S2 EP271 – The Uplift Effect: Lifting Yourself and 0thers

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Today I’m speaking to the issue of being able to uplift yourself and uplift others. So I was not brought up to understand anything about uplifting anybody because my family had no idea that they could uplift themselves or they could uplift me as an only child or uplift others. They were mainly critical, judgmental, harsh, they were quickly able to see what was wrong, but I don’t remember them being able to see what was good, what was loving. In fact, with school with me, they didn’t care how I did. I came home with all A’s they’d never noticed, there was never anything really positive. In fact, it was the opposite because I think that my mother was very threatened by my father’s attention to me, so she did everything she could to hold me down. She didn’t want me to go to college.

She really did not want me to succeed. When I came home with such good grades, she would say, oh, honey, you don’t have to work so hard, which made me feel so unseen because I actually didn’t have to work very hard to do very well in school. So I didn’t have an experience that people uplifted each other, I just had the experience of people criticizing each other. And so of course I had no idea that I could uplift myself or uplift others until I met Erika. Now, I don’t know how Erika got to be so uplifting with other people because her background was even worse than mine. Way, way worse than mine in terms of being put down, held back, abused in so many different ways. But for some reason, Erika learned to uplift and to really be able to see who somebody is in their essence.

And to speak to that, and I’ve seen her do this over and over and over again. I’ve seen her do it with homeless people, I’ve seen her do it with checkers at a market or banks or anyone who engages her. Her intention when she meets somebody is always to be uplifting with them, and it’s so beautiful to see how people respond to that. It’s like the light goes on within them, somebody is seeing them, somebody is valuing them, somebody is seeing them as a human being, not as just a homeless person or just as a checker in the market, but as a full human being. And it just brings such smiles to my face when I’ve been with her and see the effect that she has on people when she’s uplifting and she does this with anybody. I think it’s fairly automatic, I think that her intention is always to uplift people, and it’s just such a beautiful thing.

And so that developed my ability. I saw that as it’s not just about criticizing people, in fact, it’s not at all about criticizing people, judging people, it’s about seeing what’s beautiful about them, seeing the best in them, and being able to mirror that to them. And so I have developed that ability now along with my ability to see the essence of others. I think that I’ve always had this ability to see beyond people’s woundedness into who they are in their essence, but I didn’t know until I met Erika that it was actually loving to reflect somebody’s essence. And so I uplift people all the time now, I uplift my clients, my friends, people I love, my family, by mirroring their essence, by seeing them, they start to see themselves. And so I can see who they are on the soul level, I can see their ability to love.

I can see their caring, their openness. And when I see that, then they start to see this in themselves. And this is really what healing is about. Healing is about knowing who we really are, I’ve said this so often in the podcast that seeing is really about knowing who you really are and valuing who you really are as a soul, recognizing that I am not my wounded self. I thought for a long time I was my wounded self that I was this scared, that insecure person who was fairly harsh and critical because that’s who I had learned to be. I thought that’s who I was and I didn’t think I was good enough. But with Inner Bonding and with the role modeling that Erika has given me, I’ve learned to express what I see in people. I see it in myself, I’ve learned to define my own soul essence, my own deep worth, my own lovingness.

And that makes it really easy to see that in others. And I get great joy when they start to see it in themselves because this is what healing is. It’s knowing who you truly are, not who your wounded self thinks you are. You are not your wounded self, we created our wounded self, spirit, God, whatever you want to call it, created who we really are, our true soul essence. And one of the things we can give each other, one of the things you can give the people in your life is to see who they really are, to tell them to mirror that, to help them to see who they really are. It makes me think about a story by Dr. David Hawkins, who wrote a fabulous book called Power vs. Force, one of my favorite books. And he was an amazing human being. He was a PhD and he was a physician.

And one of the stories that he told in the book is that he was in a mental hospital and he was there because he wanted to help heal people in the mental hospital. And one of the stories he told was by looking in the eyes, looking deeply in the eyes of one of the inmates and really seeing him, seeing his true self, not the mental illness, but the soul within this man. And he looked him in the eyes and saw him, and the man got seen, the man felt seen by Dr. David Hawkins and in being seen, he got healed. It’s really an amazing story about an instant healing, not just with one person but with many people in the mental hospital. That his looking in their eyes, his really seeing them enabled them to see themselves. And that’s what healing is, seeing who you really are in your soul essence.

And what this leads to, which is so important on our planet today, is it leads to a sense of oneness. Now, let me talk a little bit I want to talk a little bit about oneness because there’s too much separation in our society. There’s too much separation, there’s us and them, there’s people and there’s animals, there’s people and the planet, and people see it as separate. But as you really get to know your own soul essence and perhaps with help from somebody who can really see you, but as you get to know who you really are, then you are able to see that essence of others and feel your oneness with them. You can actually feel your oneness with people, you can feel your oneness with animals, you can feel your oneness with the plants, with the trees, with the flowers, with the planet, because we are all an expression of God.

That is love is the creator. My experience of God is that it’s not a being, it’s the energy of love and peace and wisdom and joy. And when we open to who we are, we are a spark of that. We are a spark of that divine love within us, and when we get that and we’re able to start to see that love in others, we start to feel a sense of oneness. We know that we’re all pieces of a giant puzzle, each of us a different shape, each of us a different color, but each of us a major part of that puzzle. If you think about a puzzle, that puzzle isn’t incomplete if one piece is missing. So if you’re not there, you’re not part of the oneness. We are all part of this oneness that we can experience once we know who we are, we uplift ourselves by knowing who we are.

We uplift others by knowing who they are, and we greatly uplift them when we feel our oneness with them, people can feel that. They can feel when we’re coming to them with a sense of equality. And we do have a sense of equality when we recognize who we are in our own soul and we recognize who they are in their souls. We know, I mean, we do different things, some people have more, some people have less, but on the soul level, there’s a sense of equality. And when you come from this within yourself, when you’re not putting yourself one upper one down, like the wound itself does, the wound itself tends to put us one upper one down. But that’s not what the loving adult does. And the more you learn and practice Inner Bonding and develop your loving adult, the more you know that you are not better than or worse than.

You’re different, we’re all different, but it’s not a matter of one up or one down. And when you feel your equality with others, they get that and they are uplifted by it, and you are too. You’re uplifted, I am uplifted when I genuinely see another person in their soul and I get such joy and such pleasure out of mirroring who they are. I’m also uplifted by that. So I’ve talked about the fact that I am a member of the Transformational Leadership Council, and when I was at one of the retreats in July, I had the pleasure of meeting a very famous author who’s a member of the Transformational Leadership Council. His name is Ken Honda, he’s from Japan, and he is written some wonderful books, and he’s very, very famous in Japan, and he’s a brilliant man and a very, very sweet, kind, loving person.

And so I was at a dinner on the last night and there were about a dozen of us at this table, and I ended up sitting next to Ken Honda, which I was so happy about because I really wanted to get to know him, having read his books, I really wanted to know more about him. One of the things he said to me, which was so powerful for me in terms of being able to uplift myself is he said, he’s starting to give these workshops and he’s teaching people that if they say thank you 3,000 times a day, which of course is really a lot, and I don’t know how you add that up, but if you say thank you 3,000 times a day and in Japanese it’s arigato, everything shifts for you. You start to be able to manifest what you want, you feel so much happier, so much better.

And so I heard him and I have definitely been practicing this, but the interesting thing about it is that the more I do this, the more I really focus on being grateful for every single little thing in my life, the more I can feel the resistance of my wounded self. In fact, I went through a couple of days of feeling really bad after maybe even saying thank you 3,000 times, I did it a lot, I felt so great, I felt on top of the world, And then the next day I felt down. And so of course I did my Inner Bonding work and I took a look at what was happening. I was feeling so good when I was saying thank you, and then all of a sudden I was feeling bad. And so I realized as I did my inner bonding practice that my wounded self was not at all happy with the fact that I was uplifting myself with so much gratitude because my wounded self, like everybody’s wounded, self, wants to stay in control.

And the more I’ve done my inner healing work, my inner bonding work, and now focusing on this big level of gratitude, the more threatened my wounded self is, it doesn’t want me to be that uplifted. And so it will go into resistance. “No, I don’t want to say thank you that much. What’s the point of saying thank you that much?” That’s the kind of thing that the wound itself will do. Well, once I realized this, once I realized that I was feeling bad because I was allowing the resistance of my wounded self to stop me from this project that I have of being able to say thank you 3,000 times throughout the day, I could let that go, I could say to my wounded self, “You know what, I like saying this. It makes me happy, it makes me feel good, I know you’re threatened by it, but please just back off because I am going to continue to practice this whether you like it or not.

I am going to continue to be thankful for the big and little things in my life.” So many of you listening to this have a lot in your life, have more than people in many places in the world. And yet, how often do you uplift yourself by being thankful for big and little things, not just the big things, but little things that a lot of people don’t have? There may be big things like somebody might not have a bed and that’s a big thing, but maybe somebody doesn’t have a toothbrush or dental floss or something like that, maybe somebody doesn’t have Kleenex, maybe they don’t have an egg to eat in the morning, maybe they don’t have enough vegetables, maybe they don’t have enough to eat, period. Maybe there’s not even a place for them to go to get good food, like many of us in this country don’t have access or all over the world actually, not just in the us don’t have access to really good food.

But I do. And most of you do. And I think that it’s wonderful to be thankful for the food we eat, for all the things we have for our bed, for each other, and so I want to encourage you to start bringing that thankfulness more and more into your life, the research on gratitude does say it’s very, very uplifting. So it’s uplifting for you, it’s uplifting for others, I really encourage you to practice that. So as I’ve often said, I generally walk first thing in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, but my walk is really, really important to me outside up and down hills, and I do my prayer work and my inner bonding work while I’m walking. And so I pray for a lot of people and then I ask my little girl how she’s doing and see what’s going on, and if she’s doing fine, I go right to my higher guidance and I ask my guidance, “Is there anything that you want to tell me?

What do I need to know today?” Well, very often there’s three things that my guidance tells me to focus on. One is faith, one is gratitude, and one is smiling. It’s amazing what smiles do when you’re around other people, smiles are contagious. So for me, faith means that I know that I am being guided moment by moment in my highest good. It took me a long time to have faith because as many of you know, I was brought up in an atheist home, I didn’t have any support for my natural spirituality. And so I didn’t have a sense of faith and when I started to practice Inner Bonding, I really did not have faith that there was anything there guiding me, I thought maybe other people had that, but not me, I was not in touch with that. It took a lot of practice of Inner Bonding before I had that access to my higher guidance and knew that I wasn’t alone here, knew that I was being guided.

And of course that makes it so much easier to have faith. But even that gets challenged, we all have difficult things that happen to us, and when difficult things happen, like what happened with my office burning to the ground in the Palisades fire, it’s sometimes hard to say, yeah, I’m being guided in my highest good. And yet I see over and over again how I am being guided in my highest good. How when I stay open to lifting myself, lifting others, being loving to myself, being loving to others, staying open to learning with my higher guidance that lets me know that I’m not alone. And even when tough things happen, it makes it so much easier to stay in faith that I am being guided in my highest good. Of course, gratitude, the other thing, the second thing that my guidance tells me to focus on is what I am focusing on.

I’m still a work in progress. It takes practice to be able to say thank you 3,000 times a day, but I am getting there. And with the smile, I love to smile, smiling, uplifts me and smiling uplifts others. And think about this, think about how do you go about your day? Do you go about your day being pulled down by the false beliefs of your wounded self? Or are you open to being guided and lifted by your higher guidance? How often when you are by yourself or with others, do you smile? Research shows that smiling has a really, really positive effect on our system. And so one of the easiest ways to uplift yourself and uplift others is very simply to smile. So I want to encourage you to practice these things, to practice faith, to practice gratitude, to practice smiling, to practice tuning into your guidance and knowing you’re not alone, to practice defining your own worth and being able to see the beautiful souls of others and saying something to them, being uplifting, not just with yourself but with them, and not just with them, but with yourself. 

You’ll be amazed at what focusing on being uplifting to yourself and to others does for your life. So I hope that you join me for my masterclass, which I think is going to be now called Master Circle, where I do individual work with people, you can really see Inner Bonding at work. And this is the least expensive way to work one-on-one with me, to get the help you need is to be part of my Master Circle. And you can go onto our website, look under events, and click on, it’s still called the masterclass, but we are going to be changing it to the Master Circle so you can click on that. And I hope I see you there. 

https://www.innerbonding.com

https://innerbondinghub.com/membership.

I am sending you my love and my blessings.