Hi,
You know the voice.
The one that speaks up right when you are about to try something. You have done this before. You will quit in three weeks. Who do you think you are. It is quick, it is specific, and it knows exactly where to press. Most people I meet have been fighting it for years, and most of them are losing. The first one I met was me. That is where all of this started.
Here is what took me a long time to see, and I did not see it alone. I got there sitting with Rick Scott, the therapist in our network, and I mean sitting, not only talking. Long meditation sessions, deeper than anything I had managed on my own, where Rick would take me somewhere quiet and then wait there with me until the thought finished itself. I have been walking with it since.
That voice is not your enemy. It is protection. Somewhere along the way you got hurt, or embarrassed, or you tried and it did not work, and a part of you decided that would never happen again. So it built a guard. The guard has one job, which is to keep you from getting hurt, and it does that job by keeping you small. It has never been updated. It is still protecting a version of you that no longer exists.
You do not win by fighting it. You have tried that. What actually works is quieter. You thank it. You let it know you heard it, that you understand what it has been doing, and that you are going to walk anyway. This is what loving yourself means in practice. Not a feeling. Not something you say to yourself in the mirror. It means having compassion for the part of you that has been hard on you, because it was scared, and it was trying to help.
And then you remember something the voice tends to forget. You are not only what you see in the mirror. The body feeds the soul and the soul feeds the body, and whatever you believe about what that soul is, there is more of you than the reflection. I do not say that to make you feel better. It is the reason any of this works at all. Feed one and the other wakes up.
So we start where you are. Not where you should be. There are two words in Latin I keep coming back to. Festina lente. Make haste slowly. Walk at your own measure, every day, and do not rush it.
Love is not what you get at the end. It is the ground you are standing on the whole time.
Same time next Friday.
Alper Kaynarkan