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Self-compassion
Looking back from my current place onto my childhood, I see myself doing stupid things. Baby stuff like eating sand or insects. And a lot of crying to get my needs met instantly. I feel okay to look at my younger self with compassion and love. I totally understand, that my 4-10 year old self is of course reacting from a completely different state of mind, than the one I am using now.
Even looking back at my teenage years, which were driven a lot by self-image and insecurity issues, I can now see, why it was so hard for me to act from an authentic place back then and out of fear rather chose to blend into the crowd.
These past events from my childhood and teenage years, got reframed by my current model of the world. Which took a while, but now I understand and embrace these as stepping stones, which were essential to become the current me. But isn’t it the same with myself from only a week ago? Or a day ago? Or, going one step further, isn’t it the same with myself from one minute ago?
For instance, after I screwed up, by saying something out of anger, reacting from the wrong state of mind or just ate something I don’t really want to eat out of mindlessness, isn’t the awareness that I did something „wrong" exactly the distinguishing element which separates the old me from the current one? By curiously examining what exactly caused the slip up, we might find that we now know something, we just didn’t know a moment ago. That there was a pattern running us, an emotion driving us or something deeper we had to cope with. Now we know, which makes us aware.
By finding, that our model of the world, again, changed a tiny bit and is different now, than it was just a moment ago, and seeing, that this makes us a slightly different person, we might be able to right away have the same compassion for ourselves, when doing a mistake, like that we have, when looking back at our childhood days and our slip ups back then.
By accepting, that our model of the world is constantly changing with every interaction, we can accept that we are now more intelligent than ever and that everything we did wrong or will do wrong, doesn’t happen because we are not good enough, but because we acting from a different state of mind.
Lets embrace the shit we’ve done and do. Don’t hold back, interact fully and honestly!