Every morning when you wake up, you find yourself completely back to the foundational level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – You’re hungry, you need food and you need water.
To thrive in this new day, you have to use the coping skills you’ve learned during your life to meet two of your most basic needs- food and water. Yes, you can go without these basics and then, whatever you’re seeking to actualise at the higher levels will come to an abrupt stop.
You could go without water for just a day or two, or without food for several days, even a week, and if forced, perhaps a few weeks. But that’s about it.
Even after a few days, a fast without any food at all will begin having strong effects on your thinking and emoting – diminishing their quality.
And then every evening, you return to the most foundational level of the levels of needs – you need sleep. You begin to yawn and have to find a safe place where you can effectively be unconscious and allow your body to recuperate for 6 to 8 hours.
Isn’t it funny that no matter how far along the personal development pathway you, like me and everyone else, keep coming back to the fundamentals. Every day between waking and sleeping, we are called back to the foundational needs that drive us, that create our energy, our vitality, and our health.
So what does this mean? It means that to actualise your highest and best, you have to take care of the lowest and first. Ignore these and you do so to your own detriment. And you will pay for it.
The price? Energy, health, short-life, vitality! The price? Ill-health, not feeling good, loss of motivation, fatigue, lack of a sense of pleasure, irritation, annoyance, stress, illness.
So Self-Actualisation also involves actualising every day, and in an ongoing process, your lower biological needs. We have to get the foundation right in order to fully actualise our highest and best.
In Meta-Coaching, we have a self-analysis tool, the S-A Scale. What it did for me was direct my attention to the problem that many of the people I was meeting were having in actualising their potentials. They had holes and weak spots in how they were coping, or not coping, with their eating, exercising, sleeping, etc.
So, if you feel you are not coping well with your lower needs or lack the energy to sustain your higher needs, drop us a line and try it out for yourself!
