You are not an owl whose head turns all the way around. You cannot see everything that is coming, and sometimes you are taken unawares. It is life I’m talking about that you cannot always see coming. You may even see a preponderance of being taken unawares in your life. You may see a pattern. You may wake up, and then you fall asleep again and have an uncomfortable awakening.

Now, when you look back, you may see how you set yourself up for a great disappointment that was bewildering to you. But now you have an inkling of how you set yourself up. Because you loved a situation or a person, because the situation or person made you feel so good, you gave away some of your own sense of value and your own common sense. You believed in another more than you believed in yourself. You gave something of yourself away too lavishly. It may have been your integrity you gave away, beloveds. If only you had realized the extent to which you were giving away the Truth of you. You may have given away too big a piece of yourself.

There is a common element in many of your major disappointments. And it is that, somewhere along the line, you sold yourself short. You paved the way to disappointment by, ultimately, not being true to yourself. You gave away too much of yourself. In a desire for once in your life to compromise, to get along, to keep someone or something valuable near to you, you gave away some of your self-value. Somewhere in a hidden crevice of your mind you said about whatever it was:

“This means so much to me. This means everything to me. This situation or person means everything to me. Therefore, I will concede too much of myself and call it compromise. I make a trade, and give away too big a hunk of my self-regard in order to keep someone or something so important to me, so utterly valuable to me, so essential to me. So has my perception been with my eyes half-closed at the time.”

And, then, one day, you notice that you have given away too much of yourself, and now you are disappointed in the situation or the person. Most of all, you are disappointed in yourself. You think you were not thinking. You did not see. And now you see.

Of course, it is difficult in ordinary life to know what to hold onto and what to let go of, and when and where and how much.

It isn’t that you sold your soul. It is more like you gave it away, or a good portion of it away. In any case, you gave away too much, and you see it now, and you rue it now. If only, if only, you had set things up right.

It all comes back to self-value. It all comes back to love of yourself. Instead your love fastens on someone or something. It could be your career. It could be money in the bank. It could be the big love of your life.

This is the sort of occasion that makes people wary of their hearts and refuse to give in to love because eventually love fails.

Begin with love of yourself. There is no need to sacrifice your own value for the sake of keeping something to you. Your heart is not wayward. It is your mind that sacrificed you all along. You believe you were not thinking. You were thinking. You were thinking that you had to give up on a portion of your self, your reliance on yourself, and what you really gave away was what you really wanted to keep.