Getting back on track with my thoughts.
I’ve been dragged back into the world that is meaningless according to ACIM.
I’ve been dragged back into judgement and complaint instead of ease and flow, I suppose.
I spent a lot of time yesterday judging a friend and going over and over in my mind everything that I felt they had done wrong. I felt misused and unfairly treated and so I was basically complaining to myself about that and judging my friend for being like that.
All of this was only ever in my own mind. It wasn’t real. It was meaningless. It wasn’t even there. I made it all up to justify my own anger and fear and sadness and loneliness.
It’s strange. And it’s definitely harder for me to recognise this stuff when I’m around other people more, partly because I spend so much time on my own most of the time and so, when I’m practising the lessons, I don’t have to practise them much around other people or in the context of what other people may have said or done. In fact, though, I always feel I make the biggest jumps forward, the most progress, when I spend more time around others and maybe feel unhappy about some element of socialising. Also, I did no journaling even while my friend was here, let alone reading ACIM, so I just got completely back into the so-called “real world”.
So I think I was “nice” and “patient” and stuff like that, but I know I was judging the whole time in my own mind and also feeling resentful about some of the stuff that happened. It was only that I felt my friend had been a bit inconsiderate and selfish and self-obsessed sometimes. And I just felt like, although parts of the weekend were fun, parts of them were definitely not at all fun and I was relieved to get back to normality this morning.
The thing is, writing and reading really help me to feel good. Eating healthily helps me to feel good. I do also get quite anxious when I’m around someone else for 16 hours a day or more. Normally, I would hope to get some time to myself over a weekend, even if it was as busy as the one just gone, but this time there just wasn’t an opportunity.
It’s easy to see how ACIM can help you to deal with the stressful and difficult parts of life. To recognise that I made things feel stressful and difficult through my own thoughts and seeing what wasn’t actually there. I’m not completely sure what WAS actually there that I was supposed to be seeing instead, but I think it’s just not seeing my judgemental thoughts, letting those things that you think someone is doing wrong just fade away, as if they didn’t even happen. And similarly, when you realise that you yourself have maybe been rude or impatient or critical, to let that fade away as well and forget it ever happened. There were a lot of judgemental thoughts in retrospect!
But I can see how much better I would have felt, and how much more I would have enjoyed the weekend, and how much better I would have made the weekend for my friend, if I hadn’t had those thoughts, or more realistically I guess, if I hadn’t held on to those thoughts.
Also, a lot of the worry and stuff came from my perfectionism. I wanted to make the weekend perfect and I was very anxious about that beforehand. And I think that is bound to spill out into negativity too, as soon as things aren’t perfect! So it’s also about recognising that I’m punishing myself and others with my need for things to happen a certain way, and by going with the flow I can make things better for everyone.
But I still find the other side of things confusing. I’m following someone on YouTube at the moment who is a running coach and makes videos about his running. And he seems SO happy. And such a positive person who does so much good in the world. So what is wrong with that? I feel like this is the happy dream Allen Cohen talks about. Where you’re still seeing the dream and not reality but you are living well, happily etc.
I think it’s probably that your own happiness and confidence maybe has to be bulletproof before you can even hope to help others. But there might also be just an inherent personality thing there too where an extrovert is just going to feel more comfortable helping others and might be more anxious if they have to only do stuff for themselves, whereas an introvert will be more comfortable only thinking about themselves and will feel more anxious if they have to try to make things better for someone else. It’s not that introverts aren’t kind. It’s more maybe that when the chips are down, they’ll need to go quiet and be with their own thoughts.
I remember this in the past where I would start some new self-help technique and really feel like I was improving as a person and becoming happier, but then as soon as I was around other people it would stop working and I’d be really annoyed that no one else could see the progress I’d made! Look I am a more confident person than I used to be but I’m not bulletproof and I’m not an extrovert so if you push me too far I’m probably not going to be that person who can lift you up and save the day you know. Maybe someday I could be but maybe that’s not even my path anyway and even wanting to be that sort of person is just a sign of how I want to be SEEN as a certain type of person by others, rather than simply being content to be happy on the inside.
It’s totally my own fault and my own responsibility. I don’t need others’ approval. And, if people have made a judgement about you it’s totally because of their own stuff, and you’ll never stop people from having those kinds of judgements about you, no matter what you do. So yeah, you just gotta let that go honey. Because it’s all made up bullshit anyway.
So I need to let go of my own offense at other people’s apparent judgement of me, and my own judgements that then spring up as a reaction to those apparent judgements, because through both of those things, offendedness and judgement, I’m only attacking. Myself and others. And adding to the world’s pain instead of helping to heal it.
The more you can just let go of the bad parts and let stuff be easy, the better. The more you can just go with the flow, the better – always and forever.