Take an 8-ounce glass filled with coffee. This represents your low self-esteem. It is murky, dark and does not transmit light. Now take a large pitcher of crystal clear water. This represents your new empowering vision. Pour the water from the pitcher into the glass. The water from the pitcher flows into the glass, causing the glass to overflow. The first few ounces have little obvious effect on the color of the liquid in the glass. However, as you add more pure water, the content of the glass gets lighter and lighter.

Studies show that at least 85% or more of the world’s people suffer from some degree of lacking self-esteem. Although one might think that such challenges are only characteristic of the poor, uneducated, or lower socio-economic members of society, people from all walks of life can suffer situational or more widespread challenges with their levels of self-esteem.

Many very successful business people lack self-esteem in some areas of their lives. Perhaps they feel socially challenged or they have difficulty establishing close or intimate relationships. Perhaps they experience low self-esteem with regard to their physical appearance or their health. Perhaps they are not having any fun in their lives, maybe devoting too much attention to their work. Many “successful” people are driven to succeed.

Why does it take a disaster to bring us together? Recent tragedies like 911, Hurricane Katrina, and the Tsunami remind us of who we are deep inside – a spiritually connected part of a large extended family, a web of living beings, sharing a tiny biosphere, on a small planet. As Albert Einstein reminded us, “our separation from each other is an optical illusion of consciousness.” Disasters jolt us out of the sleepwalking that can happen as we focus on the daily business of life and survival with our self focused agendas, even our higher spiritual ones. Disasters also can open our hearts, as spiritual energy comes through us and is released in the form of compassion to others. Collectively, a chain reaction of goodness can come as a flood, but then, after the crisis, a “spiritual dam” may form once again within us and we go back to the sleep of our busy lives.

Happiness is declining in the most powerful country in the world. As Robert E. Lane, Yale professor emeritus, puts it in his book, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies: “Amidst the satisfaction people feel with their material progress, there is a spirit of unhappiness and depression haunting advanced market democracies throughout the world, a spirit that mocks the idea that markets maximize well-being and the eighteenth-century promise of a right to the pursuit of happiness under benign governments of people’s own choosing.

The haunting spirit is manifold: a postwar decline in the United States in people who report themselves as happy, a rising tide in all advanced societies of clinical depression and dysphoria…increasing distrust of each other and of political and other institutions, declining belief that the lot of the average man is getting better…a tragic erosion of family solidarity and community integration together with an apparent decline in warm, intimate relations among friends.”