Best Friend
Do you treat yourself as your own best friend? Do you feel you made a mistake or you are the mistake? Is there a critical voice in your head telling you that you are not good enough, you did it wrong or you never do anything right? Most of us have a really harsh view of ourselves and would never speak to anyone we loved the way we speak internally to ourselves. Why?
Those voices, opinions and feelings are actually someone else’s, someone we absorbed as a very small child and made into our own personal critic. If we are lucky we also absorbed some loving voices who believed in us who can drown out the critic, but all too often the critic wins. When that happens our self esteem gets hit, we make decisions made to suit that critic or we try to drown them out with drink food or drugs.
There are a few simple tips to start to work on those nasty voices and the constant berating we give ourselves –
Try to remember where you first heard what you are hearing when you beat yourself up, who was it, what did they say and how old were you? Now you have identified them you can admit they are not yours – catch them and send them away.
Now did you have a nurturing, loving supportive influence in your life? Meditate on that person; feel their love come back to you and difficult as it will be in the beginning try to replace the critic with the love.
Remember that you heard this when you were very small so sometime be apparent to your feelings and soothe them by being your best friend too.
Challenge the idea that being hard on yourself will make any improvements to you or anything else. Being unkind to yourself causes resentment, a sense of defeat, and cause a pattern that will end in emotional damage.
If you forgive yourself, let yourself off the error you will not become weak or fail at your life, you in fact become more understanding, intuitive and able to cope with what life throws at you. You become braver as you don’t fear the inner turmoil that would follow failure and you can accept that sometimes you just don’t get it right.
Finally the shame that you feel at so many things from your body to your bank balance start to drift away as you accept you are not prefect and that’s ok.
Love and light
