I was having a conversation with a friend not too long ago and she mentioned something about how she liked talking with me because I was non-judgmental. It was high praise. As I suspect is the case for others, we rarely judge others as much as we judge ourselves, and when it comes to myself and my own perceived shortcomings, I am perhaps the harshest judge of all. With the passing of time, I find a little more compassion for myself, a little more willingness to drop something I've been telling myself for many years that I could have sworn was the truth but that my life experiences are showing me is not as true as I thought.
Earlier today, I thought about this as I drank tea and attempted to find something funny to watch on Netflix. I was thinking about the stuff I have to do to get ready for the school year, my concerns about being off on my triathlon training schedule, the trash needing to be taken out, the weather, and my slightly lower-than-normal energy level over the past few days. I wondered if I was at the very start of becoming sick, since there has been some kind of virus going around. My inner sense was that the low energy had to do with my body dealing with something and not quite falling over into full-blown illness. Then I wondered if I was just playing a game with myself and trying to get out of doing stuff that I haven't been feeling super psyched about doing lately. The reason I'm not feeling super psyched is because I've been feeling low on energy. It's fabulously circular reasoning, and until I wrote it out just now, I didn't realize it.
Something else that's going on beyond this surface level of thinking is that I have a tendency to become judgmental of myself when my energy drops. It took me a long time to be aware of what's going on when my energy drops. I started to notice that I would see the energy drop, and then I'd get curious about the drop and an answer would come to me. It's usually something like 'you're getting sick' or 'you've been staying up until 3 am the last four days' or 'you did just run five miles'. At this point, one of two things happens. Either I am able to accept what is going on and deal with it from there, or I start to resist it. In today's situation, the judgment hit as soon as I started resisting that I wasn't feeling well in the form of, 'you're just trying to get out of doing stuff that you have to do, and if you don't do it, it means you're failing at everything you're doing.'
Once I start resisting the way an experience is for me, things go downhill quickly. If I'm getting sick and I don't want to be sick, it takes me no time to start judging myself and berating myself in an attempt to rally and motivate myself into doing stuff even when I'm not feeling well and know that the best thing to do to care for myself is to just chill out. Sometimes the judging shows up when I'm taking a big ol' leap out of the status quo and trying to change something that is important to me and matters in my life. Over and over again, I find that the best thing to do in these situations is to let go of the judgments and the resistance. This lets me just be with however I'm feeling in a place of gentle acceptance.
Yeah. Not so easy to do. I know.
Part of the reason it's not so easy is if we're really good at judging ourselves and resisting ourselves, we might not even know we're doing it. The only way to deal with this, as far as I know, is to be willing to start noticing when we're judging ourselves, or to notice when we're feeling agitated, or when something is happening within our emotional or physical experience of ourselves that we just want to get the hell out and not come back. When we have the awareness, we have to just acknowledge that this is what is going on and not use it to beat ourselves up some more.
Another reason it's not so easy has to do with our understanding of what it means to accept something. Acceptance has nothing to do with rolling over and letting life batter you about while you submit resignedly to your fate. It has to do with being aware of what is happening in a situation and staying with it, without needing to change it right now and make it different right now. In order to accept difficult feelings or thoughts in a moment, it's helpful to realize that they all eventually pass, and when acceptance happens, a lot of the tension and struggle that surrounds something passes, too. If you resist that something is happening, you render yourself powerless to do anything to change it. Accepting something means that you are aware of it happening and that you are present with your felt experience of what is happening, rather than just observing it with intellectual distance.
So, as hard as it is to just kind of hang out and be generally non-productive without beating myself up for it, that's what I'm trying to do today. I can be all right with being tired. I can totally embrace the fact that I don't want to do something without getting caught up in the 'not wanting' part of it. The funny part is that, as I do just hang out and accept that I'm feeling resistant, or notice that I'm judging myself and handle it with a soft touch, it gets easier for me to treat myself with greater kindness. The judgment eases up, the resistance may or may not linger, and I find myself able to do what I absolutely must in that particular moment to care for myself.
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