Overcoming Pride and Growing Forward

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An excerpt from Breakup Rehab by Rebekah Freedom McClaskey

How does one regain confidence and optimism about love after a breakup? After her own relationship ended, author and counselor Rebekah Freedom McClaskey developed and practiced a series of small, step-by-step actions that ultimately helped her heal her heart and live in harmony with her destiny.

In Breakup Rehab: Creating the Love You Want, Rebekah meets readers in their states of grief or resignation and walks them through twelve steps to forgiveness and self-responsibility, self-compassion and self-awareness, power and purpose.  We hope you’ll enjoy this excerpt from the book.

Step 8 of Breakup Rehab is about overcoming pride and growing forward. Without forward motion we just get stuck. It’s risky to love and risky to grow. I’ve witnessed my clients’ relationships break apart because one partner will look at the other and say, “Do your work.” Pride keeps us from seeing that it’s “our” work. Now the real work is to use self-awareness about how pride contributed to your breakup so that you can grow forward.

This is a crucial step. Overcoming pride is the difference between repeating old patterns and creating a new life. If we keep an eye on the past it will replicate in our future. Remember, our reality is a collaborative effort between mind and matter.

It’s Not a Race
Who are you really competing against when you make breaking up a race to win? Or were you racing to get your way? Either way, we tend to compete with each other only to lose sight of the real prize — creating the love we want with someone who wants it too.

Western culture prides itself on individualism, which leads to competition over collaboration. Both growth and creation are collaborative processes. If your relationship was a competition for who got their needs met most — the power struggle — then chances are that caused the breakup. We do the best we know how at the time. Some attempts are better than others. It’s true, your ex may really suck at life. You may suck just a little too. You have a choice to be prideful and competitive about it or seek to work in collaboration with cooperative components — people, places, and things that contribute to your well-being.

Let me talk to your heart for a minute. Hey, I know you feel broken right now. I know that the mind is barking orders at you. It’s okay. You know what to do. That’s right. Find your rhythm. You feel a little off right now. A little confused. But you know where true north is for you. Just give yourself a little time to stabilize. You’ve been running a hard race after all.

I assure you, we’re all unstable after a breakup. Our pride is often a major contributor to the fallout. Adam Shannon, the author of the website DeadlySins.com, defines pride as “excessive belief in one’s own abilities, that interferes with the individual’s recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity.” I believe that vanity is the denial of impermanence in that all things will return to dust and ash in this physical world. We cling tightly to dysfunctional beliefs because of pride and vanity.

When I’m working with clients to help them through their breakups I often ask, “What caused the breakup?” Of course, there are a variety of answers, including finances, kids, cheating, lies, falling out of love, a bad sex life, residual pain from trauma, and more. Of those issues, the underlying force seems to be someone who is too prideful to let their walls down, to admit they feel shame, and to ask for help.

Pride, like judgment, blocks our growth. We get stuck and can’t make the transition into healing and moving forward. I like to flip the script and bring up that a lot of people feel pride in “being unencumbered.” If you date, it sounds like, “Let’s just keep it casual.” Well, you know, I think fear of commitment is fear to grow. What do you think?

Where do commitment issues come from?

Pride.

“But, Rebekah, what about good pride? Can’t I be proud of all the things I’ve collaborated on? Is collaboration good and competition bad? What’s the difference?” Thank you for asking, person whose voice I pretended to be right there. You can be proud of yourself for leaving a bad relationship, which is good. But you can have pride and think you’re better than anyone else because you left that relationship, which is vanity.

Growth comes not in running the race against others and winning. It comes with realizing it’s not a competition. You can be proud of who you are without having pride.

Rebekah Freedom McClaskey is the author of Breakup Rehab: Create the Love You Want. A relationship specialist with a master’s degree in counseling psychology, her private practice focuses on helping clients get what they want out of life and love. She lives in Rancho Santa Fe, California. Visit her online at www.rebekahfreedom.com.

Excerpted from the book Breakup Rehab: Create the Love You Want. Copyright ©2017 by Rebekah Freedom McClaskey. Printed with permission from New World Library.

"Life happens. Life in the flow."

We learn over time that nobody can solve our problems, but someone can guide you how to solve the problem. You may receive guidance through a teacher, a guru or even strangers that you run into every day. As we practice yoga we learn that the more we know, the less we truly know. Every day I am reminded how much I truly do not know; a very humbling experience.
Yoga teaches me to be present. To just live for being and enjoying life as it is right NOW. Not ten minutes from now, no five days ago, but right now. We are taught to get out of our heads, to release worries and fears of the past or the future and to only live for this very moment. Presence.

"Lead me from untruth to truth, lead me from darkness to light." ~ Buddha

Through yoga we are reminded that we do have a dark side as well as a light side. We are not to repress the dark side, but embrace that side of our Self. We are the yin and the yang. We ultimately cleanse the dark stuff we hold inside. We shine the light on this. We must make friends with dark side. Both positive and negative balance out the whole. Daily practice refines and improves our inner vision to see our Self more clearly. We no longer need to run from fears. Face them and say I'm not running from you anymore. So much is in our heads, so much dark is only in our heads, self-doubt judgment betrayal. Yoga grounds the body so that the light and dark sides of ourselves become clear. So much is truly untrue. But as we diligently practice we are able to find the middle ground and walk our centered balanced line in life. We gain balance in centered lightheartedness. We can have harmony in both light and dark.

"Yoga tells us that the world is actually a projection of our own thoughts and we can modify our inner world to manifest into our outer world. When our inside realm is at peace and in harmony, our outer world shines this projection back at us."
~ David, Jiva Mukti Yoga co-founder

Yoga is observation.

We can observe our world and see what part that is in us is begin reflected back to us. We can then see what part of us needs modification or adjustment in order to have our outer reality reflect back to us the peace, happiness and love we so greatly desire and deserve.

Yoga is already inside of you. Happiness is there. Yoga helps you peel away the onion layers to get to the core. To freedom. The deepest Divine connection to the Ultimate Light Source.

Come out of wanting and back into acceptance and Joy. A yogi or yogini can turn any situation into bliss. That is a yogi. Yoga is being now. Ultimate yoga is meditation. Just BE.

Yoga is love.

"Love is the light that dissolves all walls between souls." 
~ Paramahansa Yogananda

Through a dedicated practice of all forms of yoga we can participate in the world with a sense of freedom, unaffected from trauma, depression, anger, etc. The freedom is balance in both.


Maggie Anderson is a Yoga & Spiritual Teacher, Reiki Master Teacher, Integrated Energy Therapy® Master Instructor, Soul Coach®, Past Life Coach, Magnified Healing® Master Teacher and Angelights Messenger. She is the author of How I Found My True Inner Peace and Divine Embrace. You can contact Maggie at SpiritualCompassConnection.com.

"Follow Your Bliss. It's Your Spiritual Compass."