Choosing Our Story
How we perceive, interpret, and respond to our surroundings creates our reality. The stories we believe are only part of the whole truth, so while they’re our whole experience, we should be mindful not to allow our perspective to limit us. Two people can go through the same experience, one carrying forward the story of a victim, and the other carrying forward the story of the survivor. Choose how you narrate your own reality. Push yourself to find positives in hard times. Acknowledging those positives will instill strength and resilience, but dwelling in negative thoughts will deplete us. The more we train ourselves to see the positives, the more our overall life story will reflect positive characteristics.
“We are all captives of a story.” —Daniel Quinn
We Respond to Our Thoughts
Our reality is shaped by our perspective. If we consider ourselves a survivor, we’ll more easily cope with our stress than if we think of ourselves as a victim. If we remind ourselves of our flexibility and resourcefulness in times of hardship, we’ll likely have the confidence and clarity of mind to find a valuable solution. If we focus on how negatively we feel, that pain will deplete us and we’ll find ourselves with little energy to tackle our problems. Thinking lovingly about our body can encourage us to eat better, motivate us to go to the gym, and inspire us to make wise choices for our physical health. Thinking negatively about our body sets the stage for us to be mindless with our physical choices in the future. Choose your thoughts carefully, for they have more influence on your reality than you may think.
Positive Core Thoughts
Our thoughts are a very powerful tool. Our thoughts affect everything - our mood, our speech, even our actions! We represent ourselves and define ourselves with our speech and actions, but it all starts in our thoughts. If we're not mindful, we can develop a very negative idea of ourselves, negatively influence others, unintentionally hurt someone’s feelings, or portray an unpleasant version of ourselves without even realizing it, so mindfulness allows us to become aware of the suffering caused by negative thoughts. Our thoughts, beliefs, judgements, biases, and past experiences all influence how we interpret the information shared to us by those around us. We often are so preoccupied with our inner voices and suffering that we don’t even truly listen to other people.
We are all different people with different cultural and personal views that make up our core beliefs about life. Our sense of worth, our relationships with others, and our connection with the world around us are all shaped from our thoughts and beliefs. Once we are aware of our belief systems, we can shift our perspective so that our core beliefs can be positive! When our core thoughts are mostly positive, we naturally have a deeper sense of peace and contentedness in the world. Things don’t whirl wildly out of proportion and there’s a sense that everything is okay, even in times of stress.
We are all different people with different cultural and personal views that make up our core beliefs about life. Our sense of worth, our relationships with others, and our connection with the world around us are all shaped from our thoughts and beliefs. Once we are aware of our belief systems, we can shift our perspective so that our core beliefs can be positive! When our core thoughts are mostly positive, we naturally have a deeper sense of peace and contentedness in the world. Things don’t whirl wildly out of proportion and there’s a sense that everything is okay, even in times of stress.
"It’ll turn out alright because no matter what, I can handle this. I am capable and I am determined."
"Maybe she didn’t mean that comment in the way it sounded. I should give her the benefit of the doubt and ask her about it later."
"Even though I lost this time, I learned something for next time!"
"Maybe she didn’t mean that comment in the way it sounded. I should give her the benefit of the doubt and ask her about it later."
"Even though I lost this time, I learned something for next time!"
We can practice thinking and speaking in a positive way, with loving kindness and compassionate listening, in order to relieve the suffering of misunderstanding and to promote peace in ourselves and amongst other people.
When we are skillful, we can think, speak, and listen in a way that is focused on what is needed to transform suffering. We can promote joy. We can choose not to spread news that we don’t know to be certain and we can avoid using language that could cause division or discord. We know that words can create happiness and that words can create suffering, so we should be diligent in thinking and speaking using words that inspire confidence, joy, and hope - especially when we're speaking to ourselves!
When we are skillful, we can think, speak, and listen in a way that is focused on what is needed to transform suffering. We can promote joy. We can choose not to spread news that we don’t know to be certain and we can avoid using language that could cause division or discord. We know that words can create happiness and that words can create suffering, so we should be diligent in thinking and speaking using words that inspire confidence, joy, and hope - especially when we're speaking to ourselves!
Encouraging Empowering Beliefs
Whenever we catch ourselves doubting ourselves or feeling critical about something we’ve done, we should pause, then switch to a more empowering, positive perspective. It may feel like being hard on ourselves and calling out our mistakes helps us perform better, but really it just drains our energy. We may react better short term from the stress of the negativity, but eventually we’ll reach a point where we burn out. When we’re encouraging, optimistic, and generous with ourselves, we can generate more energy and clarity to contribute to our overall positive momentum.
Here are some examples of shifting the perspective from a negative place to a more tolerant and loving belief:
“I’m not good enough.”
Gently rephrase, “I’m deserving of all the opportunities I receive. I don’t have to be perfect because I improve and learn something from every new situation.”
“I can’t believe I feel this way.”
Remind yourself, “I’m grateful for all my emotions and bodily sensations because they help alert me to what’s good or bad for me. “
“I can’t deal with this.”
Reassure yourself by reaffirming, “I have been strong in times of hardship in the past. I can be resilient and resourceful to get through challenging situations.”
Gently rephrase, “I’m deserving of all the opportunities I receive. I don’t have to be perfect because I improve and learn something from every new situation.”
“I can’t believe I feel this way.”
Remind yourself, “I’m grateful for all my emotions and bodily sensations because they help alert me to what’s good or bad for me. “
“I can’t deal with this.”
Reassure yourself by reaffirming, “I have been strong in times of hardship in the past. I can be resilient and resourceful to get through challenging situations.”
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Deepen Your Understanding: Accepting vs Resisting is a concept to help us realize when our thoughts are stubborn or negative, so we may shift them to be more positive, flexible, and constructive.
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Perspective Poem
Everything reflects
our state of mind
our state of mind
Extended Reading: How Our Beliefs Shape Our Perspective
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This piece of writing is my interpretation of some of the key concepts presented in The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz. Check out this and my other favorite books on mindfulness, health, philosophy, spirituality, and elevated living on my reading list.
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When we’re growing up, everyone around us is constantly influencing us, especially when we’re young children. We are fragile and defenseless, so the people who take care of us teach us what they know, and we absorb everything like a sponge. We look to others to learn how to develop and mature. The people we live with have many types of knowledge, including all the personal, social, religious, and moral rules of their culture. What is “good” and what is “bad”? What is the “right” way to behave? These values can become our own and become accepted as things we agree with. We are innocent, we are looking for our way in the world, and we're too young to have the right opportunity to choose our beliefs.
Usually, we are told what to believe and warned against what we shouldn’t support. The people we live with tell us their opinions: what is right and what is wrong, what is acceptable and what deserves punishment, what is beautiful and what is ugly. We are children, so we agree easily and eagerly with whatever our parents or other authority figures tell us. We agree and we remember. We pay attention to what lessons we learn. Attention is essential as we develop because it allows us to concentrate on a singular concept out of many. If we didn’t pay attention to what causes us pain, or if we couldn’t concentrate well enough to remember what is dangerous, our species wouldn’t have a very high chance of successfully evolving! Our attention is what directs our focus, the channel we use to communicate and interpret our interactions with other humans and the world around us. Pretty important stuff!
Sometimes our attention can get stuck on one thing too intensely, or we can be paying all of our attention to the wrong things altogether! As we try to master and navigate our complicated world, we start giving meaning to everything we observe, hear, and learn. We try to make sense of new information by translating symbols and images into things of meaning. We do this for things that are real, such as “that is a person” or “those are flowers” and for things that aren’t real but we have imagined them to be, like smart and stupid, beautiful and ugly, skinny and fat. We think in the same tone of language in which we learn to speak.
From the time we are just learning to talk and comprehend language, people have always shared their individual opinions with us. We listen aptly because we are small children, we do not know what we or the world are made of yet. We are inquisitive, always asking questions, always seeking answers. People in our life reflect their opinions into us and we see them as truth. Our mother tells us what we are, and we believe her. What our mother says we are is very different than what our father says we are, and his opinion is also different than what our siblings or teachers would tell us. Our grandparents say, “you have your mother’s eyes” or “you’re just like your father” and we believe them. The friends of our parents, the people in our class, the mailman: everyone has opinions! We listen to and accept all these thoughts and look for understanding of ourselves in them. The only way we can see ourself is with a mirror, and everyone around us acts as that mirror. We accept opinions as a reflection of truth and we incorporate that information into our belief system. Life is built on understanding, so we begin to apply these interpretations from other people and we start to formulate an idea of ourselves. According to what other people say we are, we try to understand our image, and if we don’t like the image we see, we begin to modify our behavior.
We understand abstract concepts of what’s right and what’s wrong by the time we start going to school. If we haven’t learned already, school will teach us additional concepts like winner and loser, or perfect and imperfect. We automatically interpret this new information and add it to our existing thought process. We believe the knowledge we’ve acquired because it’s all the knowledge we have. We even have our own thoughts about everything we’re learning! We form an inner voice, a dialogue that dictates constantly, analyzing and reacting to stimulus around us. This voice is our own, but it is also sometimes the voice of our mother. The voice is sometimes in the tone of our father. It’s the voice of our brother or sister and it’s also the voice of our teachers. This inner voice is a combination of many things, but it isn’t real. It is our creation. We believe this voice is real because we have no reason to doubt our thoughts or what the people in our life tell us. We have faith in the words of others and in the words in our own consciousness.
Usually, we are told what to believe and warned against what we shouldn’t support. The people we live with tell us their opinions: what is right and what is wrong, what is acceptable and what deserves punishment, what is beautiful and what is ugly. We are children, so we agree easily and eagerly with whatever our parents or other authority figures tell us. We agree and we remember. We pay attention to what lessons we learn. Attention is essential as we develop because it allows us to concentrate on a singular concept out of many. If we didn’t pay attention to what causes us pain, or if we couldn’t concentrate well enough to remember what is dangerous, our species wouldn’t have a very high chance of successfully evolving! Our attention is what directs our focus, the channel we use to communicate and interpret our interactions with other humans and the world around us. Pretty important stuff!
Sometimes our attention can get stuck on one thing too intensely, or we can be paying all of our attention to the wrong things altogether! As we try to master and navigate our complicated world, we start giving meaning to everything we observe, hear, and learn. We try to make sense of new information by translating symbols and images into things of meaning. We do this for things that are real, such as “that is a person” or “those are flowers” and for things that aren’t real but we have imagined them to be, like smart and stupid, beautiful and ugly, skinny and fat. We think in the same tone of language in which we learn to speak.
From the time we are just learning to talk and comprehend language, people have always shared their individual opinions with us. We listen aptly because we are small children, we do not know what we or the world are made of yet. We are inquisitive, always asking questions, always seeking answers. People in our life reflect their opinions into us and we see them as truth. Our mother tells us what we are, and we believe her. What our mother says we are is very different than what our father says we are, and his opinion is also different than what our siblings or teachers would tell us. Our grandparents say, “you have your mother’s eyes” or “you’re just like your father” and we believe them. The friends of our parents, the people in our class, the mailman: everyone has opinions! We listen to and accept all these thoughts and look for understanding of ourselves in them. The only way we can see ourself is with a mirror, and everyone around us acts as that mirror. We accept opinions as a reflection of truth and we incorporate that information into our belief system. Life is built on understanding, so we begin to apply these interpretations from other people and we start to formulate an idea of ourselves. According to what other people say we are, we try to understand our image, and if we don’t like the image we see, we begin to modify our behavior.
We understand abstract concepts of what’s right and what’s wrong by the time we start going to school. If we haven’t learned already, school will teach us additional concepts like winner and loser, or perfect and imperfect. We automatically interpret this new information and add it to our existing thought process. We believe the knowledge we’ve acquired because it’s all the knowledge we have. We even have our own thoughts about everything we’re learning! We form an inner voice, a dialogue that dictates constantly, analyzing and reacting to stimulus around us. This voice is our own, but it is also sometimes the voice of our mother. The voice is sometimes in the tone of our father. It’s the voice of our brother or sister and it’s also the voice of our teachers. This inner voice is a combination of many things, but it isn’t real. It is our creation. We believe this voice is real because we have no reason to doubt our thoughts or what the people in our life tell us. We have faith in the words of others and in the words in our own consciousness.
“I’m good at this” versus “I’m not good that.”
“I’m very beautiful” or "I’m not beautiful”
“I’m smart” or “I’m not so smart”
“I’m very beautiful” or "I’m not beautiful”
“I’m smart” or “I’m not so smart”
After a while, we’ve listened to a lot of different opinions from a lot of different types of people. All the opinions of our friends, parents, teachers, religious and social leaders, they all swarm together and reveal a certain way we need to act in order to be accepted. We start to see that we should behave this way to avoid punishment, or we need to be these things to receive praise.
We all have a fear of rejection because we are a social species. We depend on altruism and community support to survive, so rejection can easily be misunderstood as not being good enough and fearing isolation or annihilation, we fall into the trap of perfectionism. If something isn’t good enough, it isn’t acceptable. In our search for what is considered acceptable, we discover an idea of what we ideally would like to be. This idea is sometimes unrealistic and doesn’t match how we may actually be, and instead of accepting that, we judge ourselves for not matching up. We don’t like ourselves, and we criticize ourselves.
We all have a fear of rejection because we are a social species. We depend on altruism and community support to survive, so rejection can easily be misunderstood as not being good enough and fearing isolation or annihilation, we fall into the trap of perfectionism. If something isn’t good enough, it isn’t acceptable. In our search for what is considered acceptable, we discover an idea of what we ideally would like to be. This idea is sometimes unrealistic and doesn’t match how we may actually be, and instead of accepting that, we judge ourselves for not matching up. We don’t like ourselves, and we criticize ourselves.
“Look how dumb you look, how ugly you are.”
“Look how fat you are, how weak, how short, how stupid you are.”
“Look how fat you are, how weak, how short, how stupid you are.”
We are just trying to be better. We are focused on continual progress. Unfortunately, the concepts and labels we’ve learned are going against us. We aren’t even aware of how we’re using words to reject ourselves.
We keep growing up, soon hormones change our bodies and we look completely different from the child we’re used to being. We’ve reached adolescence! We no longer fit into the way of life we lived before, and we no longer want to listen to our parents and to other authority figures telling us what we should do. We want our freedom! We want to be ourselves, but because of all the opinions in our head, we feel afraid to be ourselves. We hear, “You’re not a child anymore” so we detach from everything we gave our attention to previously. As little children, we don’t care what we look like or what we are generally, we only have eyes for the present moment! We want to experience everything. We typically like to explore, we like to express creatively, and we seek pleasure and avoid pain. Our mindset is wild and free, unburdened and inquisitive. We literally run around naked without any judgement or thought towards critiquing ourselves. We have no fear for the future, and no shame or embarrassment lurking in the past.
After we start listening to any of the opinions of those around us, we lose this weightlessness. We want to please others so we try to be good enough for everyone else, but we are no longer good enough for ourselves. It’s impossible living up to our idea of perfection.
At this point, we feel lost. We start searching for freedom because we feel as though we have lost the ability to feel comfortable being ourselves. We look for happiness because we no longer feel content with ourselves. We constantly search for beauty because we no longer believe we ourselves are beautiful beings.
As teenagers, we are not children anymore, but we are also not adults. We no longer want adults to tell us what is right and what is wrong, because we judge ourselves now. We also punish ourselves, and we reward ourselves when we do something we consider to be good. We gauge these decisions according to the belief system we inherited, using the same system of punishment and reward. This system varies by family, sometimes it’s harder for certain people and easier for others, but generally we all go through this difficult time.
When I say difficult, I’m not kidding! Between the challenges at home with our family, the stressful dynamics of social and academic pressure at school, and the unavoidable conflicts and drama of daily life, we’re bombarded from all angles with hardship. In the face of intensity, we toughen up. We callous with each incident, taking other people’s unskillfulness as personal attacks because they are framed as such. We don’t understand or care that those that hurt us act from a place of deep pain themselves. We can hardly process the pain itself. We evolve coping skills to help us with these intense, overwhelming emotions. Some of us will develop productive coping skills that elevate us over distress, while some of us will really struggle to find the right tools we need to handle overwhelming situations. Everyone handles things differently, with some people bottling everything up and others exploding outwards with every feeling.
There are a few things can that influence our likelihood of developing intensified emotions. Our genetics play a roll in our personality, but our coping skills are mostly formed throughout our childhood and adolescence. Trauma and neglect experienced during childhood at critical points in our development can literally alter our brain structure in ways that render us more vulnerable to intense, negative emotions. We can mature and find ourselves grown up with limited understanding and minimal resources for our individual needs. We know what it feels like to support and care for other people in our lives, but we don’t know where to begin with giving ourselves the same respect. We have convinced ourselves that we aren’t worthy, so we look at ourselves and reject what we see. We believe that we don’t deserve acceptance because we don’t match the idea of what we find acceptable. We don’t realize this idea isn’t real. This idea of what is satisfactory to us probably doesn’t align with anyone else’s ideas about us, and yet we feel as though we will let everyone down if we don’t constantly strive to match our idea of what is right. We believe we will find happiness by changing, and we continue to exhaust and limit ourselves in pursuit of a ridiculously narrow condition for contentment.
After we start listening to any of the opinions of those around us, we lose this weightlessness. We want to please others so we try to be good enough for everyone else, but we are no longer good enough for ourselves. It’s impossible living up to our idea of perfection.
At this point, we feel lost. We start searching for freedom because we feel as though we have lost the ability to feel comfortable being ourselves. We look for happiness because we no longer feel content with ourselves. We constantly search for beauty because we no longer believe we ourselves are beautiful beings.
As teenagers, we are not children anymore, but we are also not adults. We no longer want adults to tell us what is right and what is wrong, because we judge ourselves now. We also punish ourselves, and we reward ourselves when we do something we consider to be good. We gauge these decisions according to the belief system we inherited, using the same system of punishment and reward. This system varies by family, sometimes it’s harder for certain people and easier for others, but generally we all go through this difficult time.
When I say difficult, I’m not kidding! Between the challenges at home with our family, the stressful dynamics of social and academic pressure at school, and the unavoidable conflicts and drama of daily life, we’re bombarded from all angles with hardship. In the face of intensity, we toughen up. We callous with each incident, taking other people’s unskillfulness as personal attacks because they are framed as such. We don’t understand or care that those that hurt us act from a place of deep pain themselves. We can hardly process the pain itself. We evolve coping skills to help us with these intense, overwhelming emotions. Some of us will develop productive coping skills that elevate us over distress, while some of us will really struggle to find the right tools we need to handle overwhelming situations. Everyone handles things differently, with some people bottling everything up and others exploding outwards with every feeling.
There are a few things can that influence our likelihood of developing intensified emotions. Our genetics play a roll in our personality, but our coping skills are mostly formed throughout our childhood and adolescence. Trauma and neglect experienced during childhood at critical points in our development can literally alter our brain structure in ways that render us more vulnerable to intense, negative emotions. We can mature and find ourselves grown up with limited understanding and minimal resources for our individual needs. We know what it feels like to support and care for other people in our lives, but we don’t know where to begin with giving ourselves the same respect. We have convinced ourselves that we aren’t worthy, so we look at ourselves and reject what we see. We believe that we don’t deserve acceptance because we don’t match the idea of what we find acceptable. We don’t realize this idea isn’t real. This idea of what is satisfactory to us probably doesn’t align with anyone else’s ideas about us, and yet we feel as though we will let everyone down if we don’t constantly strive to match our idea of what is right. We believe we will find happiness by changing, and we continue to exhaust and limit ourselves in pursuit of a ridiculously narrow condition for contentment.
Looking at negative emotions and the memories attached to them can be challenging. Negative emotions are uncomfortable by nature, and looking at them can make us uneasy. If you practiced the exercise from the last post, you may have noticed your body physically reacting as if it was experiencing part of those past difficult emotions, in that moment of practice. Luckily, the same goes when we practice remembering positive, uplifting emotions. Focusing on positive memories can fill us with a warm, energized feeling! Focusing on negative emotions fills us with feelings, too; but they will be energized in a way that isn’t so enjoyable. We can feel anxious, or perhaps we feel ashamed. We believe it’s bad to feel these emotions because that implies we have been bad people, so often we stuff, avoid, or escape these uncomfortable feelings as soon as we feel the slightest twinge of bad.
While avoiding our emotions works in the moment to relieve our anxiety and fear, it doesn’t benefit us in the long run. We develop skills and become very practiced in avoiding, escaping, in compartmentalizing our overwhelming emotions. We tell ourselves we are in control of our emotions. This takes a lot of energy, and it can feel like an enormous task to simply get back to a place where we feel okay again after we find ourselves facing challenging feelings. We are so depleted from controlling our emotions to make sure they don’t hurt us, that we have completely forgotten to practice balancing, positive emotions. This is not to say we never feel happy, because we do quite often! Our thinking is adaptive, so even if we are suffering deeply, we will find small ways to spark happiness in ourselves. Sometimes we even resonate and find joy in alternative, unexpected places. We crave to be okay. Our thinking is also attractive, meaning whatever we are focused on is going to guide how we see and interpret everything around us. We all have experienced this in some way. Think of a time you were very hungry and all the commercials or ads on your phone seem to feature delicious food, or a moment in which you were upset or discouraged, and everything around you (even people you usually enjoy) seem to be extra irritating. If we start believing we are not good enough, we will subconsciously apply this belief to everything. When we make a mistake, instead of looking for ways to learn from it, we immediately feel validated that we weren’t perfect and it further solidifies our agreement that we’re not enough.
We can be really hard on ourselves! We even start rejecting ourselves in front of our peers, which in turn programs us to accept judging ourselves as normal. We feel lost and we feel empty. Does everyone feel like this? We look around for clues. We want to feel stronger, and we model what we see in other people. There is heroic strength, stoic strength, even strength in sacrifice and vulnerability, but we do not notice these subtleties. We look into moments where we felt weak and we observe what the other person did to make us feel that way. When someone is mean or judgmental, it is more aggressive than an accepting comment, and it is divisive. When we see someone speaking down to another person, we translate this into one person being stronger and one person being weaker. We don’t want to be defenseless, we don’t want to be prey waiting to be picked on, so we copy the “stronger” words and actions and we accept them as legitimate solutions to future issues. Now when we feel threatened, especially if we can’t escape our stressful situation, we’ll react with judgement, divisiveness, or straight up cruelty. All those times we have felt small, every stinging memory of someone else hurting us, all those frustrations swirl together and add pressure for us to stand up for ourselves.
While we can defend ourselves now, we still don’t know what exactly we’re defending. We have our idea of what we should be, what we could be with a few adjustments; but we don’t see ourselves clearly. We have a small voice inside of us that sometimes, if we listen to it, gives us insight. This is our true voice, our honest thoughts. There are many other voices circulating in our head, and these voices are more developed. They are the voices we interpret everyday, the thoughts that are our own, but also an expression of the thoughts of our mother, our father, our brothers and sisters, and our academic peers. We’re used to the commentary of voices in our head, we accept our thoughts as our own, but this small, little voice is different. It is simultaneously clearer than the other thoughts in our head, and it’s also more difficult to understand. This is our conscience. Your conscience is the feeling of real inner truth that only you can know. We first notice our conscience out of the rest of the noise in our consciousness in a moment where we know strongly that something was unjust or not right. We (hopefully) know we should throw our trash in the can instead of on the ground, we respect rules in moments where we couldn’t be caught breaking them, we feel bad when we break something that doesn’t belong to us. Have you ever loved something odd that other people didn’t support? Have you experienced a time where everyone around you told you one version of reality, but you had an unmistakable feeling that you disagreed with those beliefs? Some children have a clear and bright inner voice, knowing their conscience doesn’t feel right about hunting or neglecting animals, even if their family supports that kind of activity.
Our conscience is a crucial key to unlocking true understanding of the self. By the time we are teenagers, we have so much emotional confusion that in desperation, we “try on” beliefs and test if we resonate with any of the opinions we receive. This can lead us to finding a community of similar peers but it doesn’t aid us in ultimately gaining understanding of who we are.
“What are you going to be?” When we are in our adolescent years, we hear this question from everyone! Everyone has an opinion of what we should do, and we compare this to the idea we have of what we could be and try to gracefully formulate an answer to such a profound question. We continuously seek to discover acceptance in our groups, and we start to dismiss people and concepts that we don’t fit in with. We learn what is valued and what is scorned, favoriting to practice things that place us in good favor with our community. Sometimes, we don’t find approval anywhere, and we become withdrawn and isolate ourselves from the competitive energy around us. Regardless if we are extroverted or introverted, we feel euphoric in moments of glory and devastated in times of failure.
This system stretches forward into our early adult years, and ultimately can encompass our entire life if we’re not aware of what’s happening. We face even more challenges as we learn how to position ourselves successfully for our future. We are tense from constantly avoiding looking at our pain, and this results in imbalanced values, so we place enormous emphasis on doing well in the few things we determine we have enough energy to care about. We can attach to our individual accomplishments, allowing our pride in small achievements to keep us afloat over the burning mess of emotion we don’t know how to deal with. We prioritize what makes us feel the most positive, such as gaining status in our community or focusing on advancing our career. These are good things to do for ourselves; however, we will feel as though once again, it isn’t enough for us to be happy. We don’t understand what contentment is. We need to have our professional degree to feel qualified, we need to have that perfect partner to feel attractive, we need to make this amount of money before we feel secure. Whenever we achieve one of our goals and we’re met with the same deep, internal dissatisfaction, we create a new idea of what we need to feel better and we strive towards that.
Sounds exhausting, right? It is. The constant comparing, analyzing, and judging drains our valuable energy, directing our focus away from benevolent or altruistic affairs. We have convinced ourselves that we are being strong, not weak, and we constantly reaffirm this belief with our strengths, soothing our fears with a tight focus on the areas we find success in. We believe, as our parents did, that it is good to be strong and it is bad to be weak. When we look into our emotional clusterfuck, we feel weak because we do not know where to begin in untangling, addressing, and solving the issues that bother us deeply. We feel if we keep looking forward, if we just focus on the right things, then we can transcend all our icky emotional baggage and the resulting effect will be happiness. In reality, our emotional understanding is severely neglected; giving our emotions attention is actually what we need to focus on to uncover happiness!
We desensitize ourself from the importance of this because we are not good at gracefully considering our feelings. Our experience with negative emotions is wild and out of control, we feel that intensity immediately when we look into them. We have all sorts of systems in place for controlling our emotions. We even use emotions we have a better tolerance of, such as anger or desire, to avoid feeling the ones we dislike, like despair and shame. Some of us even turn to substances such as food, drugs, or alcohol to try to cover up the depth of pain we have inside. We develop fixations and escapism mentalities, all to avoid actually feeling our untended emotions. We’re really great at this, too! Some people are able to maintain this distance from their true self better than others, hiding behind their business or responsibility to their family, but none of us are able to actually run fast enough to forget what we have been through.
We believe that the further we get from a traumatic incident, the easier the memory and feelings inherent to it will be to bear. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Too often, we are hurt by something and in order to feel immediately stronger, we reject the fact that our feelings have been hurt in a way that needs tending. We put energy into blaming other people, the situation, or into blaming ourselves. We don’t spend any energy on compassion for ourselves and we don’t have the patience to uncover why we may feel hurt. We have to understand why we feel a certain way for our conscience to relax, and our inner voice is very determined in its quest to communicate our deepest feelings! When we dodge (consciously or unconsciously) addressing our feelings, we basically put a fiery, emotional bookmark right on the issue that disturbed us. Whenever we encounter something that reminds us of whatever feelings we stuffed down, all the unresolved feelings we still have but haven’t addressed swell up inside of us and boil over. We now have the challenge of dealing with whatever is bothering us in the moment and the task of unpacking the older, still hurting piece of our self. It’s almost impossible to handle this layered, complicated mess of emotions gracefully. Some of us explode outwardly in a desperate plea for help, while other people just continue to add each new incident to their never-ending pile of “I’m fine.”
While avoiding our emotions works in the moment to relieve our anxiety and fear, it doesn’t benefit us in the long run. We develop skills and become very practiced in avoiding, escaping, in compartmentalizing our overwhelming emotions. We tell ourselves we are in control of our emotions. This takes a lot of energy, and it can feel like an enormous task to simply get back to a place where we feel okay again after we find ourselves facing challenging feelings. We are so depleted from controlling our emotions to make sure they don’t hurt us, that we have completely forgotten to practice balancing, positive emotions. This is not to say we never feel happy, because we do quite often! Our thinking is adaptive, so even if we are suffering deeply, we will find small ways to spark happiness in ourselves. Sometimes we even resonate and find joy in alternative, unexpected places. We crave to be okay. Our thinking is also attractive, meaning whatever we are focused on is going to guide how we see and interpret everything around us. We all have experienced this in some way. Think of a time you were very hungry and all the commercials or ads on your phone seem to feature delicious food, or a moment in which you were upset or discouraged, and everything around you (even people you usually enjoy) seem to be extra irritating. If we start believing we are not good enough, we will subconsciously apply this belief to everything. When we make a mistake, instead of looking for ways to learn from it, we immediately feel validated that we weren’t perfect and it further solidifies our agreement that we’re not enough.
We can be really hard on ourselves! We even start rejecting ourselves in front of our peers, which in turn programs us to accept judging ourselves as normal. We feel lost and we feel empty. Does everyone feel like this? We look around for clues. We want to feel stronger, and we model what we see in other people. There is heroic strength, stoic strength, even strength in sacrifice and vulnerability, but we do not notice these subtleties. We look into moments where we felt weak and we observe what the other person did to make us feel that way. When someone is mean or judgmental, it is more aggressive than an accepting comment, and it is divisive. When we see someone speaking down to another person, we translate this into one person being stronger and one person being weaker. We don’t want to be defenseless, we don’t want to be prey waiting to be picked on, so we copy the “stronger” words and actions and we accept them as legitimate solutions to future issues. Now when we feel threatened, especially if we can’t escape our stressful situation, we’ll react with judgement, divisiveness, or straight up cruelty. All those times we have felt small, every stinging memory of someone else hurting us, all those frustrations swirl together and add pressure for us to stand up for ourselves.
While we can defend ourselves now, we still don’t know what exactly we’re defending. We have our idea of what we should be, what we could be with a few adjustments; but we don’t see ourselves clearly. We have a small voice inside of us that sometimes, if we listen to it, gives us insight. This is our true voice, our honest thoughts. There are many other voices circulating in our head, and these voices are more developed. They are the voices we interpret everyday, the thoughts that are our own, but also an expression of the thoughts of our mother, our father, our brothers and sisters, and our academic peers. We’re used to the commentary of voices in our head, we accept our thoughts as our own, but this small, little voice is different. It is simultaneously clearer than the other thoughts in our head, and it’s also more difficult to understand. This is our conscience. Your conscience is the feeling of real inner truth that only you can know. We first notice our conscience out of the rest of the noise in our consciousness in a moment where we know strongly that something was unjust or not right. We (hopefully) know we should throw our trash in the can instead of on the ground, we respect rules in moments where we couldn’t be caught breaking them, we feel bad when we break something that doesn’t belong to us. Have you ever loved something odd that other people didn’t support? Have you experienced a time where everyone around you told you one version of reality, but you had an unmistakable feeling that you disagreed with those beliefs? Some children have a clear and bright inner voice, knowing their conscience doesn’t feel right about hunting or neglecting animals, even if their family supports that kind of activity.
Our conscience is a crucial key to unlocking true understanding of the self. By the time we are teenagers, we have so much emotional confusion that in desperation, we “try on” beliefs and test if we resonate with any of the opinions we receive. This can lead us to finding a community of similar peers but it doesn’t aid us in ultimately gaining understanding of who we are.
“What are you going to be?” When we are in our adolescent years, we hear this question from everyone! Everyone has an opinion of what we should do, and we compare this to the idea we have of what we could be and try to gracefully formulate an answer to such a profound question. We continuously seek to discover acceptance in our groups, and we start to dismiss people and concepts that we don’t fit in with. We learn what is valued and what is scorned, favoriting to practice things that place us in good favor with our community. Sometimes, we don’t find approval anywhere, and we become withdrawn and isolate ourselves from the competitive energy around us. Regardless if we are extroverted or introverted, we feel euphoric in moments of glory and devastated in times of failure.
This system stretches forward into our early adult years, and ultimately can encompass our entire life if we’re not aware of what’s happening. We face even more challenges as we learn how to position ourselves successfully for our future. We are tense from constantly avoiding looking at our pain, and this results in imbalanced values, so we place enormous emphasis on doing well in the few things we determine we have enough energy to care about. We can attach to our individual accomplishments, allowing our pride in small achievements to keep us afloat over the burning mess of emotion we don’t know how to deal with. We prioritize what makes us feel the most positive, such as gaining status in our community or focusing on advancing our career. These are good things to do for ourselves; however, we will feel as though once again, it isn’t enough for us to be happy. We don’t understand what contentment is. We need to have our professional degree to feel qualified, we need to have that perfect partner to feel attractive, we need to make this amount of money before we feel secure. Whenever we achieve one of our goals and we’re met with the same deep, internal dissatisfaction, we create a new idea of what we need to feel better and we strive towards that.
Sounds exhausting, right? It is. The constant comparing, analyzing, and judging drains our valuable energy, directing our focus away from benevolent or altruistic affairs. We have convinced ourselves that we are being strong, not weak, and we constantly reaffirm this belief with our strengths, soothing our fears with a tight focus on the areas we find success in. We believe, as our parents did, that it is good to be strong and it is bad to be weak. When we look into our emotional clusterfuck, we feel weak because we do not know where to begin in untangling, addressing, and solving the issues that bother us deeply. We feel if we keep looking forward, if we just focus on the right things, then we can transcend all our icky emotional baggage and the resulting effect will be happiness. In reality, our emotional understanding is severely neglected; giving our emotions attention is actually what we need to focus on to uncover happiness!
We desensitize ourself from the importance of this because we are not good at gracefully considering our feelings. Our experience with negative emotions is wild and out of control, we feel that intensity immediately when we look into them. We have all sorts of systems in place for controlling our emotions. We even use emotions we have a better tolerance of, such as anger or desire, to avoid feeling the ones we dislike, like despair and shame. Some of us even turn to substances such as food, drugs, or alcohol to try to cover up the depth of pain we have inside. We develop fixations and escapism mentalities, all to avoid actually feeling our untended emotions. We’re really great at this, too! Some people are able to maintain this distance from their true self better than others, hiding behind their business or responsibility to their family, but none of us are able to actually run fast enough to forget what we have been through.
We believe that the further we get from a traumatic incident, the easier the memory and feelings inherent to it will be to bear. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Too often, we are hurt by something and in order to feel immediately stronger, we reject the fact that our feelings have been hurt in a way that needs tending. We put energy into blaming other people, the situation, or into blaming ourselves. We don’t spend any energy on compassion for ourselves and we don’t have the patience to uncover why we may feel hurt. We have to understand why we feel a certain way for our conscience to relax, and our inner voice is very determined in its quest to communicate our deepest feelings! When we dodge (consciously or unconsciously) addressing our feelings, we basically put a fiery, emotional bookmark right on the issue that disturbed us. Whenever we encounter something that reminds us of whatever feelings we stuffed down, all the unresolved feelings we still have but haven’t addressed swell up inside of us and boil over. We now have the challenge of dealing with whatever is bothering us in the moment and the task of unpacking the older, still hurting piece of our self. It’s almost impossible to handle this layered, complicated mess of emotions gracefully. Some of us explode outwardly in a desperate plea for help, while other people just continue to add each new incident to their never-ending pile of “I’m fine.”
“I’ll deal with it later”
This doesn’t work unless we actually take the time to address our difficult feelings.
“I’ll do better next time, I won’t mess up again”
This doesn’t set us up for any actual success because there is still a giant gap of understanding about the difficult feelings related to the issue. Whenever we’re confronted with a similar challenge, or even a harder one, we have no better idea what to do to solve the problem because we didn’t gain any experience or skills in what it takes to transform the difficulty we’re suffering from. We need to look gently into our emotions to gain insight from them.
“I can’t deal with this”
This limits our ability to grow or learn because we have already decided that we don’t have the capacity required to succeed.
This doesn’t work unless we actually take the time to address our difficult feelings.
“I’ll do better next time, I won’t mess up again”
This doesn’t set us up for any actual success because there is still a giant gap of understanding about the difficult feelings related to the issue. Whenever we’re confronted with a similar challenge, or even a harder one, we have no better idea what to do to solve the problem because we didn’t gain any experience or skills in what it takes to transform the difficulty we’re suffering from. We need to look gently into our emotions to gain insight from them.
“I can’t deal with this”
This limits our ability to grow or learn because we have already decided that we don’t have the capacity required to succeed.
We exist on these excuses until we either run out of energy, run into trouble, or run something important to us into the ground, such as our relationships or our health. Many of us have years of pain and suffering buried away inside, and we also have responsibilities. Maybe we have a family we look after, or a job we have to be on point for; we all have our unique roles to other people. We cling to these duties, we convince ourselves they are our purpose and if we do not do them perfectly, then we will fail in that dynamic. Fortunately, self-discovery and self-development not only greatly benefit us, they benefit everyone else in our lives, too!
When we’re happy, confident, and courageous, we fill others with those wonderful qualities because we’ll want to share the relief and joy we’ve cultivated. When we aren’t burdened by our doubts or preoccupied with ideas of insecurity, we can be more present in the moment and have the best opportunity to perform in excellence. When we know how to alleviate our own suffering and dissolve our false perceptions, we can help others around us to do so, as well. We learn how to offer comfort or encouragement to anyone around us, as we learn how to do those things for ourselves. Perhaps you’re thinking, “I already know how to do so much for other people. It’s effortless for me to take care of my friends and family. I like helping others, I don’t like accepting help!” These are wonderful and commendable points to make, but you owe yourself the same respect. You can try to be everything for another person and if you aren’t a full person yourself, you aren’t giving them everything. If you spend all your energy on helping other people, and you neglect to tend to yourself, the result will expose itself later when those you’ve helped have to help you because you have no understanding of how to care for yourself.
When we first start practicing self-care, it’s going to feel awkward and ridiculous. In learning any new skill, it’s understandable to feel pretty silly until we start figuring it out. Looking into our emotions is much more intense than learning how to drive or to play the piano, so we practice using an accumulation of tools and tricks that work for us. The coping skills we may have missed out on learning as children are available for us to practice now, in this moment. No matter what suffering we have endured in our past, no matter what habits we find ourselves stuck in, the present moment offers us an opportunity to act in honor of ourselves. Any struggle we’ve encountered in the past can be redeemed through treating ourselves with dignity and respect in this moment, now.
When we free ourselves of all things harming our life, including limiting or critical beliefs, we can truly step into our power and be our best self, for ourselves and for our loved ones and for our global community as a whole!
When we’re happy, confident, and courageous, we fill others with those wonderful qualities because we’ll want to share the relief and joy we’ve cultivated. When we aren’t burdened by our doubts or preoccupied with ideas of insecurity, we can be more present in the moment and have the best opportunity to perform in excellence. When we know how to alleviate our own suffering and dissolve our false perceptions, we can help others around us to do so, as well. We learn how to offer comfort or encouragement to anyone around us, as we learn how to do those things for ourselves. Perhaps you’re thinking, “I already know how to do so much for other people. It’s effortless for me to take care of my friends and family. I like helping others, I don’t like accepting help!” These are wonderful and commendable points to make, but you owe yourself the same respect. You can try to be everything for another person and if you aren’t a full person yourself, you aren’t giving them everything. If you spend all your energy on helping other people, and you neglect to tend to yourself, the result will expose itself later when those you’ve helped have to help you because you have no understanding of how to care for yourself.
When we first start practicing self-care, it’s going to feel awkward and ridiculous. In learning any new skill, it’s understandable to feel pretty silly until we start figuring it out. Looking into our emotions is much more intense than learning how to drive or to play the piano, so we practice using an accumulation of tools and tricks that work for us. The coping skills we may have missed out on learning as children are available for us to practice now, in this moment. No matter what suffering we have endured in our past, no matter what habits we find ourselves stuck in, the present moment offers us an opportunity to act in honor of ourselves. Any struggle we’ve encountered in the past can be redeemed through treating ourselves with dignity and respect in this moment, now.
When we free ourselves of all things harming our life, including limiting or critical beliefs, we can truly step into our power and be our best self, for ourselves and for our loved ones and for our global community as a whole!