Become Self Actualizing

I recently took a devastating blow in my personal life.

And I’ve been meditating.

These two things together are actually helping to move me forward on this goal. How ironically fortuitous.

Out of all of my goals, this is the most all-encompassing, biggest, most badass one.

Thanks to Abraham Maslow, I have a spiritual path of some sort. There’s a void in all of us. It’s in that part of the brain that seeks a purpose, a togetherness with reality, a thorough understanding of self. Many people fill this void with religion, but that’s just not for me.

When I read Maslow’s list of the qualities of self actualizing people, I decided that he was really on to something. Some of the qualities I could relate with, but with others, I still have a long way to go. His descriptions of Peak Experiences really resonate with me.

This is a lifelong goal, but I’m far enough along to realize that it’s the most worthwhile one to work towards.

I’m having a tough time with this goal. I think my job is really hurting me at this point. I feel demoralized much of the time and am in constant fear that my boss, who is always yelling at employees and demeaning them, might get mad at me and fire me. I found the below listed information on Self Actualization

Self-actualization implies the attainment of the basic needs of physiological, safety/security, love/belongingness, and self-esteem.

Maslow’s Basic Principles:

1. The normal personality is characterized by unity, integration, consistency, and coherence. Organization is the natural state, and disorganization is pathological.
 2. The organism can be analyzed by differentiating its parts, but no part can be studied in isolation. The whole functions according to laws that cannot be found in the parts.
 3. The organism has one sovereign drive, that of self-actualization. People strive continuously to realize their inherent potential by whatever avenues are open to them.
 4. The influence of the external environment on normal development is minimal. The organism's potential, if allowed to unfold by an appropriate environment, will produce a healthy, integrated personality.
 5. The comprehensive study of one person is more useful than the extensive investigation, in many people, of an isolated psychological function.
 6. The salvation of the human being is not to be found in either behaviorism or in psychoanalysis, (which deals with only the darker, meaner half of the individual). We must deal with the questions of value, individuality, consciousness, purpose, ethics and the higher reaches of human nature.
 7. Man is basically good not evil.
 8. Psychopathology generally results from the denial, frustration or twisting of our essential nature.
 9. Therapy of any sort, is a means of restoring a person to the path of self-actualization and development along the lines dictated by their inner nature.
10. When the four basic needs have been satisfied, the growth need or self-actualization need arises: A new discontent and restlessness will develop unless the individual is doing what he individually is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write--in short, what people can be they must be.