Be Gentle with Yourself You can only attract the people, things, and events that match the quality and intensity of your beliefs about yourself. That’s why being gentle with yourself is a pre-requisite for conscious creators. You can visualize and affirm all you want, but if in your heart you aren’t worthy, you aren’t receiving. If you want to let the good stuff in, stop beating yourself up. No matter what. Criticizing yourself, beating yourself up, feeling sorry for yourself, and being disappointed in your own behavior is not virtuous, honorable, or productive in any way. If you do it on a regular basis, you’ve been taught to believe that negative feedback is an effective way to motivate change. That kind of thinking was taught to you by those who didn’t know any better than to make you feel worse so they could feel better. They did their job well because you sub-consciously believe that if you can make yourself feel bad enough, you’ll do better. Fortunately, that’s not how it works. Negative feedback creates avoidance behavior, not inspired behavior. Otherwise, the only way we can be successful is by making ourselves miserable! Self criticism is a primal form of invalidation, and humans need validation at the most primal level in order to thrive. Decision making, creative thinking, intuition, and higher comprehension are most efficient when the self feels good about itself. Getting upset with yourself has devastating effects on your self esteem. it creates enormous resentment, resistance, frustration, and jealousy that causes you to sabotage your own best efforts. It fills you with stress hormones and inhibits your creativity. It sucks the energy right out of you and it feels bad. Self criticism is self defeating. Biologically, criticism sends a danger signal to your nervous system that puts you into “fight or flight” mode just as effectively as a bear chasing you through the woods. While the situation with the bear will resolve itself rather quickly, emotional stress and trauma goes on and on. During “flight or flight” mode, your body slows down cellular growth and repair, digestive and immunity functions, and higher cognitive processes in order to give priority to the mid-brain, glands, and muscles that help you run faster and climb higher to escape the bear. No wonder our shoulders hurt and our legs are restless when we can’t climb a tree to escape the danger! Self criticism actually makes you sick. You can’t focus, relax, digest, sleep, or shift your energy as well as you can as when you feel good about yourself. That’s why choosing to feel good about yourself, no matter what, is the most important Practice you can undertake. It also requires the most courage! A Brief Criticism of Criticism Authority figures love to use criticism to disarm their enemies and control people. Whoever the authorities are for you, if you criticize yourself, you have learned to do the work for them. Your energy, enthusiasm, attractiveness, joyfulness, intelligence, sensuality, sense of humor—whatever—is no longer a threat to them because they have conditioned you to need them to tell you if you are worthy or not. They pulled your plug, and most of the good stuff you do manage to attract goes down the drain because you don’t believe you have suffered or sacrificed enough to deserve it. But take heart. If you beat yourself up for any reason, if you criticize and second guess yourself to the point of distraction, if you are depressed because things aren’t working out for you, it’s ok. It’s not your fault. None of it is your fault. And that tunnel has no cheese! If you want to make a real and lasting change in how you feel, you’ve got to turn off the self criticism and pity and choose to be gentle with yourself. And every time you do it you will be one step closer to matching the energy of your desires and attracting what you want. This one change in your behavior, practiced consistently, will make the biggest improvement in the quality of your life. Hands down, forward and backward, inside and out. I can’t say it enough!
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 02:38:17 +0000