Everyday Mindfulness

Ooh, this week's topic is interesting...!

Wow, this resonates deeply with me, even tho I can't spontaneously say how exactly. I guess I just know that I'm often very unforgiving with myself, day to day, and judge my mistakes or weaknesses quite harshly, often without even meaning to.

I think I do this retrospectively too - judging past mistakes and weaknesses harshly, many years later still...

I think in part this comes from having been raised to believe that "if I do everything right / if I'm always good" then I'll be rewarded by having good things happen to me - or at least by not having bad things happen to me.

In hindsight, I can now see that as the magical (wishful) thinking that it was, but my parents instilled it so deeply in me, that it's still hard to shake it, today.

And the flip-side of that thinking, of course, is that if bad things do happen - then you must have done something wrong... Ouch!

So I guess this week I'll be trying to let go of the idea that although bad things have happened in my life (just like in everyone's life) that doesn't mean that I did anything bad in terms of "having deserved it".

Plus, I just remembered that there's a specific thing that happened 14 years ago, that was probably just a sad coincidence, but I tortured myself with the *possibility* that it could have somehow been my fault for many years afterwards. I've tried letting go of that feeling before, but I will try revisiting it this week too.

As with the other JOT exercises, I will be combining this week's exercise with the JOT exercise of "taking in the good", so that my forgiveness will truly sink in deep and not feel like water off a duck's back.

Wishing you all well with this week's exercise.

XXX

Janey

Thank you, you make some very interesting points.

My initial reaction to this week was one of dis-connection and I didn't find many of the ideas in the chapter helpful. I did, however, highlight the passages "listen to the still, quiet voice of conscience" and "may you be at peace" as points to work on during the week.

However, I tried meditating on the phrase "I forgive myself" and was surprised to find that this brought up a number of issues, some of which I hadn't come to mind when I read the chapter, such as (with the benefit of hindsight) making bad decisions on choice of business partners and bad decisions on financial advisors. So I wonder if I am sub-consciously blaming myself for the problems these are now giving me.

I'm going to confine myself to this approach to this week's topic (and I'm going to continue practising the 'go slowly' approach from last week to try to take this approach to life more often).

I look forward to hearing others' views/experiences of this week's topic.

Steve

Hi all,
This was another shocker for me, again I had difficulty with summoning recollections of care.I have gone to Paul Gilbert's book on Compassion and doing some of the building a wise compassionate figure created by myself instead of using memories etc as suggested.Hence things are progressing along slowly, though helpfully and I will be getting to forgiving myself etc soon!

There was a suggestion made way back , someone was following a practice of writing 3 pages a day, to assist with creativity, and I did this and found it good.
Anyone know where that reference was in our old posts as I would like to read the book it came from.

Hi Maggie,
I don't remember when it was posted, but I know writing the 3 "Morning Pages" are a concept by Julia Cameron. I don't know in which book she first introduced the concept, but it definitely features in "The Artist's Way".
You could try searching for those names/ titles in the forum's search tool.
Here's the link to the book at Amazon, for your info...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Artists-Way-Discovering-Recovering-Creative/dp/0330343580/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1392829787&sr=1-1&keywords=the+artists+way+julia+cameron

Brillant , thanks for taking the time to let me know about that. I have found it a useful way of processing the JOT stuff and more.... I will see how I go with the book