Generosity Is You Liking You

It is not anybody’s job to like you. That is your job. Your primary obligation in this third dimension is to establish a generous, open-minded orientation toward yourself. I mean that word, generous. How generously you relate to yourself is the template others reference. Your relationship with others mirrors your relationship to yourself, and that relationship runs on your internal standard. I call that standard structure.

Here is what most people miss. Others do not have access to your internal standards. They infer them from your behavior. People default to what your actions permit. This is not a complaint about people. It is how the reading works, for them and for me.

So watch the mechanism. What you permit is what you pay attention to. Attention toward something demonstrates importance. Attention away from something is neglect, and neglect signals permission. Write that down. Neglect signals permission, because neglect is observable. When you do not respond to your own needs, your own boundaries, and your own preferences, that non-response is behavior, and repeated behavior becomes a pattern, and the pattern becomes your standard operating procedure. Everyone observes it. Everyone follows it. You set the standard for how you get treated by demonstrating how you treat yourself.

Attention allocates focus. Whatever gets your attention becomes the priority, and priorities assign relative importance. Where your attention flows, your energy goes, because attention is how you tell your energy what matters. When your needs, boundaries, and preferences get your attention, your behavior organizes to reflect them. It falls in line the way anything falls in line behind what has been declared important.

Now the definition. The self is an ongoing construct. When you address it as an essential and important vehicle for exploring and experiencing this cosmos, it emits a liking of itself. Generosity is liking yourself unconditionally. And unconditional acceptance is not indulgence and it is not judgment. It is an accurate assessment of what is. That is the generosity. Seeing what is there, plainly, and staying.

So the audit is simple. Look at what you neglected this week in your own house, your own body, your own time. Each neglect was a signed permission slip, and everyone around you read it. Take one back. Respond to one need you have been ignoring, on purpose, where you can observe yourself doing it. That response is a new standard being written, and you are the one writing it.