Your mind can be a powerful and\u00a0splendid ally. It can be a motivator, a planner and a supreme puzzle solver.\u00a0But it\u2019s not necessarily your friend.<\/p>\n
I was in the grocery store the\u00a0other day and I passed the ice cream section. I saw boxes of chocolate ice\u00a0cream bars covered with dark chocolate. Hagen Dasz. My favorite. I hesitated a\u00a0moment. \u201cGo ahead,\u201d a voice in my mind encouraged me. \u201cBuy some. They\u2019re
delicious.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re bad for you,\u201d another\u00a0voice said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re a healthy eater,\u201d the first\u00a0voice spoke again. \u201cIt\u2019s one little ice cream bar. You deserve it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Remember those cartoons where\u00a0someone has an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other? Guess who won? I\u00a0put a box of ice cream bars in my cart and I hurried home so they wouldn\u2019t melt.
Then I removed the paper covering on one of them and took a bite. My taste buds\u00a0flooded with pleasure as I kept on eating \u2013 until the first voice began singing\u00a0a different tune. \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t be eating that,\u201d it told me. \u201cIt\u2019s unhealthy\u00a0and it\u2019s fattening. You know better. Now you\u2019re screwed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those of us with loud, persistent\u00a0inner voices (isn\u2019t that all of us?) are faced with daily obstacles that are so\u00a0familiar, they seem like old friends. \u201cI must be \u00a0not be doing this right,\u201d we tell ourselves. \u201cHow do I get rid of this? What if I\u2019d made a different choice? Is it better to deny myself or to feel guilty?\u201d How about making another choice \u2013 doing what we want and feeling good about it.<\/p>\n
When I was a kid, I thought that by\u00a0the time I was in my third chapter of life, I would have figured it all out.\u00a0The inner criticism would have gone away and a sense of all knowing would have replaced\u00a0it. I was wrong and I\u2019m not alone in this. I was in a Stephen Levine workshop
years ago, when he said that he was sailing along one day, feeling good about\u00a0himself when a big glob of self-criticism hit him in the face. It was something\u00a0he had been working on for years, so he had learned not to blame himself.\u00a0Instead he said, \u201cHere it is again. Big surprise.\u201d And he did his practice of\u00a0being loving and compassionate with himself.<\/p>\n
If we think we\u2019ve overcome our\u00a0obstacles for good, that isn\u2019t a sign of maturity or enlightenment. It\u2019s a sign\u00a0of self-abuse and ignorance to expect that kind of perfection. It doesn\u2019t\u00a0exist. The act of staying with ourselves in the face of fear or sadness carries\u00a0its own kind of perfection. It\u2019s a commitment to stop abandoning ourselves and
start appreciating ourselves, even if we think we don\u2019t deserve it. It\u2019s a\u00a0commitment to stop judging when an old wound comes up. Mr. Levine said. \u201cTo\u00a0heal is when we touch with love that which was previously touched by fear.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
If we can be kind to ourselves when\u00a0we feel shame and embarrassment, life will be easier. When something difficult appears
in my psyche that I\u2019ve dealt with over and over, I accept it as my life\u2019s work.I\u00a0try to follow Mr. Levine\u2019s suggestion to touch myself with kindness. I don\u2019t\u00a0expect my obstacle to disappear but I expect to keep learning from it and I\u00a0hope I never stop. With all the spiritual work I\u2019ve done in my life, I\u2019ve\u00a0learned that I\u2019m not the only one dealing with these things. I\u2019m not thatspecial. If I feel something, so do you. We may have different stories, we may\u00a0have had different experiences but the way we feel is the same. No one is\u00a0better or worse than anyone else. We are all fellow travelers walking along the\u00a0same path together.<\/p>\n
The AIDS epidemic was in full swing\u00a0back in the eighties when I went to visit a friend in the hospital. He was having\u00a0a hard time. He was in pain, he had lost a lot of weight and his breathing was
labored. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be here any more,\u201d he said. \u201cWill you help me die?\u201d<\/p>\n
That was the toughest question\u00a0anyone had ever asked me. I wanted to help him but I didn\u2019t want that kind of responsibility.\u00a0\u201cI\u2019ll think about it,\u201d I said. When I got home, I was terribly agitated. I
couldn\u2019t sleep and when I went to see him the next day, I hadn\u2019t figured out\u00a0what to do.<\/p>\n
It turned out that I didn\u2019t have\u00a0to. I stood at the foot of his bed and he said, \u201cI\u2019ve thought about this ever\u00a0since I got sick but I decided to stick it out. I want to see this through. What\u00a0if there\u2019s one thing left for me to learn and I leave here without learning it?\u00a0I don\u2019t want to take that chance.\u201d<\/p>\n
During my life, loneliness, fear\u00a0and judgments have been constant companions. They\u2019re like visitors who never go\u00a0home. As I\u2019ve confronted them daily, I\u2019ve learned that when I make a commitment
to treat myself with respect, when I don\u2019t \u00a0burden myself with judgments and self-abuse, my life lessons don\u2019t seem so insurmountable. \u201cHere you are again,\u201d I tell myself. Big surprise.\u201d When I accept this as my life\u2019s work, I welcome it. As long as I have something to work on, I have meaning in my life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Your mind can be a powerful and\u00a0splendid ally. It can be a motivator, a planner and a supreme puzzle solver.\u00a0But it\u2019s not necessarily your friend. I was in the grocery store the\u00a0other day and I passed the ice cream section. I saw boxes of chocolate ice\u00a0cream bars covered with dark chocolate. Hagen Dasz. My favorite. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2525,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2526"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2527,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2526\/revisions\/2527"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}