Namaste 🙏🏻
"I will keep constant watch over myself and—most usefully - will put each day up for review. For this is what makes us evil - that none of us looks back upon our own lives. We reflect upon only that which we are about to do. And yet our plans for the future descend from the past"
Seneca
It's fascinating how reviewing places, services, and experiences is done almost automatically these days. We rate health shops, Amazon delivery service, apps, films, politicians and even our cat sitters. A review of a restaurant, where food was excellent or terrible according to some (usually nothing in the middle) will make the decision for us whether we should go there or pass. A kind word about that smiley receptionist who bumped someone up to the room with the sea view will probably draw us to the same hotel and a moan about a grumpy barista, who should be replaced with someone smilier may result in a coffee shop remaining empty. We openly use our right to rate, judge, and label. We invest time into it, and most likely enjoy it. Though when it comes to us, we don't give ourselves 10 minutes to sit down and ask a few questions. We allow our achievements & failures, our emotions & feelings to flow by unnoticed. We continue making the same mistakes and blame others for our bad mood. We say we feel happy, but our limited vocabulary doesn't always allow us to explain what exactly that means. We feel frustrated, but can't point the finger on why the exact same situation the other day didn't bother us at all, yet today it feels like a total disaster.
Back in 2019, she started journaling. One of the podcasts she was hooked on recommended it as a mindfulness tool and as she was extremely desperate to treat her anxiety, she decided to give it a try. She wrote everything, starting from how she felt and where in her body she felt it, to what made her feel upset, angry, uplifted; people that were adding value to her life, and those who drained her energy; why she loved her job & how swimming was meditation before exercise; what she felt grateful for regardless of her terrible insomnia & extreme moodiness as a result. She expanded her emotional vocabulary, started to understand the roots of her anxiety through being curious about her pain & accepting that not everyone had to like her.
Before even knowing the scientific benefits behind the pen & paper, she had trusted her instincts. Unloading anything that was on her mind onto a blank page felt like sweating out all the toxins and bad energy. Later, she found some exceptional studies which gave her enough reason to appreciate journaling:
Writing things down, often called a brain dump, is a very effective tool to cope with anxiety.
All of a sudden it made perfect sense why she couldn't sleep night after night. There were far too many stories - some helpful, some self-destructive - preoccupying her mind simultaneously. Unloading them on others didn't seem like a fair deal, so she bought herself a chunky LifeStory book from one of those funky gift shops in London & started conquering its pretty pages. She tried a bunch of mindfulness exercises. One that really stuck with her was
a powerful three-letter question Why?
One of the questions she asked herself was: Why was an apology so important to her? And as soon as she began a line of self-inquiry, it just went on. She asked another why to each of her responses and ended up with a nicely laid out pyramid where the answer was right at the bottom.
As a child she didn't learn to say 'sorry'. No one in the family ever apologised to her because she was the youngest and the older ones were always right. Neither was she taught to use what now seems one of the most important words in her vocabulary along with 'thank you' and 'please'. Saying them out loud was seen as weakness and Soviet kids were expected to be tough. And so she was. Up until she moved to the UK, where she got an overdose of all three. People seemed overly polite and overly apologetic, but surely it's better to exaggerate it slightly than leave someone feeling hurt or unappreciated.
Another discovery she made while doing all those smart exercises and a bunch of useful reading is that generally speaking our emotional vocabulary isn't sophisticated enough to express everything we feel. Apparently, 'the more words we can use to describe what we feel, the better able we'll be to understand ourselves and to make ourselves understood to others.' It seems like a very obvious thing, but when we ask someone 'how are you?' 9 out of 10 cases we get 'fine' as a response. The response is done without giving the question much thought, it tells you no story and doesn't encourage much of a conversation.
She caught herself using the same words over and over again. So she learned a bunch of new alternatives for 'good' and 'bad' to be able to label her emotions more accurately, to deal with them with more confidence and eventually to give her writing a little polish. At the end of the day writing to her always manifested something creative & repetition wasn't a part of that deal. Soon she started feeling cosy and calm (not just 'good') after her Yin Yoga practice, motivated and thrilled (not just 'happy') while getting positive feedback from her students, miserable and exhausted (not just 'bad') while in conversation with certain people, uneasy and tense (not just another 'bad') when people didn't try to understand her pain. Or at least accept it.
It requires time to recognise how one actually feels, but most of us either don't give ourselves permission to reflect on our feelings or simply don't know how to do it. Another important aspect is that even though we all feel the same emotions, for various reasons we prefer not to share them. Whether we worry about others gossiping, misunderstanding or mocking us, we keep quiet. There she found another great benefit of journaling:
Journaling provides a safe space for our thoughts and emotions to be recognised, expressed and processed.
Journaling turned out to become a tool to improve her life through breaking the patterns that had been sitting there by 'habit' & harming her without her knowing it. Through building awareness about what was aiding her mental well-being, she reorganised her priorities and daily routines. She started prioritising healthy friendships, included downtime into her schedule & gave herself time to set some clear goals. Goals which involved self-improvement - not getting another teacher certificate or mastering a handstand (which in fact she still can't do without support). Goals which involved understanding her emotions (and reactions), helping people, improving communication, and all in all becoming a better version of herself. And most importantly by recording them she could track her progress.
Due to relocation in the pandemic her journal was locked in storage for 4 years. Reconnecting with it was one of the happiest moments she has recently lived through. She got back in touch with her dreams, struggles & tears of the time. She felt the pain & joy of releasing them through writing. And realised how much work she's done in the past few years, how many relationships she's mended & how much freedom and power over herself that simple habit has created.
Sometimes she wishes she could discover all that sooner. Sometimes she doesn't have the courage to apologise to everyone she's hurt. But she's grateful that her sickness helped her find some tremendous self-discovery tools and that now she can share them with others.
Have a healthy day
Do you review yourself?
Inspiring & practical read
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