… no wonder I’m so frickin’ tired!
I’ve talked a lot about self awareness, even written a blog on the importance of self-awareness. And if you’ve been watching my Thirsty Thursday videos, you know that I have been reading a book called The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power by Vernon Howard, and it is really shifting my perspective on some things. Over the last couple of weeks, a huge shift for me has been becoming aware that I’ve had this awareness thing all jacked up.
As a student of personal growth (and an admitted overthinker and perfectionist), I have become quite masterful at analyzing myself. I can come up with a dozen possible hidden motivations behind everything I think, say or do. I can recognize fear, insecurity, and a whole host of other unpleasant emotions or responses within myself. It’s almost TOO much awareness and I swear to God it gets exhausting.
The problem is I have been doing all of this with one main purpose in mind – to FIX myself. I must be AWARE of every possible negativity or unhealthy thought or pattern so that I can CORRECT it. It’s like, “Oh I have this desire for others’ approval but that’s bad and I have to stop it,” or “I see I have a hard time being vulnerable in a relationship but that’s wrong and I need to change it.”
Yesterday I read an article by author Iyanla Vanzant in which she says: “On the emotional level, I had fallen into a pattern of terrorizing and brutalizing myself with my own thoughts. Before anyone else could, I would make myself wrong; before anyone else could, I would begin to doubt myself. I had trained myself to push up the mountain rather than take the lift. Things only counted if I suffered. For far too long I had been willing to be beaten up and beaten down and pop back up smiling.”
DAMN. That’s totally me. I can’t stand the thought of being caught off guard, of someone else confronting me with an unpleasantness about myself that I didn’t spot first. And I can take all my self-imposed struggles and write about them and call them “learning experiences” all neatly and cheerfully wrapped up with a bow. It’s bullshit!
Perhaps this is why I’ve been feeling a creeping sense of sadness lately. And perhaps why I found myself crumpled in a heap of tears the other day when I heard that old Indigo Girls song Closer to Fine, with the lyrics, “The best thing you’ve ever done for me was to help me take my life less seriously, it’s only life after all,” and “The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.” You see, I have this ideal vision of who I would like to be (or think I should be), and I’ve been allowing every bit of so-called self-awareness to remind me I am not there yet.
Enter Vernon Howard and his teaching on the practice of self-observation WITHOUT JUDGEMENT. What has been happening is that I mistakenly identify myself, my true self, with these unpleasant feelings, patterns or responses. Howard says you must simply “witness the passage of mental and emotional grief. Do not resist what you see. Do not identify with it, that is, do not take the painful feeling as being part of the essential you.” He says you have to stop trying not to be angry (or annoyed, or fearful or needy etc.), but instead just be that way and notice it without condemning yourself.
He adds, “Don’t work so hard at living your life, just let it be lived.” Sounds like a tall order.
If I were coaching myself, I would probably issue a challenge to go an entire week without trying to fix anything about me. Geneen Roth writes, “You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. What would happen if you treated yourself as if you already are who you most want to be?” (The thought of that sends shivers up my spine. I honestly don’t know if I can do it!) In my favor, Howard describes this practice as one that is challenging at first but produces amazing results. So I really want to try. Besides, I’m just worn out from the old way.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
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