Early in your life you made decisions to explain why your need for love was not being met. You probably adopted a belief that there is something wrong with you, something unworthy or lacking. We spend our lives avoiding intimacy trying to hide this imagined flaw. From early failures we conclude how limited are our capabilities. We spend our lives trying to compensate for that basic sense of inadequacy and incompetence by striving for recognition, approval, security, sexual gratification, and status symbols (money, possessions, power).

The mind says, "If only I had that job, more income, a special relationship, a better body, then I would be happy." But you are programmed not to have those things, and you sabotage your best efforts. Ironically, even if you attain those desires, they don't fill the empty place.

Seeing the futility of these desires, and the damage done by the obsessive pursuit of them, religious teachers of all traditions have warned us not to seek false satisfactions. Instead, qualities of poverty, chastity and submission were idealized. Many traditions regard sexuality as sinful, so we feel guilty for experiencing the most natural pleasure, and shut down that energy flow.

The values of deprivation are deeply ingrained in our psyches, another reason why we seem to have unhappy relationships, to be ineffectual, to struggle with providing life's necessities. We fear, and avoid, prosperity, sexual satisfaction, and creative power.

Your identity, that with which you identify, is based on outmoded philosophies and erroneous beliefs, held securely in place by the repressed fear, pain and anger associated with them. You define yourself by your self-imposed limitations and self-negation, creating a life without joy, without hope of change.

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