Excluding my experience teaching in prisons, every single student/client I have had would be deemed as ‘successful’ by most people who knew them casually. All of them looked –and more importantly were– the sort of people all of us would like to be in one way or another. And yet they all came with what they felt at the time were crippling problems.
In our heads, we tend to do negative comparisons with people we see. If we’re angry or disappointed in the world, then we tend to be insulting and judgmental about people. But if our negativity is turned inward, then we only notice the qualities they have that we feel are missing within ourselves (e.g. I wish I could wear clothes like that, or, that guy is smooth and polished and I’m a bumbling idiot.)
But inside those smooth and polished exteriors, people come to me largely at a moment of transition. Sometimes the transition is mistaken for a crises, but most are just ordinary people that have developed negative feelings about themselves or their lives for all kinds of very human and understandable reasons.
Some are struggling with grief, others with fear. Some have addictions, some are anxious, some lack confidence, some aren’t sure who to become next. There are senior business people that want to have a heart to heart without losing face, parents who want to admit they are failing (but generally aren’t), and cheating spouses.
There are people tired of hating, bosses who need easier but more effective ways to manage people, people who need to forgive someone –and some are even crippled by guilt by having done some truly awful things in their lives.
They all come as a way to move forward and create positivity; as a way to atone for their past. But each and every one would look like a successful person you might envy on the street or at work. Think about that the next time you’re using your uninformed beliefs about others to beat yourself up with.
In our heads, we tend to do negative comparisons with people we see.
Remember, we all might think harsh thoughts and have periods in our life that we regret, but the regret is the sign that we are good people otherwise we wouldn’t feel that. Instead, we are better to face that pain full on because it is ours. After that, we should see ourselves as human and forgive ourselves.
Instead of wallowing in negative emotions, we are better to enact our regrets via the expression of positivity within the world around us, through the living of our lives. So let’s all just forget all the self-doubt and comparisons and have a great day enacting positivity in our little parts of the world. Thanks for reading.
peace. s
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
If you don’t think you have different identities just try this: the next time you’re talking to someone you don’t like, imagine that someone you respect more than almost anyone is listening to the exchange.
Everyone’s so judgmental that no one feels acceptable and that’s lead to insecurity that in turn leads to loneliness etc. etc. We shouldn’t use harsh judgments to build sharp, tall fences around ourselves when we are also stumbling through reality. We need each other, including each other’s forgiveness for our own inabilities.
I would like to begin by thanking you all for the very warm welcome back. You caught me a bit off guard; I had been so focused on what I had to do that failed to consider external reactions along the way.
So now that we know what it’s about, I want to discuss its frequency. I really have no idea how easy it could ultimately be on each weekday as before, but even under current conditions that might be doable if the pieces are a bit shorter. It depends on a lot of unrelated things. At the same time, I may find I only have time for one piece a week on a general theme and one on caregiving and what can be learned about ourselves from that. Even non-caregivers can learn about life from the latter.
A lot of my students come to me with an issue or a problem. In most cases, their attraction to solving that issue will cause them to see most of the lessons through that lens. But every now and then I get a more philosophical student, who comes with a problem but quickly finds themselves, like me, fascinating by these very ideas themselves.
Maybe it’s a few friends of yours. Maybe it’s you and you know it. Maybe it’s you and you aren’t aware of it; but we’re all somewhere on the self and other spectrum. Regardless of how various individual people define us, we can all appreciate that some people will be more selfish than others, just as we know some will give beyond their capacity to give.
Most of you will know these varying spiritual states as political distinctions. People seen as over-generous and foolish by one side are seen as compassionate and generous by the other. Likewise, the ones viewed as selfish and careless are seen by their own side as focused and successful. Each of these opinions and every single one in between are all largely valid, which helps us realise the truly meaningless nature of opinions, because what we’re really talking about is the many ways people are.
Can you accept that your nature is to move toward balance and that is the pull of life you feel each day? And can you simultaneously accept that your nature includes the idea that where you’re headed isn’t better than where you are, it’s just a different balance point with different challenges? The point isn’t to get anywhere, it’s to go; to live; to be. External outcomes ultimately don’t matter. It’s what Shakespeare meant with that “To be or not to be,” stuff.
We evaluate, we name, we label, we judge, we value. Totally lost in ego, we use words like truth to represent what is really only our personal view. Reacting more to our own thoughts about things than the things themselves, we seek to remove all of our opportunities for personal growth by removing any and all offending ideas from our daily experience.
Meanwhile we have difficulty expressing compassion for a fearful or angry young man with equal challenges and his own set of mistakes. Our job isn’t to look at his clothing and terms of speech and his behaviour and then evaluate him, label him as an offender and his wife as a victim, and then dole out our compassion according to those judgments. Our job is to care about each of them in conjunction with their relationship.
It is we who must lower our sense of right and wrong and instead ask how we can help situations traverse the distance from tense and unpleasant to calm and rewarding. Remember, every time you either consistently negatively judge, or universally accept another person, you are engaged in the very deepest and most destructive state of ego. That’s like failing to throw a life preserver so you can instead scream at a drowning person about how they should have learned to swim many years ago. It’s cruel and it does not serve the larger community.