Tag: self worth

Shackled by ourselves

Posted on by philipdodson

I have over the course of a lifetime allowed my mind to dominate the real me, I have shackled myself with repeating thought patterns, made up in my head by the unconscious ramblings of others’ minds and the never-ending ramblings of my own.

I have created these so-called ‘truths’ about myself based on utter nonsense and then acted upon them. Thus actually creating the stories in reality. What we believe reality is, is what reality is. We always create and manifest our own reality. If we believe something to be true, then it is. If we believe we can do something we can and, of course, if we believe we can’t, then no surprise, we can’t.

I have felt shackled by those restrictions that I have created in my head and I have been slowly unshackling myself. However, I feel like I am slowly undoing a bolt or just starting to take the hacksaw to the chain and cutting slowly through it.

I feel that I want to jump into the water, but I just put one toe in, maybe a foot, and then I’m scared, the water is frightening, it’s cold, so I run back to the safety of the beach. It’s funny, that I am able outside of the nonsense of my head, to run straight into any sea, in any temperature and dive straight in, I have a cold shower, and during the winter months a fucking freezing cold shower, every single day and have done for 2 years. 

However, when it comes to getting on with my life dreams and allowing my soul to experience the things it wants to, the things I’d really, really, really want to do in life, then I am back to dipping the toe in the water and running back to the safety of the beach. Fear, as in whopping great psychological fear grips us all when it comes to the things we really want to do most in life. It is the fear of the uncertain future, that is just a concept in our heads as, of course, the future does not exist there is only now.

I am building the bravery muscle, as I want to stop just slowly removing the shackles, like dipping the toe in the water, I want to just dive in, I want to tear the shackles off in one go and be totally free of the restriction. 

I want to live a totally authentic life, where I allow the real me, my soul to experience life unhindered by the shackles of my mind and its thoughts and ego.

That means I have to face vulnerability and if you love Brene Brown’s work as I do, you’ll know that facing and rumbling (her fav word) with vulnerability isn’t a fluffy, cool and easy thing. It is like having to cross a river of molten lava in a flimsy dingy. Vulnerability, as in truly being our authentic and soulful essence is hard and requires true courage to ‘brave the wilderness’ (great Brene Brown book).

The hard things in life always bring us the most amazing and magical adventures and experiences, the very reason we are here and they get easier the more we brave it and build that bravery muscle, it’s all habit. The easy things turn sour, they bring us the suffering, regret, pain, internal pain, and eventually mental and physical decline. Easy gets hard and hard gets easy. But hard things require taking the shackles off, diving in and crossing the river of molten lava. But if life was plain sailing, no molten lava rivers, there would be no point to it.

Of course, our minds and egos don’t want any of this risk so it sabotages our attempts to be vulnerable and throw off the shackles. But at some point, when we are on the edge of that diving board looking down at the pool wanting to jump, we can either jump and become free or stay put, suffering a life of not achieving our true dreams living an unconscious mind-dominated life, whereby we miss real life now and spend it in our heads.

Take the shackles off and jump off the board.

Critics

Posted on by philipdodson

When we come from a place where we look for the good in what we do and see things how others see our work we start to get even better at what we do. When we start with kindness towards ourselves we change the internal narratives.

We have been conditioned to be our own biggest critic and that comes from the mind and its fears. Add to that the cultural norm of ‘you can do better’ mentality instilled in us from our formative years in order to satisfy the egos of others and to prepare us for a life of servitude to working for others. It creates a default reaction of self-criticism and it is a shield we put up to ‘protect’ ourselves from the perceived judgement of others. However, this behaviour only serves to affect our self-esteem and causes us to suffer within.

We never feel inspired or motivated after beating ourselves up.

However, if we choose to be our biggest fan instead then we are proud of our work and we grow in self-confidence and we feel good.

It inspires us to build on what we have already achieved and to look positively on what we have done not what we didn’t do or did badly in our eyes.

When we focus on what we did well we free ourselves from the negative energy of looking at what we think we did wrong.

Lastly, we are all already worthy of love and belonging from the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we go to sleep, no matter what we did or didn’t do that day.