The Essence Of Need

by Dr. Paula Horan

It is essential to tune into the love that is all around us if we are to receive the abundance which is truly ours. Unfortunately, most people are not in contact with this infinite supply of love. Instead, we spend much of our time trying to please others. Most of us unconsciously, try to please our family, friends, and co-workers in order to barter for the love we so deeply crave — but will not acknowledge.

Vulnerability: Asking For What You Need

It took me years before I could allow myself to become vulnerable enough to simply ask for what I need.

We seek recognition outside of ourselves which can never replace the love which is already there inside of us — just waiting for us to experience. This deep need for approval can be traced to the development of the ego, the illusory identity created by the mind, which we use to manipulate our way through the physical world. Because of our strong identification with the ego or personality, we have lost touch with who we already really are — a vehicle or vessel of Universal Life Force Energy. There is no need to seek approval, and thus love outside of ourselves, for we are composed of love energy itself.

Shifting from a Consciousness of Lack

If you are that very energy, you only have to wake up to that fact, to have it operate in your life. It all comes down to a simple switch in consciousness: a shift from a consciousness of lack (which is what you have been brainwashed with by the unconscious mass hypnosis of many egos having bought into lack for eons), to an awareness of the infinite being that you are. You are much more than all your thoughts, feelings and emotions, much more than all your ideas of who you are and your beliefs which filter your experience of reality. You are the very substance or energy of the universe itself, and therefore are already in direct contact with it. It is only your attachment to your beliefs about yourself and the world around you, which shroud your deep inner knowing and keep you from this realization.

Breaking Free and Surrendering the Ego

The only way to break through this consciousness of lack is to surrender the ego (which is only a construction of your mind) to the greater Universal Life Force that is you. You don't have to fight your ego, or try to subdue it, or even wipe it out; you simply relegate it to its proper position. The ego is simply our land map for moving through the world of physical form. It is there to help us survive, and thus it has picked up some peculiar habits along the way according to each person's conditioning and prior circumstances.

Survival Techniques that are No Longer Necessary

Whatever actions may have been appropriate for your survival when you were a child, are probably no longer necessary. However, the ego cannot know that. It is like a computer program, reacting to life robotically; doing what it deems is most applicable in the present blocks you from feeling what is appropriate in the present moment, through its preconceived notions of what worked best in the past, and may not necessarily pertain any longer.

For example, as a five year old, you may have pushed others away to protect your vulnerability, which was trampled upon time and again by insensitive parents or siblings. Due to this experience, you may be resisting intimacy as an adult today by pushing others away and shutting them out the same way you did when you were five. This proclivity of the ego to protect us, is the very essence of our need to be right. At certain times we have needed to be right so that we could make the correct decision in order to survive. Nonetheless, in day to day relationships, this need to be right can become an insidious habit, which robs us of the intimacy we so deeply need in relationships and leads us into more pain and suffering. In order to make yourself right, most often you end up making someone else wrong, and we all know no one likes to be made wrong. The end result is that you push the other person away and end up feeling alone and separate.

Expecting Negative Behavior Patterns

The tendency is to just keep on projecting the same insensitivity we experienced as children on the people we are in relationship with at the moment. We may blame them and make them wrong because we feel needy. Unconsciously they end up "obliging" us by actually acting out the same negative behavior patterns we have come to expect, even if this is not their natural proclivity.

This constant projection on the present of a past reality is what binds and keeps us reliving the same miserable patterns over and over again. We automatically assume others will treat us as we have come to expect and because we are attuned to a certain frequency of behavior, we usually attract the perfect person to act it out. An extreme example is the battered child who then attracts a mate later in life to reenact the same pattern. As children, we so desperately crave love and attention that we will accept negative attention as an indication of love, if that is all we are given or offered.

What it comes down to is that what we experience in life, is exactly what we have come to picture in our minds. If you change your mind and expectations — your whole life changes. The people and situations you will attract, will be a direct reflection of your beliefs about yourself.

Admitting Your Needs: I Need You

To counteract the pattern of constantly attracting what you don't need, due to old outmoded beliefs, there is a very simple solution. One of the most profound lessons I have learned in my life is simply to ask for what I need. After having played the role of the "independent" totally self-sufficient career woman, it took me years before I could allow myself to become vulnerable enough to simply ask for what I need. Having played the teenage rebel role to the maximum in my early years, I continued the pattern by always being sure I could take care of myself. In all my relationships with men, I could never say "I need you". As far as I was concerned, to say such a thing would reveal a weakness I could not acknowledge at the time, and which would make me feel terribly vulnerable. As a result I went through several relationships which eventually all ended in a deadlock, as neither of us could ever commit or even admit that we needed one another.

This incredible need for love we all have, if left unacknowledged, leads to a terrible sense of neediness. If we allow ourselves to reach the level of neediness where we become desperate to find a partner simply to help assuage our hunger for love, we will find this very neediness sends any possible companion running. No one is attracted to a needy person, because a needy person has drained him or herself of the ability to give, as well as to receive on a very deep level.

Feel Your Needs and They Disappear

Whenever you come to a point where you allow yourself to feel your need, and openly express it to another, your need suddenly disappears. Paradoxically, the only way to transcend neediness, is to openly express that need — not resist it. Just like the pain which disappears when you put all your attention on it, neediness disappears when you allow yourself to feel the need.

It is helpful to consider that, at the deepest (or highest) level, we don't really need "others" because "others" are just different expressions of your True Self. They only help mirror what we already are deep inside, for they are intrinsically who we already are. How can you need something that you already are? You were never separate to begin with! To help understand this truth which seems so confusing when you view it from the vantage point of a person with a "separate" body, it pays to look how experience is processed by the mind.

Putting It Together

Everything we experience actually happens entirely through the mind which is composed of all our thoughts and beliefs of how things are. We interpret all the circumstances in which we find ourselves with the mind. Thus, what we are really dealing with (our thoughts), is entirely unseen. Our experience of others is also only in our thoughts, because even though we may touch them physically, we interpret that touch in our minds. It follows easily from this, that the essence of who we are is entirely unseen — and completely limitless, as are all "others" we experience with the mind. True Self just presents itself time and again in a variety of forms, the body being just a denser vibration of all-mind, giving the illusion of being separate from "others".

The ego or persona, as the mind's vehicle for experience in the world, begins to identify with the body as a "self" separate from the whole. This identification as a separate "I", sets in motion a major downward spiral into matter. We hook into all the thoughts which justify us as a separate "self' and conclude that all others are just as separate.

Feeling Separate and Alone

The mind gets hooked on the ego and the ego gets hooked on the body. Feeling separate, alone and embroiled in the five senses, we hook onto others who also feel this same aloneness, and together in full unconscious cooperation we all further exacerbate this illusion of separateness.

The only way out of this is to turn inward: to get to "know thyself as commanded by the oracle of Delphi. As we slowly discover what we are not, we eventually uncover true or Core Self — the unchanging essence which is attached to no-thing (nothing) and from which everything flows.

The quickest (or shortest) way to Self-Knowledge is direct self-inquiry. By constantly going within and asking, Who's angry? Who wants to know? Who is frustrated? Who is sad? Who loves? Who is laughing?, we discover that nothing is there. After you go through all the standard labels of who you think is there, that you always call yourself, you discover a silent presence which is ultimately the only thing we ever need to be in relationship with. When we are in contact with this essence, we are then in touch with it in all others, no matter how they may be acting outwardly at the time. When you can live from this quiet presence, you no longer take your (or any one else's) persona seriously, and you seldom get hooked on needing to be right, blame, guilt, fear, or the innumerable thought forms which habitually keep us hooked on the wheel of life.

Awareness of the True Self

Ultimately, to experience an abundance of love in our relationships, we need to see "others" as the true mirrors of Self that they really are. Each has the innate freedom and access to love and abundance as the next. To see others in this light we first have to see ourselves. Our very awareness of true Self as the source of loving relationship is what enables us to be in loving relationship. To gain this awareness it is essential that we learn to feel our needs fully. By turning to our heartfelt need, the True Self reveals itself.

This article was excerpted with permission from "Abundance Through Reiki", ©1994, by Dr. Paula Horan. Published by Lotus Press. http://www.lotuspress.com.

Info/Order book