we do in knowing ourselves, the courage we show in accepting what we find, is the key to living our life in congruence and in developing compassionate relationships with others.