The Tale of our Strength and why we need to incorporate our All to bring peace
The Tale of our Strength and why we need to incorporate our All to bring peace
Do you tell yourself these words: “I am strong!”, “I just got it!”, “I am not weak!”, “I don’t need that!”, “I can do that!”. Over and over again in the hope that these parts of you that make you weak hide and disappear with a while? Maybe that works, then congratulations. But often they don’t. and even worse, they bring out exactly those things you are trying to hide altogether. The inner critic gets louder and louder, “You are weak!”, “Be strong! I know you can be!”, “Don’t be so bad and unproductice!”, “Be that woman you can be!”. And instead of becoming strong we become the opposite.
Or maybe you tell yourself; “I am worthy of love!”, “I am so great, people love me!”, “I am a fantastic woman, so strong!”. Over and over again. And after a while you my believe it, but somehow it still does not work, the thing with the worthiness. The more you tell yourself, the more you tell yourself “Be worthy, don’t do so bad things that make you unworthy!”, “Stop wasting your potential, you stupid thing, you are strong and worthy!” and so on. Will you feel worthy? Will you act in accordance of being worthy? Likely not. You will be defeated by your own words that claim you to be worthy.
There are many more examples, where we claim to be strong, and brave, and worthy and beautiful. But because we tell ourselves all the time, the exact feelings we try to have within, depleat themselves and disappear. And we feel the exact opposite.
Isn’t that crazy? What we try to accomplish does not work by telling us that it works. So what else can we do to overcome that? And to actually really feel what we are looking to feel?
Is there an easy answer? No, there is not. It includes many layers, but I want to share one layer with you today. Something that helps me, as absurd it may sound (but isn’t an absurdity only absurd in the eyes of the viewer? So find out for yourself, whether it helps you or not ;))
Incorporating All that we fear
When we tell ourselves that we are worthy, and then please do more to be worthy. Or that we tell ourselves that we are looking great as we are, but shortly after pushing ourselves to be thinner, or tell ourselves that are successful in monetary terms but shortly after telling ourselves that we have to work harder and harder and harder to accomplish that, otherwise we fail, or that we are lazy and procrastinate when we apparently wanted to achieve something. What do we do then? We tell ourselves what is innate important to us. The chit-chat and the way of the chit-chat is highly unhelpful and self-damaging, but at the same time it reveals a deeper truth of what we care for.
When I tell myself I am not worthy, and then worthy again and so on, then I apparently judge myself rigorously. So what may be important to me could be for example that I care for acceptance, love and caring.
When I tell myself that I am beautiful as I am or not doing enough to get thin, then I may value feeling good in my body and eating healthy in a way that I feel god about me.
And so on. Whatever the inner critic says, if good or bad, it tells us something. And becoming aware of it and realizing that it includes some deep dive values we care about hels us to care more for those values compared to the stories, and claims, and words, and chit-chat, that we use to describe and push and pressure and judge ourselves.
And with that we come to an even more profound way of how to incorporate our thoughts and chit-chat into our life.
Incorporating it All in and Speak with it
When you listen to your thoughts and chit-chat, you will realize specific patterns emerging, topics yor mind loves to think about, ruminate about, immerse itself in, deeper and deeper. I did an exercise about it today in the morning and the more I let it flow, the deeper and more worrysome the thoughts became. They brought out all that I feared, all that I tried to “positively manifest and brush away”. “You are not capable”, “you are failing” were some of the nicer ones, until I kept going deeper and deeper and consciously not stopping to find out what was coming up the more I went into the deeper layers. And so I wrote down stuff like “You are shi*”, “You are supposed to be in the kitchen and serve those that tell you what to do”, “you are lazy and unable and stupid”, and so on.
If I would have incorporated that without being aware that I do that exercise, holy shi*, that is bad. Imagine all the thoughts that come out, all the uglyness, and busyness of the mind to bring out the worse. But unbelievably, there was a time, where I believed that voice. Where I paid attention. Where I acted as if those things were true. And there was a time, where I fought them. Where I reared up and tried to calm them down. What happened? Believing them is bad, really bad. I do not wish anyone to be in a similar position. And if you are, I give you big fat hug here right now. And if you feel sad and lonely and lost in the bath of your negative chit-chat with thoughts similar to those, let me tell you, they are not real. They are running and running and running. And there is a way to let them go.
But what also does not work, as I tried several years with rather pitiful results, is to change them, make them more positive, work on the chit-chat itself. Trying to give them a meaning, finding ways of how to control them.
I recently learned through a book by Steven C. Hayes, a psychologist and founder of the ACT therapy, that we learn through frames of reference. In that way we humans are able to learn that when we see an orange, that there is an interaction, a bidirectional connection. If we want to teach a chimpanzee that he shall point to an orange, we need to teach him not only to point to an abstract symbol when he sees an orange (Orange ->), but also that an orange is connected to that abstract symbol (-> Orange). For us humans, we don’t need to learn both directions. When the word Mum is connected to a specific person, then Mum is the right answer, when someone else points at this person and asks who that is. Through these frames of reference, we learn to connect things, and we are incredibly good to connect everything with anything — real, abstract, imagined, back and forth, up and down, all is interconnected, and our mind tries, whenever a new thought is arriving to incorporate it into our constantly growing and changing thought network.
So when we try to “think positive”, or “change our thoguhts and make them better”, well, it is as if we try to entangle a huge spider web, that is changed by any interaction it has, and create a new thought that we then work on and work on and manifest. But any new experience, or feeling, or trigger, or basically whatever may change the whole net, may change the thought itself again. So it is an almost (if not impossible) impossible endeavour to try. It costs many resources, strength and thoughts, that often create the opposite effect of what we wanted to achieve. And it is draining as hell as well.
So what else could we do?
Incorporating it all in and Accepting it
What does these thoughts tell you? We already saw it, they show us what is important. So what if we instead of trying to change and control them, do the opposite? We accept them. For exactly what they are. Thoughts. Chit-Chat. Combined, built up and created over all the years we already lived. Some ingrained since we were babies, others recently added to the mix. But they are all there and they are firing and creating and working constantly. Sometimes they only claim, and judge, and misjudge, and play and banter, sometimes they give advice, and tell us what to do, and try to force us to follow their lead. They are active there all the time. But what if we simply accept that they are there. And that instead of making them small or push them away, we let them be there and we listen to them, of what they want to tell us? But not in the form of “You are stupid, go away” or “you are awesome, please stay”, but instead see them as a player in our life that is telling us and we can decide to listen and even more important, we can decide whether we want to act upon it or not.
When you feel comfortable doing that, you can go one step further and incorporate what it tells you into your life and care for them.
We learned that when the chit-chat is talking to us, it tells us that we are “shi*”. What if we take care of shit and learn what it tries to tell us. Maybe, that it wants to move shi* out of our body. And thus, we can talk to shi* and take it on our tour to be kind to shi* and take care of our body.
Maybe that was a bit too extreme, right from the start. Maybe, we have that chit-chat, that tells us that we are unworthy. What if we take unworthy with us on our journey. And unworthy feels unworthy, but at the same time is unworthy the person that let us feel when we feel the most unworthy, when we are shaking, and feeling uncomfortable, we want to flee a situation and run away, as we often did before. But instead of running away, we can thank unworthy, as she shows us that we really care. That whatever we do right now is something we care about, it is important to us. And for that reason, we can accept her, we accept the pain and we decide to go through that meeting, that moment, that experience, whatever it is with the pain and with unworthy. She learns in that moment, that she is helpful, that she does something good, she is helping. And we learn that we can do what we value and that by doing what we value we come closer to those things that are important to us. In that way, the unworthyness we feel and our chit-chat tried to make sense of with running back and forth and in circles, are calmed down, as we proactively incorporate them in our being. We can move on. And we all learned a valuable lesson.
Or there is that chit-chat that tells us that we “are the woman that is meant to be in the kitchen serving those that are the ones to decide and she is just accessory”. What then? You could feel the absolute sadness of having put that woman, that part of you, in your chit-chat in that position. You could realize that the chit-chat, the way we learn at one point in time incorporated that picture into its spider network of thoughts and it pops up again and again. And especially if you do specific exercises that let them all pop up ;). If you tell it to stop, I am sure it will come back in one form or the other. But what if you accept that it is there, that it is something that is there from long time ago and is unlikely to go away. What if instead of you value it for what it is. And feeling sad for the pain that concept have given you in the past. Hugging yourself. And being kind to you, to the child that had to endure what apparently kept her awake in the darkest hours of her being and being there and saving her for that devaluing thought. And then? You could take the woman in the kitchen with you. You know? She loves cooking and she loves good food. She cares for freshness and tasting and going to markets and feeling it all. Take her with you on your journey, and let her help you when you want to eat good food. And she supports you in your endeavours. In that way, you do not ridicule or brush away what is within, but incorpoate it into your being in a caring, helpful, kind way.
Incorporating it All and the Imact on You and Your World
You know what happens, when you incorporate all that is within into yourself? When you accept? When you are caring and kind to these parts of yourself that you neglected before? That you tried to control and to manipulate and to force for positivity? you do good to yourself. You learn to do good things to yourself. You start to value you more. You start to take care of you. You look for the spark within you and work on bringing it alive. You create yummy food for yourself and you are playful, accepting, kind, curious, adventurous, brave, generous, joyful and more. You start to be the kind of person you want to be. And you find the excitement and endurance to keep looking to incorporate more suffering into your being, being kind to it, nurturing it, loving to see it develop, and becoming beautiful and rich and free. And the more you do this, the more you display these values and behaviors not only for yourself, but for others as well.
You see how all the things you did to yourself, you also did to others. You see that when you did not accept yourself fully, you also did not see others fully, when you judged yourself, tried to control parts of you, tried to run away, tried to make it all positive, you stopped listening, you stopped understanding, not only to you, but to others as well.
It feels like awakening. Like seeing a light. A way of being. A goal that is no goal in its form of moving from A to B, but a guiding light that is always there. A light to be kind, and caring and curious and real. And whatever you choose for yourself you want to be. Not only for you, but for everyone around. It won’t be an easy journey, but a fulfilling one. A real one. And the only that really counts.
Do you liked what you read? Then I would be happy to hear if you can relate and how your journey entailed.