Self-Appreciation
by Joseph O’Connor

We are often quick to set up standards and judge ourselves against them.  It can help to spend a few minutes each day simply observing your thoughts in a non-judgmental and accepting way. When you do, you can see your own process of thinking. What seemed to be isolated thoughts merge and change into one another, it is hard to see where one ends and the next begins, very like what happens in our life. It is easy to chop our experience into small pieces, judge each bit in isolation and then move on, rather than taking a more long-term view and seeing the connections.   Being aware of your own thoughts in a non-judgmental way counters two of the most destructive attitudes – perfectionism and indifference and starts to replace them with their opposites – love and trust.

Observe your thinking

1.    Pick a quiet time of the day, perhaps when you feel you need a natural break.

2.    Sit down and just observe your thinking without trying to stop it, judge it or change it. This is simple to describe and not so easy to do. It also sounds passive, but it takes a quality of attention that we are not used to giving. We are used to evaluating our thoughts and striving towards doing something.

It can be a relief simply to let go without feeling guilty. You have to breathe out in order to breathe in, so you have to give your mind a rest in order to use it to the full.

Ten minutes is enough to feel the benefit of this exercise.

You can also use this type of simple self-appreciation when you feel stressed, particularly if you have a headache. Before you reach for the aspirin, pay attention to what you are feeling, not only in your head, but also in your jaw and neck. Over three-quarters of headaches are caused by muscle tension in the head, neck and scalp. A painkiller will stop the headache but will not touch the tension. They will still be there when the drug wears off.

To get rid of the causes of the headache as well as the pain, you can try the following:

1.    Relax any muscles that you feel tense. Massage them. Notice how the sensation of the headache is not fixed, but changes as you watch it.

2.    Imagine the muscles in your jaw neck and scalp, and imagine tightening them still further. You can probably make the headache worse just for an instant. Why? Because if you can make the headache worse, it shows you have some control over it and therefore you can make it better.

3.    Clench your fist and slowly relax it, and as you do, imagine the muscles of your head and neck relaxing as well.

4.    Give the headache a colour, and then see that colour. Imagine that colour slowly changing to another, pleasant, pain free colour. Or imagine what sound would represent that headache. Hear that sound, probably an unmusical noise, and slowly change it into pleasant, relaxing music, like an orchestra tuning up before a concert, the whining and groaning of the instruments slowly come into tune and into harmony when the music starts. If this does not work, you can always use the painkiller.

Setting aside a few minutes a day to relax gives a more natural balance to the day and helps you be more active when you need to be. Taking time out of the day to relax and counter stress is a cliché, but cliches only become cliches by having some truth to them. Many people when told to relax just laugh and say, ‘Relax?  If only I had the time!’ Yet they do not have the time because they are working hard at what is important to them. Perhaps if they did take time to relax, then they would feel better and be more effective and therefore they would have that spare time, but they imagine trying to fit ‘relaxation’ into an already busy schedule, something they have to do. There are times to be quiet and there are times to be active, when you have the two balanced, you will enjoy both more.

Each day is a small part of the richness of your whole life, like a hologram the patterns that go through your life also go through your day. Do you like those patterns? When you want to change the direction of your life, the way to start is by changing the direction of your day, while recognising the practical realistic limits of what you can do. When I was travelling the London Underground, I saw a nice piece of graffiti. Someone had written in large black letters, ‘O Lord, give me the strength to change the things I can, and the grace to accept the things I cannot. Underneath, someone else had added in large green letters, ‘And a great big bag of money.’

In a complex world, there is no guarantee we will still want tomorrow what we want today, or that what works today will also work tomorrow. The world changes despite us. Increasing your freedom of choice works better than trying to develop a right answer to apply every day. The more creative and flexible you are, the better you can deal with whatever happens. And the world is changing faster and becoming more complex every day.  Go for what is workable and do not expect circumstances to last. The moments you have now will never come around again, and what you are doing now will effect who you are and what you do tomorrow.

Now let's look at how we think, and how we can be inside or outside our experiences.  Are we independent observers watching the world go by, or are we part of it? If we are, then what we do changes us as well as others. Are you part of an audience, watching the play of life unfold, but ultimately powerless to change it. The playwright made up the plot, all you can do is applaud, or boo, or go home and write a review. Or are you part of a conspiracy where we are inventing the rules, the dialogue, and the dramatic action as we go along. Is this theatre that we experience actually part of another wider play?

We are an essential and interdependent part of the world. What we do effects others, and ourselves, our actions send out ripples that can come back and affect us.  We bump into the consequences of our past actions every day. And tomorrow we will feel the ripples of what we do today. We may only play a small part in the world, but if the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Beijing can cause a tornado in Texas, how much more influential must we be? Could our words be butterflies of change for other people that we may never meet? We can change other people’s lives with a few well-chosen words at the right time, and we are different after those words as well. We never know the full consequences of what we do. Gandhi is reputed to have said, ‘What you do may not seem very important, but it very important that you do it.’

A chapter in my book, Extraordinary Solutions for Everyday Problems has the peculiar name of 'Pieces of String' which comes from a story an acquaintance told me. One of her relatives was helping to clear an old house, the previous occupants had died, and the house was going to be sold. The last place they had to clear out was the attic; it was huge and dusty and had been used as a general storage space for all sorts of strange things. One of the last things they found was a small and rather beautiful embroidered box with an intricate catch. It had a label that read, ‘Pieces of String that are too short’ and sure enough when they opened it, it was full of pieces of string of different lengths. All neatly folded away. When I heard this, I laughed, but then felt sad. Someone had taken the trouble to save those bits of string. Dozens of leftovers that had not measured up. What were they too short for? I shall never know.

Wouldn’t it have been a pity if someone had measured every day by how much their experiences had fallen short of what they wanted and carefully stowed away the difference?
   
You have the power through how you think to store away a treasure trove of experiences that were much more than you wanted, and you can open it every day and enjoy.