 I got this short question from Jessica and it's about emotional needs and Jessica's question is I don't know what my needs are, I don't know what I want, where do I begin to work on bringing some clarity to find out what my needs are. So it's a great question and first of all to Jessica or anybody else watching this and want you to give yourself a break because knowing what you want it's very important what you need is important but you know we're not very good at it none of us are actually very good at this knowing what our needs are because it's a very very complicated matter not impossible though and there's ways to go about it so that's the first thing to note none of us are great at this none of us actually ever perfect this knowing what our needs are so what we want to do is bring a kind of a lightness to this and acknowledgement that yeah there are there are needs I'm not really good at knowing what they are and I'm not really good at knowing how to meet them specifically what that might entail I'm not I'm not good at sitting down and analyzing and figuring that out by myself okay none of us are so the first thing is to just sort of some stillness and some releasing and letting go of needing to figure all this out by ourselves and to invite your higher mind in to be your guide and to be kind of like a what's the way to say this kind of like the the the executive who's going to sort of take on a lot of this for you in terms of identifying what your needs are and making sure that they're met and balanced now that is a starting point okay that's the most fundamental thing is to let go of control of how the needs need to be met not to deny them not to repress them but to let go of control and to realize I'm going to need a new guidance system here I'm going to need a new chief executive to run this operation because none of us are very good at this now over time and through that practice of stillness and inviting your higher mind in your higher self you will begin to get sort of better ideas about what your needs are and that's so much better because life is not a lot of fun when we don't know what our needs are we're completely blind to it and we're taking this sort of scatter going approach to hopefully you're trying different things and something will stick and something will meet a need and I feel more balanced so the scatter going approach isn't very good so over time through that invitation you'll begin to know more consciously what it is that your needs are you don't need to know perfectly what they are but you get a general sense of what seems to meet needs for us even that conscious awareness of it isn't essential if we fully give up control to our higher mind but you will develop that over time so ultimately with that new guidance system what you'll find is that you'll notice balance is coming so we are human beings we are complicated we are whole every one aspect of my life influences all other aspects of my life so what we're looking for is meeting needs in a way that is balanced that it's not off balance okay so that means let's say for instance you have five needs now I use a model of five basic needs that I developed over time the idea is that in meeting needs we do need that higher mind to guide this because it's not easy but what what the higher mind will do is it will find a way to balance needs to treat you as a complete human being who all these needs interact with each other and will therefore need to be kept within balance so that's one thing we are looking for with these needs when we're in the small egoic mind of trying to control it and figure it out by ourselves what tends to happen is let's say there are five needs these needs are actually seen as being in competition with one another and therefore you're going to have all vying for time and attention and energy and they're going to resent each other and everything else so when you are getting in touch with your higher mind and that stillness and that influence it's going to be seeing these as not in competition but actually complementary all part of the same one system so we're looking for balance with this now when you start to find ways to meet your needs okay you this is another important point but why we're not so good at meeting them and maintain that balance is well the higher mind might influence you into two let's say and in a given day this is what is required here to meet our needs and your higher mind is never going to force you it's never going to bully you it's never going to ask you to do something you can't do it's going to encourage you to do things that are easy and achievable and it might give you a way to do it and you'll have this realization oh my god that worked but the problem then becomes well that's the way it's going to be from now on every single day it needs to be exactly the way it was today because that worked and that's problematic because we kind of stubbornly stick to overly rigid formulas in terms of well what a routine looks like in terms of meeting a need and the problem with that is none of those rigid structures or routines will hold up it's an inevitability that they will break down why is that well like situations can come up and all sorts of things will happen not to mention the fact that your needs will fluctuate and change and vary so any system that you develop to meet your needs self parenting kind of thing approach or strategy will work but will never work permanently so one of the issues we have to look at is I can't be too rigid and stick into how I'm doing this which brings me to my next point which is well okay if I can't stick rigidly to a system and me and my needs what do I need well what we need is the practice of attunement regularly to what's happening within that system of needs so that's about basically you sit down and you get feedback from the needs and that's really even in my model of needs I have five needs you can check them out in a free book on my website it's called forget happiness which I outlined the five needs the fourth one in mind is basically about the need for attunement I call it the need for reflection but it's sitting down as in how did I do today how do I feel some things out of balance something didn't quite work there today but the last thing I'll say is that when we're practicing that attunement what we tend to do is we're super critical of ourselves for first of all well I didn't stick to the routine well you shouldn't have because it wasn't going to work permanently anyway it needed to break down but we criticize ourselves we attack ourselves for not being perfect there is no perfect system there is no perfect self-parenting you know there's that book the good enough parent well I advocate for being the good enough self-parent so it's it's it's never a thing you perfect meeting your own needs and a little bit of compassion for yourself and an acknowledgement that some days I won't do this well I was certainly want to a perfectly and I won't I certainly will not do it perfectly all the time so it's like okay instead of beating myself about the fact that I'm not going to the gym if that's one of my needs or I'm not working on a project or I didn't do my assignment or I didn't learn how to speak Spanish today whatever it might be in terms of these goals or needs that you have instead of beating ourselves up it's like okay something was off I wasn't quite fully attuned and that's part of how this works it's not a bad thing it's actually an inevitable thing attunement listen to what the needs are saying and it's basically calling out for some kind of an adjustment but that's all that's all it means it doesn't mean you're a bad person it doesn't mean you're failing at this it means you're engaged with the very complicated and always in flux process of figuring out what your needs are and meeting them now yeah it's it's like we need compassion because we're not going to do it perfectly but the good news is with attunement and more and more attunement and stillness and inviting in that presence to sort of guide you along that way you do get better at it you get a lot better at it and you know finally I'll just say you know with needs we do have needs and we have kind of two options with them one is to repress them and pretend like they're not there which isn't a lot of fun and doesn't work because you can't get rid of them the needs don't go away so my approach is meet them but we meet them in relationship with the higher mind with the higher self which is that presence that guides us through them in meeting them and it's also you'll find when you bring in that presence and you cultivate that relationship with your higher self that there's kind of less of a sort of a preoccupation on the needs and meeting them it's a much softer almost invisible experience when that presence is there yeah it's not denying the needs it's acknowledging them but it's so much more gentle and less high stakes when that presence is there so self-compassion but optimism too that you will get better at this so a few thoughts there for Jessica's question about meeting needs I hope that's useful if you want to find out more about this my book again forget happiness it's free it's on my website and it's really at the very least it's a really good starting point for what is all this stuff about me in my own needs and self-parenting and it'll give you a good introduction into how to start that and then develop that and get much better at it over time guys thanks for being with me as always and if you think this video might help somebody consider sending it to them sending it on to them or sharing with them and it helps too if you like these videos it helps me reach more people so that's a huge way that you can help me here and I'll leave it there for now but I'll see you again soon bye bye