- First off,
here I am in front of these two things right here
that represent the ultimate epitome
of attention seeking. (chuckles)
But nonetheless,
I want to share with you what I've learned
through the process
of creating daily videos on YouTube,
being driven one by wanting to help people,
but two a deep level of feeling empty
and in a way unworthy and not validated.
And one of the ways I went
about validating myself
was by getting attention and helping people
in the hopes that then I could finally be worthy
and feel valuable and feel validated.
And there's a big shadow side
to both attention seeking and deflecting attention as well
that I want to share with you.
Because in some ways,
I also have that within me as well.
So there's a shadow side to both of these and heal-
Until you heal the wound
of attention seeking or attention deflection,
you'll continue to look for things on outside sources.
So in this video,
I'm gonna show you one
of the most important things you need to know about this,
how you can heal it,
so that then, in a way,
you don't need it,
but you naturally know what to do with it
and how to manage it in a way
so that it is natural for your identity.
That's the main part of this video.
It's important to understand.
It's a natural by-product of who you are,
not something you're seeking or needing
in order to feel validated or approved.
(lighthearted music)
Welcome back to another video.
My name is Aaron.
And I help people expand their consciousness.
Now in this video,
I wanna share with you more about the vibration
of attention seeking and attention deflection.
And understanding that these two sides
of the coin are based in fear.
And many times come from a childhood trauma
or a childhood wound of not feeling worthy,
whole and complete.
And when I look at my own life,
and in a way, the success that has come from it,
I think that in many ways,
attention seeking for me has actually served me.
Because it's like,
when I started making daily videos on YouTube-
First off, I started making videos.
And first, I started making videos
on like personal development.
And then eventually, I made law of attraction videos.
Those started to get a certain level of views.
And then I made a couple of videos that went viral
and I was working a nine-to-five job at the time.
And then, my channel started to explode.
And then, it became this interesting race
of getting more attention
at the expense of sometimes my own authenticity.
And you see this, by the way,
in pop culture or on YouTube in general.
Many of you maybe have heard of the Logan-Paul thing,
the Logan Paul and the forest thing.
Well when that happened,
it was attention seeking that went to a level
that proceeded somebody's morals
or even social intelligence to understand
that something was, you know, not right or wrong.
Because it's almost like the drive for attention
can override different, like,
filters that would say,
No, normally this isn't cool.
Look at the David-Dobrik thing.
David Dobrik right now,
who I used to watch all the time-
David Dobrik pushed it to a level to get attention
and to get views and vlogs to a level to where one
of his friends like got injured and almost lost his eye
and other people have been harmed.
Well, the shadow side of this is that it becomes,
literally, like a drug
that you keep needing more, and more, and more,
in order to feel validated, worthy, or on top of it.
There's almost like a fear
that I'm not going to be as big
or I'm not gonna continue to, you know,
have a certain quality unless I do that.
For me, I remember that it was like I was making videos
because I was passionate about it.
And then it moved into like making videos for views.
What's gonna get views?
And when I would focus on that,
the results didn't come as good
because it wasn't as authentic.
And then what also happened is
I would put out videos
that would in a way have people view me
in a certain way.
And yes, I'm pretty vulnerable in a lot of my videos.
And I share the same stories over and over again,
just to-
Because it's something I think is relatable.
And you know,
it's in a way,
it's my way of of getting out there
and trying to connect with people.
Because I think sometimes I don't feel
that own connection within myself.
I feel like I'm looking at reality.
I'm looking, you know,
it looks like, by the way,
I have everything figured out.
Some people think I'm actually enlightened.
They look at my YouTube videos
and they're like,
oh, Aaron's enlightened.
I'm not enlightened.
I still have waves and peaks and valleys.
There's times I feel great.
And then, there's times I feel not so great.
No matter how many YouTube videos you've seen of me,
I don't have it all figured out.
But at the same time,
I've learned a lot
through the process of visualizing for months
This gold play button, I-
That was a goal of mine.
And I thought that when I got it
I would feel some sense of worthiness or wholeness.
I'm literally searching for wholeness
through attention seeking,
through attention.
Now, why is that?
It's because when I was a kid,
when I was a couple of years old,
the attention shifted from me to my little brother.
I was three years old when brother was born.
My brother had all these health issues.
My mom's attention went from me to him.
Then, I felt alone.
I felt like there was something wrong with me.
I have a great mom, by the way.
She's doing the best she could with where she was.
My brother needed more attention.
But that's just how I felt.
I felt alone.
I felt unworthy.
The attention shifted.
Why did the attention shift?
There's something wrong with me.
That was the belief.
And that was the childhood wound.
And the interesting thing is
that childhood wound never went away.
And even after I was making daily videos on YouTube,
I was using that in a way to become successful,
in a way it served me.
It served me to become successful.
But at the same time,
it's rooted in a shadow and a belief
that I'm not worthy for just being me.
And many people that crave attention.
What they're craving is they're craving validation.
They're craving their mom or their dad to tell you,
"Hey bud, you got this."
"It's okay."
"I see you."
"I love you."
"You're so special."
And as a kid, that's something that you want to hear.
And if you don't hear it when you're a kid,
you will search for it in external validation in life.
And you'll give a-
You'll give a shit what people think.
Let me tell you that.
My drive to be successful on YouTube,
also is having me protect this little self image that I have
of how I want people to perceive me.
Once I let go of that self image
and once I let go of that goal,
that's when I started not caring so much what people think.
Then, I started to be more polarizing.
and I started being more authentic.
And that authenticity is something that feels good.
It is natural for me to make videos like this
where I'm feeling authentic like this.
But if I'm trying to put a certain filter around me
and I want you to perceive me in a certain way,
then guess what?
It's not as natural.
It requires more energy.
So that the balance to this I think is being aware
of where your motivation is.
And the way that I healed that is I had to go
and I had to in a way,
feel the abandonment
and feel the aloneness that I felt when I was a kid
and let it be there,
not try to control it.
And at the same time,
start like in a way,
rearranged the way that I thought about myself.
And even think about that.
In Buddhist scripture,
different scriptures,
who is the self?
I need self-esteem.
Who is the self that needs the esteem?
There's two different people here.
All there really is
is source intelligence, God, the universe,
whatever you want to call it,
it's manifesting itself
through billions of different people on the planet.
Everything is source energy.
The self though,
is this thing that we need to build up
because it didn't feel big when it was a kid.
And the key is realizing we're all, in a way,
just channeling higher levels of our own consciousness.
When I make these videos, it's channeling.
And everybody has the ability to do this.
I'm not special.
I've just been doing this
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times,
days in a row,
so it gets easier and easier.
In a way, we're all an aspect of the divine.
But just as much-
At the same time, we put that on importance.
We make it on a pedestal, then guess what?
We didn't have to control shit.
It creates resistance.
It's true.
Just as much as we're all a part of source energy,
just as much as we are all parts of source energy,
so is dog shit.
It's also source energy.
Everything is.
We live in a dream of reality and everything is God.
Everything is source.
And in the same way,
what we can begin to realize is
that this protection mechanism,
this avatar ego just wants to protect itself.
And if it thinks it needs attention
in order to feel worthy and validate,
it will do whatever it can to get it.
And then, you have things where people put themselves
on a pedestal.
They become more important than they actually are.
And then, they get slapped because of it.
David Dobrik, Logan Paul, same thing.
And they learn from it, hopefully.
So attention seeking is a drug.
Now on the other side of this,
some people are afraid of attention seeking
or afraid of attention at all,
because the attention represents to them,
something negative.
Now in a way,
I remember my brother.
I remember growing up.
I would actually get attention for certain things.
From even like in high school,
I get attention from from like girls I was flirting with
and stuff like that.
And I remember that I could feel the jealousy
from my brother at certain points.
And I know that, too.
Because at one point.
he was like telling chicks I was talking to, like,
things that would make me look like a douchebag
or make me-
Told one of them,
"Oh, he really likes you"
or something like that.
Like, he said that 'cause he was trying to
mitigate them liking me or something like that.
But also, yeah, it was kind of like a competitive edge to-
I love my brother.
But there's like this competitive edge
that we kind of had growing up.
But on my side,
I didn't, in a way,
want to shine too bright.
I know after I'd become successful,
I'd have family come to my house, you know,
in Vegas, the house I'm getting to move out of.
But there's a house in Vegas that's just gigantic.
It's a big house.
I'm not trying to brag or anything.
I'm just saying.
And I remember the first time I had family come over
especially a part of my family
that maybe doesn't make as much
or isn't used to that kind of abundance,
there was like a level of guilt
and I didn't want to shine too bright.
And I didn't want to reflect things back to my brother.
And it's almost like I was afraid of shining.
I was afraid of shining my light.
Or even when I first started going on YouTube,
I started doing what I love.
I remember even the house before that house.
It wasn't a crazy house.
But I remember he came over
and I was like trying to like,
pretend like I had roommates.
Because I didn't want him to know how successful-
That I had this like four bedroom house that like-
With a pool-
And I was doing it all by myself
back when I was like, you know,
probably second year on YouTube.
I was not ashamed of it, but I was-
I didn't want the attention on me
and I didn't want it to make him feel small.
Many of us,
we may be afraid of attention
because we're afraid
that we're gonna make other people feel small.
We're afraid of shining our light.
So on both sides of the coin,
we've got the shadow of not being ourselves
and inhibiting ourselves
from just being our true natural selves
by caring too much what people think.
And then on the other side of this,
we have the trying to get attention and significance
because we really care what people think.
Who, when you were a kid,
did you have to look to for attention and approval?
Was it your parents?
Most likely.
And my guess is that by looking to them approval
that carried on to now caring
what a lot of other people think.
How do you heal this?
You pay more attention to how you feel about you.
And you realize, in a way,
this is just a dream of reality.
We're all divine, spiritual beings,
dreaming that this is who we are.
There really is no self.
The self is this illusion.
Self-esteem is an illusion.
If you can more so go with the flow and let go of outcome,
you can then be yourself more in apologetically.
But also realize the middle way.
The middle way.
It is not needing significance and validation.
You give yourself that significance and validation.
Who is the self you give it to though?
That's where we get kind of trippy.
But it's feeling into the moment.
And then on the other side of that,
not being afraid of deflecting attention.
Because you're afraid of-
You're afraid of shining too bright.
You're afraid that then you become a threat.
Then you'll get, you know,
all this attention maybe you don't want.
It's the middle way,
expressing yourself, being authentic.
And realizing that when it comes
to this whole process of attention seeking,
it's rooted in a childhood wound
of wanting attention and validation.
But you can give that attention and validation to yourself.
You can love yourself.
It's a trippy thing.
I'm figuring this out as we go, too.
Because loving the self-
Who is the self that's gonna love?
There is no self.
We are all divine spiritual beings.
Self love is, in a way, a form of self narcissism,
maybe a healthy form of self narcissism.
Self-esteem is healthy self narcissism.
Because it's like building up the self,
which is the ego.
Interesting thing.
I'll- (chuckles)
As I go through learning about this process,
I'll let you guys know more
about what I learned through it.
But in general,
realize that this process is about being-
this process about being authentic,
being you, being unapologetic,
feeling what comes inside of your body.
Do you feel a need for the attention?
It's going back to the trauma
when you were a kid
and realizing you don't really need it.
You could be present
and you could feel the self validation.
You can validate yourself
but it's so confusing
'cause the self is an illusion. (laughs)
So I got some more research to do.
I'mma get back on another video with you, guys.
Okay, I will learn more about this.
Now also, there's a video I did recently
on the shadow of having siblings
which is also a lot of times it's connected the attention.
You can check that out by clicking the link below.
It's a-
It's not a meditation.
It's a video on the shadow of having siblings.
Check that out.
Also, there's a meditation
for raising your dominant vibration permanently.
It's one of the most powerful meditations on the channel.
Click it below.
Listen to it for 21 days.
Let's all commit to this meditation.
Comment "I'm in" if you're in.
We'll do it together.
It grows the group dynamic.
And I'm excited for that.
So with that being said,
I hope you enjoyed this video.
And as always, peace, much love, and namaste.