Do you ever put yourself down?
Oh man.
In the past, I’ve easily heard come right out of my mouth little phrases said under my breath TO myself, like “you idiot, what the hell were you thinking?” or “come on, pull it together, it’s not that big a deal” or “what the f*&% is wrong with you?”
It’s no secret that we’re sometimes super crazy harsh with ourselves.
My harsh voice used to be really vicious.
Geneen Roth, one of my favorite authors and teachers of inner freedom from the turmoil of eating troubles, calls it The Voice.
Or maybe it was her friend (who I also adore) Annie Lamott, who is also a writer.
Annie once said that The Voice was like KFCK radio station.
Turned on, it spouts obscenities, mean phrases, attacks, sarcasm and criticism, all directed at YOU, that no friend who ever cared about you would EVER say.
Many people who come to work with me say they really don’t think that many mean things about other people….
….it’s this KFCK radio station that’s the worst, and they want to do The Work on themselves instead of others.
The weird thing is….over time, I began to understand why Byron Katie suggests not doing The Work on yourself and your thoughts about who you are….
….but instead, to just point your finger outward and rip someone else to shreds.
It’s because when you look at yourself, your observations and perceptions are so completely insane, it’s often hard to find clarity or to perceive what the truth actually is for you.
You are in the soup, with yourself, and you can’t really ask your own mind easily to find a genuinely neutral, open-minded answerer.
Sometimes, when you’re tempted do The Work on yourself, you have a big motive.
You’re hoping you’ll CHANGE.
If you hope someone changes when you do The Work, INCLUDING YOU, then you’re setting yourself up for big fat disappointment.
I know it’s kind of counter-intuitive….to actually investigate a belief system or way of looking at something inside you (or others) without a secret wish that they will change.
Why do The Work?! I mean seriously! You mean I just have to ACCEPT EVERYTHING?!
All those nasty and imperfect qualities?!
Impossible! NEVER! I will fight for improvement of the person who I am until the day I die!
But what if you dropped the thought that you are missing something, you need to change, you KNOW that the quality you’re objecting to is bad and needs to be eliminated?
I love telling people about a conversation I had with Byron Katie once.
I said I did The Work over and over again, on the same few people, and I was still really freakin’ angry!
She replied “How do you know you’re supposed to be angry? YOU ARE!”
Oh! Huh.
Then it dawned on me how much I tried to be a never-angry person.
No wonder I used to eat food and throw up sometimes long ago, or run five miles super hard, or work overtime. My anger was getting trapped in an inner explosion in my stomach.
It didn’t mean it was time for me to start yelling at everyone else, instead of yelling at myself….that doesn’t feel good either (and I already did that, anyway, on the inside).
But just acknowledging the quality I disliked, and seeing how human I was, what a relief! I started to have an attitude of being open to how much it benefitted me to experience the quality of anger….or any other objectional quality, for that matter.
Anger was powerful, zesty, fervent, intense, passionate, exciting!
Who would you be without the belief that you should change?
It’s a seriously new thought for some people. They may have had the thought they should change since age three.
“As my mother used to say, “You’re like a bull in a china shop.” Did you ever hear that? If you let your mind imagine a bull getting loose in a china shop, that’s how the me is. It’s knocking things over, things like the most precious china. With a whisk of its tail, there goes . . . grandma’s four-generation-old antique china cups! Boom-they’re gone. When your me is operating, it’s like that bull. It tends to make a lot of noise because it’s always in a slightly adversarial relationship with its moment. It produces noisy thoughts, feelings, beliefs, or opinions. It also likes to search, moving its head around, scanning for the right emotion in the body, scanning through the mind for the right concept…Inside, there is something that is not creating nearly as much noise as the me. This something else, this openness, this awakeness, is not searching for the next moment or scanning for the right emotion or experience. You can get the sense of it now.” ~ Adyashanti
Right now. No scanning for what’s wrong. No criticism.
Just wait, and feel it.
If that feels hard to do, don’t worry. Even that is OK.
Much Love, Grace