I’ve been seeing it everywhere — all the ways we make ourselves wrong: second-guessing, doubting, wondering if what I’m experiencing is the right thing to be experiencing. Here’s what I’ve come to see. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve become increasingly aware of all the ways we imagine we’re wrong, or getting it wrong.
I’ve noticed how much we dismiss or doubt our very own experience.
How much we assume it should be different than it is.
How we are so afraid that we are getting it wrong. That I am wrong.
And I’ve increasingly seen the untruth and un-loving-ness of this.
It Struck Me When… a client said ‘I’m feeling anxious. But then, that’s just a thought, right?’
My heart broke slightly. Because this lady was dismissing her own experience — dismissing herself — in favour of something she’d heard, which had once had a beautiful and big impact on how she felt, but which was now just being reeled off like a trite line because it was the right thing to say, think or believe in order to feel better.
This is what can happen, in an exploration of who we really are, and how our human experience is created: the mind can so quickly come in and commandeer what had once been heard deeply, and beautifully. Taking all the love and shine out of it as it begins to wield the phrase at every opportunity, as though it were the words that had the power.
The words never had the power. It was you who had the power. Who is the power?
It is the light that you are which heard and saw that light in the face and words of another. The words were secondary to that. You saw yourself with clarity — that’s what felt good when you first heard those words and they impacted you. It wasn’t the words.
But because this isn’t clear… and because we’ve been conditioned away from ourselves for so many years, we soon forget what that light and good feeling really were. And we soon fall back into old habits of thought. And old habits of using words as though it were the words themselves that held the magic.
The next thing we know… we’re dismissing our very own experience as ‘just thought’ — subtly making ourselves wrong for feeling like this. Believing I should know better than to still be having this kind of experience.
In this we subtly resist the anxiety (or stress, or worry, or frustration, or feelings of failure, or…) by saying ‘I don’t like this…this shouldn’t be here…how do I get rid of this… oh, I know!…tell myself ‘it’s just a thought’.
Doing what we’ve done for so long—
- feel a ‘bad’ feeling
- get fearful of that experience
- make ourselves wrong for having it
- try to find a way to make it change so I can feel better again (and not be wrong anymore).
When what we really want is… love and unconditional understanding.
What the anxiety (or other ‘yukky’ experience) really wants is love and unconditional understanding.
What you wanted as a child when you began to become fearful of your experience, and you began to be taught that you were wrong for feeling the way you did, was love and unconditional understanding.
What you really want now, is love and unconditional understanding.
What you really want is yourself.
To know — deeply know — the good feelings of yourself as who you really are.
To know — deeply know — that who you really are is all you’ve ever been looking for.
To know — deeply know — that all you’ve ever been looking for is the unconditional love of yourself that says ‘You are not wrong. You are perfect just as you are. Including all the ‘yukky’ feelings.’
How does this feel to you?
Maybe if I share what I wrote in reply to a community member on a similar theme recently…feel it as you read…
The child forgets their essential nature. And they live a life trying to maintain the experience they’ve been taught is good and acceptable, because they’ve been told they have to — in order to be included, loved, accepted, to stay alive. In order to not be wrong. And then, one day, their heart hears a message that reminds them of what they knew as a kid and they begin to remember that they are the very source of all choices, the source of all change, and the source of all the love, inclusion and accepted-ness they could ever wish for.
Remember yourself.
Remember there is nothing wrong with you.
With love, Helen
