We are the experts of our own experience. Each and every one of us. To that end, everything I share on Everything is Workable is only based on my own expertise. It may not work for you and that’s fine. My intention is not to come across as telling people what to do. My intention is to inspire a sense of curiosity so that people might try things out for themselves to see what results they get.
In my first podcast of Everything it Workable I jumped right into the deep end with the statement: There is not a single human being on the planet who would not benefit from meditation.
I wasn’t saying this to mean everyone should meditate. I was saying it because I have drawn this conclusion from years of meditating, studying meditation, and observing the effect it has when people do it regularly. Whether you personally choose to meditate has no bearing on the fact that meditation can be of benefit to you. When we are around someone who works with their mind regularly, we will feel the benefit.
Meditation is about learning to embrace our experience. When we are with someone who is working with their mind in this way it’s observable, tangible, and can definitely ‘rub off’ on those around us.
I can’t always embrace how I’m feeling or what’s going on in a situation — no — but I’m definitely getting a lot better at it. And when I embrace my experience, instead of resisting it, I always feel much better. More relaxed, more open.
Not that I don’t get upset or feel hurt or pain — but more often than not I’m okay with what’s going on because that’s just what’s going on. I no longer believe there’s anything wrong with feeling anxious. I may think it feels wrong and I may wish it would go away, but I just notice that and don’t actually believe it’s a flaw so much these days.
But it’s taken a lot of work on my part to get to this point.
The first time I saw my psychologist I began to tell her my whole back story… “It all began when I was being bullied in Junior High…”
She cut me off right away and said, “But why are you here now?”
I told her I had to give her context and she said, “No. I want to know what’s going on with you right now. We can’t change what happened then. We can only work with what’s going on right now.”
The approach she had right off the get go was to look at that moment. In that moment what was going on for me was I didn’t like how I was feeling and was therefore not listening to it or taking care of myself.
Yes, I had a huge back story.
We all have stories and there’s no denying that our experiences have shaped who we are today. But regardless of what I’d been through, at the time I was rejecting a huge chunk of my experience by telling myself that I shouldn’t feel the way I did or that I was ‘broken’ for feeling the way I did.
The difference now is I’m learning how to accept that I am human. I don’t always not reject my experience, but I’m learning how to see that rejection as part of being human too and I’m starting to give my self credit for what I’m able to see, how I’m able to see it and how I can then work with it all.
We get to experience so much and we do ourselves a great disservice when we deny any part of our experience because we think we should be different than we are. Or we have an expectation that things should be different than they are.
No one is damaged. We all have wounds that need healing. If you ignore a wound it might heal but it can also fester and become infected and even become debilitating.
Mental illness is physical and needs the same attention as any other illness. By noticing what’s going on for me, noticing the storyline and how that feeds the anxiety, noticing the triggers and what the actual physical sensations are in my body, I’ve come to learn so much from it and so much about how to take care of myself. But I can only speak to my own experience and this is just one example.