For most of the first thirty-odd years of my life, I was an endlessly harsh and driving taskmaster to myself. I pushed myself mercilessly in any project, endeavor or situation in which I found myself engaged. Being tired, anxious or sick were, rather than reasons to reduce the pressure on myself, more likely to be circumstances that upped the pressure to which I subjected my chronically overachieving self. I had to be the "best" at whatever I was doing in order to feel in any way worthwhile. (My father tells me that even when I was really little I would always abandon as "not interesting" any undertaking in which I didn’t immediately see the possibility that I might excel.)
When at 32 I was moved to drop out of my overachieving life (see Pirouettes for more about this time), I took to the road West in a van that I’d set up as a traveling home for myself. For the first time in my life, I found myself earnestly questioning the ways that I had always treated myself. I started paying attention to the poor body that I had been flogging all my life to get to wherever it was I thought I’d needed to go at the time. Every fiber of my being and body called to me to slow down, to soften, to go more gently through the world and to go more gently with myself. I couldn’t help but listen to this call from my deeps. Listening, I gradually began the long, slow, sometimes arduous journey to becoming more kind and gentle with myself.
I discovered early on in the journey that my new choices went seriously against the grain of both the mainstream culture and the ways that I had learned to survive with a harsh, critical, always undermining mother. (See Speak Kindly to Yourself for more about these beginnings.) This made the road sometimes rather edgy. It also added to my general experience of being "other," an outsider in the world. Neither of these particular challenges seemed capable of deterring me.
What was, at first, most amazing was that I was moving into this new way of being in the world without the usual pressure that I’d always put on myself in any undertaking! Without yet having a vocabulary for my process, I see now that the path I took was to begin to observe myself. I became a curious, judgment-free witness to my own unfolding. Anything I did and anyway I thought or felt or acted became something for me to examine and try to understand in its own terms. My focus shifted away from that of getting to some outcome/end place/goal. Instead, I was now totally drawn to observing the processes by which I moved and was moved.
My twists and turns of mind, feeling or behavior stopped being acceptable/good or unacceptable/bad. Instead they were just whatever they were. As themselves, they offered me endless opportunities to explore my own convolutions. That I was on my own wandering along the West Coast–with neither partner nor children nor work that called my attention away from my own meanderings–was enormously facilitating. There was all the emotional and physical space in the world to devote myself to "idle" contemplation, to these quite fascinating researches on my self. I came quite a distance away from my harsh, critical and fiercely demanding-of-self former self as I continued along in this process of contemplating myself.
The work I came to in my forties–discovering and re-mothering the little ones inside (See The Little Ones Story for more about this)–profoundly deepened and fine-tuned my capacity to be incredibly gentle with myself. Still, this much earlier first step produced enormous movement in that direction from what seemed not such a very huge or particularly difficult shift in perspective.
I’ve watched many of the women with whom I’ve been privileged to work–women with more complex and contextually embedded lives than I had then–begin the journey to greater gentleness with themselves. Almost always the gateway lies in choosing the first step of becoming sensitive cultural anthropologists, becoming ethnographers exploring the terrain of their own beings. In that moment we are choosing to observe, to witness and watch ourselves in order to gather some understanding of the ways in which we function, of the ways we are in the world. In that choosing, we inevitably let go of judgment, expectations and the tangle of being outcome-focussed. The two approaches to ourselves do seem to be mutually exclusive. Choosing to commit ourselves to investigating how it is that we are "wired," we seem surprisingly able to allow ourselves to just be exactly as we are.
This open-hearted curiosity about ourselves seems inevitably to lead us to a wellspring of gentleness and generosity toward our own beings. Both are attitudes toward ourselves that our ordinary upbringings and our culture rarely teach us. In ordinary/conventional life, goal-directed and outcome-oriented behaviors are highly valued and rewarded. This valuing inevitably leads us to measuring ourselves against other people’s accomplishments or against accepted norms. Leading us- thereby into endless judging of ourselves. Such judging is rarely gentle. It also, contrary to popular belief, rarely encourages or sustains the growth or flourishing of our best, fullest selves! It is only when we treat ourselves with gentleness and generosity of spirit that we are able blossom gloriously into our truest selves
Consider remembering to approach all that you do and all the ways that you are with curiosity and interest in how you are "wired;" see how much more gentle you become with yourself and watch how you thrive!
P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!
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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 handcolored bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.
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