The first layer is filled with anxiety and stress because there is no certainty of the future in the first layer. Given that all eyes are turned to the future, this creates, whether we know it or not, an underlying anxiety that can either sabotage what we wish to achieve or lead to disruption: calamity, disaster and humbling circumstances at both a work and personal level. Today we discuss getting past the first layer by breaking the myth of individuality.

Individuality is the awareness of separation, which we call, ME. That is: individuality is that idea of separate thought, separate emotion, “I am I and I have a right to be an individual.” As an individual a person has become conscious of their separate action. This desire for a separate identity forces people to enter into work they hate, activities they don’t understand, vocations that are boring attempting to prove something, to create a sense of individuality. Individuality is not harmonious; it is a fiction. 

Rather than seeking “identification with individuality” you might find more harmony in your heart if you say, “I am no better or worse than anybody else. I am clever as well as dumb, I am happy and sometimes sad, I am right and equally wrong, I am nice and sometimes mean, I am humble and, at the same time proud, I am success and I am a failure.” Then you can stop trying to be different and wasting all that time on identity and get on with life and loving people for who they are, just like you. Once this is accomplished you are beginning to develop some sense of personal harmony.

With children – you don’t bring them up best by comparing who they are to some arbitrary standard you’ve created. You free them by respect and love and by seeing their gifts. People become as we treat them. They, like you, are a perfect balance of good news and bad, and the wise parent knows it, but focuses on the good news (called strengths by some). 

People do not thrive by putting them in boxes that have negative labels like ADD or depression. When we see our family it is wiser to say, “ There is no separation between me and my child. What I see in them is in me in a different form. Therefore if there’s nothing I need to change in them, it is all worthy of love in them, as it is in me. But if we don’t like ourselves, we can easily start trying to change that aspect of us by eliminating it in them. 

If they are hyperactive it’s because you can’t concentrate on one thing at a time. If they are ADD then you lack discipline. It’s always a mirror. So, rather than individualise your children, see that they too, are interconnected with you, and that they are the perfect mirror. If you don’t like something in them, rather than punish them to fix it, learn to love it in you first.