Growing Self Esteem

Self esteem cannot be created through praise. It cannot be created through achievement, awards, and success.

Self esteem can only be grown from within. Like a seed that grows into a flower, self esteem cannot be forced into bloom. The right conditions can be cultivated, but a flower must grow and bloom of its own accord.

What are some of the conditions that can help to grow self esteem? Acknowledging and meeting the needs of a person, facilitating their development and capacity, and reflecting back to them their own unique identity and personality.

Everyone has the light within them, and when we reflect back their light, we help them see it more clearly. This is the greatest challenge in helping another - not to make them into your idea of good or shape them into your ideal, but rather to help them to cultivate their own voice and come into their own understanding of the true and the good.

And ultimately, you must give them the space to bloom of their own accord. The growth and fruition of natural things cannot be coerced or accelerated; and so each person must eventually be the source of their own impetus upwards and outwards.

St. Francis And The Sow

Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
             the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
             and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.