People who can’t accept themselves need to get the shame out of the shadows and that’s why they are so critical of other people and of themselves. So instead of beating yourself up because your shame acts as a bad mentor, you can start directing empathy toward yourself and looking for genius and honor in what you do. This practice allows you to bring sacredness to even the least “sacred” behaviors and discover that your psyche had become attached to this destructive critical behavior stopping your progress as a person. If you see this stopping of your personal development as a sacred act, rather than a failure, you discover why you stopped and can decide if you want to stay there or if you want to get out. You can choose!!!!
You may even find that you are working on an issue that has affected several generations in your family or in your culture, then perhaps you will be able to locate yourself in the deep history of the world, instead of just beating yourself up for your weight, for not doing things the way your inner critic says you should etc.
One way to begin to distance yourself from clinging to self-critical thoughts is to look at them and repeat “I am having thoughts that I am ugly, I am having thoughts that I am unlovable.” By labeling thought we take a more compassionate, kind and loving stance with ourselves, just as we might with a child. This space of looking at things with perspective and compassion opens up spontaneously when we start to see language in its natural movement, and stop looking at the world through the lens of judging language.
We suggest you practice the following exercise:
- Close your eyes and get in touch with whatever you have trouble accepting about yourself. Take some time to feel what you feel, think what you think, and remember what you remember. Don’t try to fix it; try to connect with your own suffering.
- As you do this, notice that there is a part of you that is perceiving this suffering. Catch the origin… where does the awareness of what you perceive come from?
- Now take that awareness that registers, and imagine that you go out of your body and look at yourself. Notice how you look when you suffer.
- Ask yourself, what do I think of that person I am observing (yourself)? Is he a kind person? is he a complete person?
- Send that point of awareness to the other side of the room and leave it sitting there. Now watch yourself from a distance. You see yourself sitting there, suffering. You may notice that there are other people not far away, in your house or in the neighborhood who are also suffering.
- Ask yourself again, what do I think of that person who suffers? She’s kind? is he a complete person?
- Looking at yourself from across the room, imagine that this is a memory. You remember reading a text that asked you to observe yourself from across the room as you felt that event that caused you suffering. But now 10 years have passed and you are much wiser. Look at yourself sitting there 10 years ago. If you could go back two or three sentences from a wiser future, what would you convey to yourself?
- Feel yourself and write a few sentences with the advice of your inner sage.
- Then return to the present, to your body. Consider what you have written in the note. The key to this exercise is to be able to contemplate different points of view, to take things from different perspectives. Remember that human nature is like this: intrinsically compassionate with oneself and with others.
A key word in this process is commitment to yourself. Commitment means assuming the ability to choose our values. And by values I don’t mean the things we use to evaluate ourselves. I am not referring to critical judgments but to the qualities of being and doing that we choose because they bring us vitality, meaning, and purpose in this moment. Values are never final, because they are part of the journey and as we evolve, so do they.
This commitment is to be true to yourself. As you practice self-acceptance and compassion for yourself, you live fully and all your actions begin to align with your deepest purpose.
We know that the type of values that generate commitment are not the ones that contain the words “should” or “should”. The real values are felt within us and are freely chosen. If you link your behaviors to freely chosen qualities and build larger and larger life habits around that, life itself will lift you up and you can move on through pain, disappointment, and mistakes. This will help you on your life journey, because the places where you feel pain are linked to the things that matter to you. Conversely, if you are not willing to feel pain, you cannot allow yourself to care about things.
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