From Needy to Fulfilling Your Needs

I have come to believe that when we are unaware of our needs and are disconnected from our inner power to meet them, we tend to expect others to meet them for us, often without even communicating it to them. We become needy. I love the six needs first introduced to me by Tony Robbins. Here is my personal take, understanding, and application for those.

CERTAINTY. Our first need is that for certainty. We want to be certain about certain things in life – at least knowing where our next paycheck and our meal are coming from. Without the basic feeling of certainty, we will keep seeking it until it is met.

UNCERTAINTY. Leave it up to us, the human beings, to change our needs in a glimpse! The second we feel our basic need for certainty is met, we get bored. Yep. Majorly bored – as in even losing our passion for life. So, we will seek uncertainty to wake us up. Some of us do it in a healthy way – daring ourselves to try new things with uncertain outcomes. Some of us do it through a well practiced principle of self-sabotage. Just as we seem to succeed in getting a good position or a good relationship, just as we tap into the certainty, we freak out and bail out – subconsciously balancing our need for certainty with that of uncertainty.

SIGNIFICANCE. As we bounce back and forth and learn to balance between certainty and uncertainty, either our Ego or our Higher Self steps in and announces, “What is all of this even for?” Our third need arises. We seek to self-identify, to find our own significance in the continuous cycle of certainties and uncertainties in life. We seek to be grounded in our own significance. And so, at the outmost brutal and primitive level, one takes a life of another, feeling that this somehow gives them more power and significance. And, at the highest frequency of significance, one chooses to sacrifice their own life for a cause, a child, or a vision. And between those two outmost extremes lie all the other expressions of how we seek to establish our own significance in a way most accessible to us.

LOVE. If we allow the hungry ego take a bow and learn significance from our higher self, we move to our fourth need. Having stumbled upon our own formula of significance, we start to understand that what truly makes us feel significant is the ability to form connections and exchange love. Love is our fourth need. Love can be a scary term if we have gone through cycles of abuse, masked as love, or losses, where losing love froze our desire to every experience it again. But the need for love remains. And, until we find the genuine source of love and a way to love and feel loved, we fully reside in this need for love.

GROWTH. A lot of people never break through the first four cycles of needs. Yet, as we tap into the true power of love, we experience our fourth need, that for growth. First and foremost for the need for love to grow. We learn that it grows not by receiving, but by giving. We hunger to know more, to have more through wanting to be more. Growth opens for us new feelings of joy and fulfillment. Whether we grow mentally, spiritually, emotionally, or develop our physical abilities, growing is opposite to dying. Growing means living.

CONTRIBUTION. Our sixth need is that of contribution. Our growth takes us on a journey of helping others to do the same via teaching them how to meet their own needs. When we contribute, whether through work, volunteering, or simply being, we usually contribute to one of the person’s other needs. The cycle of neediness becomes that of fulfilling your own and others’s needs.

Take a good honest and compassionate look at yourself. Where are you fulfilling your needs? And where are you feeling needy?

I strongly believe that our deepest need, whether we believe in God or not … is to be needed by GOD (Great Overall Designer of this universe). We want to be certain that we are loved and needed our Creator. We want to be uncertain and allow for miraculous expressions and tender mercies of that love. We find our significance as we understand our divine origin, mission, and destination. We connect and heal and fill our broken hearts with the only love that is capable of truly healing us, God’s love for each and every one of us individually. We then grow through that love, guiding our growth and impact all around us through contributing from the place of that love into their lives.