Tag Archives: mindfulness

Building strength through self-compassion

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In my former life I was given an assessment by my peers that my greatest “skill” was compassion. I reacted very negatively to this feed back. Compassion after all did not seem to have any direct correlation to boosting our revenue, to giving clients accurate and timely results, to being able to advise them from a position of knowledge and business acumen or even to being able to transfer my (apparently non existent) skills to other in the business, Clearly they could not  think of anything nice and businessy to say about me so they came up with something that seemed nice whilst backhandedly giving me a slap about the chops. I almost spat, like cat.

cat

And I continued to beat myself up about being a waste of space, a failure as a good little worker bee, as a human being, if the only thing I was good at was being compassionate.

Do you see the hole here?

I may well have been perceived as being compassionate to others but there wasn’t a whole lot of self compassion going on. What was going on was a whole lot of repression, of just push it down, keep a lid on it, ignore the pain, grin and bare it. Write out those to do lists,  repeat a few affirmations, but above all do not under any circumstances acknowledge the pain.

The truth is that I did have those other skills; except perhaps for being timely, that has always been a struggle for me. Not being “on time” to get somewhere, I’m generally pretty good at that, it’s a simple goal, but to weave complex threads together to finish in a timely manner without getting lost in a maze of side roads and rabbit holes as something attracts my interest.

In the end I could not contain it any more. I had to do something and that something was to leave my business and enter a new one where my outward focused compassion was perceived (by me) as a more positive attribute.

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And along the way I started to develop just a little bit of self compassion. Wow, you mean I can be kind to myself as well as to others! Surely not. Does that not mean I am just giving my self a bit of self pity, or an excuse to slack off, to be a wuss? Not at all. To be have self compassion is first to be aware of the pain you are feeling, to be mindful, to acknowledge with no judgement and to accept and be self comforting in order to be resilient. Not to hide the pain, suppress it, try and make it go away.  Rather like the description of courage as being afraid but doing what has to be done anyway.

Recently I have been following the work of Kristen Neff and finding it is helping to build a process to rely on around what was developing ad hoc.

 

 

On this we agree

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There is a joke that says that there is only one thing two horse “experts” can agree on (and expert is used very loosely here) and that is that the third horse expert is wrong.

We can agree on breed but disagree on discipline, or we can disagree on discipline but agree on colour or disagree on colour but agree on tack. We can disagree about just about every manner of husbandry, training or any other thing remotely connected to our beloved equines.

There is one thing, however, that we can probably all agree on. What goes in one end, must come out the other end. Our gorgeous, powerful, dainty, impressive, cute, old, young, tired, playful, strong, timid, fearless equines are all, without exception, perfect machines for turning green stuff into brown stuff. And that means someone has to clear it up, and it is never them.

That is why they have us a body slaves.

More than you need to know? Why am I telling you this?

You can treat it as a mindless task. A mechanical picking up and clearing up whilst your mind wanders off to think about the argument you had with you boss this morning, or how you can attract the attention of the cute bloke at the feed store. There are a multitudes of tasks like this that we do in a day; and so the day slips past, half unnoticed and we wonder where all the time has fled. So I have started applying a form of mindfulness to “poo patrol”. It has its practical side of course, you can tell a lot about the health of your charges by considering their poo. Does it look different today? How many little piles and so on. That is not what I mean however. I mean being fully vested in the process and aware of my surroundings . Instead of think about the emails still to attend to,the bills to pay, the shopping list I keep my attention on the sun on my back, the feel of bending and straightening and lifting and tipping. Of the sounds of the birds, a car in the distance, even the faint sound of a train.

Surprisingly having my attention on the now of what I am doing seems to make the job go faster but the time is not lost, instead it expands. I can move on to those other tasks without the tail chasing feeling of never catching up because I have experienced every moment as it occurs.

And of course it can be applied to everything we do, not just picking up poo. Living life to the fullest does not have to mean a bottomless pocket and a candle that burns at both end as you grasp at more and more experiences, but rather getting more and more out of each experience you have by being present to it.

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