What is your highest value?
Do you know what it is? Are you sure?
I was thinking about my highest value the other day and I thought I’d discovered I had two, because you can have two Highest Values right?
No. You can’t and here’s why. One of your ‘highest values’ will be a lower value, a fear based value, even though it might not seem that way at first glance, and you’ll use it to hide from the harder choice of living into your true Highest Value.
The two values I had identified for myself were security and freedom. And at first, I thought they were opposite of each other, after all security, feeling safe and secure is not about being free, it’s more about locking yourself down tight and staying with what you know.
And then I pushed deeper into it. What is security? I earn enough to get by, I live in a nice house, I’m doing okay. I have my beliefs about the world, about religion, about myself, I know my limits intellectually and I know my place in the world.
Wow, how’s that for staying in a comfort zone? Staying somewhere that sooner or later starts to restrict you and strangle you. My need for security if actually fear based and keeps me small, it limits me.
And when you think about freedom, the absoluteness of it is terrifying but only in total freedom is there real security.
Think about it. Financial freedom is a much greater concept than financial security. With one there is no limit, and you have the power to choose how to spend your time, your money and your efforts. Financial security instead has a definite feel of budget and restriction and denial to make sure your money will cover your expenses for the rest of your life.
Intellectual freedom has a much greater sense of pushing boundaries within and without. Challenging yourself to open your mind to new ideas, new information and assimilating new concepts about the world, its inhabitants and the incredible multitude of possibilities. To me, this means not just reading what I’m comfortable with, not sticking with the tried and true but pushing myself to explore new scientific research in fields I don’t know well, and new challenging research in those I thought I did know well, to check out new artists, new writers, new musicians, not judging but learning and experiencing and in doing so, making my life experience so much richer.
Spiritual freedom is going beyond the safety of the religion that defined my upbringing and the hodge-podge of spirituality and world religion pieces I have absorbed over the years to asking, what else is possible? And seeking answers from enlightened sources from all over, including the religion of my upbringing but without its rigid social structures. Spiritual freedom is being open to the belief that anything is possible and holding myself, not in conclusion or even in cynical denial, but in awe and wonder at the power of people to create stories to explain the unseen and to allow myself to feel the possibility of what could be everything or nothing at all.
Physical freedom is having a fit, healthy body that does what it was designed for, enabling me to enjoy the experiences of a fit, healthy body. That is so much more exciting than physical security which plays safe, and in which your body may never get beyond the couch in the living room!
So, after some lengthy internal debate, I reached the truth of my highest value: Freedom. It is no longer obscured by my fear value of security. And it is only by living into freedom through the choices I make, that I will gain the security my fear craves.
Ask yourself, ‘What is my highest value? Be prepared for a false start and question the first few that come into your mind. When you have settled on a highest value, examine it and ask yourself if it is fear based or love based. If fear based, it’s not your highest value, and is probably hiding your love value from you. Dig deeper.
When you make choices so that you are living from your highest value, you life will improve dramatically, you’ll feel better about yourself and like yourself a whole lot more.
It just makes me better when I choose to hold myself to the bigger, more awesome Freedom choice than the one that shuts my fear up with a temporary sense of security.
Cynthia Curry 