Dear Boys,
After all these years in Aikido, I’ve had my countless injuries, and thankfully, nothing serious. Sometimes you’ll get injured without knowing why, or how the injury comes about. What’s interesting is that after a while, my body will ‘tell’ me how that injury came about.
One recent muscular pain in my left forearm baffled me. I couldn’t understand where that pain came from. The pain was a deep, dull one but nonetheless, I knew I had somehow injured it.
As I continue with my daily chores, the realisation came to me out of the blue. I must have pulled a muscle doing this stunt.
Which was to me at that time, seems like a kind of fun, but I was putting my entire weight on that arm, and I thought the first thing that should go was my wrist, but it didn’t, it was my forearm that probably got twisted and hyper-extended in a bad way. It’s fine now.
Physical Pain, Mental Answers
Well, one thing I learned these months was that my body, or psyche, can tell me what went wrong, and how I got injured, my mind can do the same thing as well.
Lacking Self-Compassion
It came to my realization one day, that I lacked Self-Compassion. I didn’t know that came from, the message just floated out into my mind and it got stuck. I know I was onto something. Somehow, I was mentally hurt, psychologically maimed and just limping around, pretending everything is fine, or hiding behind a thin vile of pseudo-positivism. Besides, in our society, we need to project happiness, strength, independence and look great not just good on every front.
My Own ‘unbiased’ Self Assessment
While I am an overall nice guy, the one thing that lurks beneath that niceness, was a sense of dark, melancholy brooding. My defense was everyone has a ‘Harvey Two-Face‘ like the character in Batman. We all have a good guy and a bad guy persona. That’s true.
What is also true was that the ‘dark’ side of me was becoming toxic, making me cynical over the good and gloat when things turn bad. It is beginning to taint my ability to interpret reality objectively and tell a more holistic self-narrative. My wife, your mum do tell me that from time to time, but it really takes yourself to know yourself.
I am an A**hole
I used to say that in a jest and shrugged it off nonchalantly. It’s like telling people don’t expect me to be nice and it’s a given if I misbehave! While it was a social defense mechanism, it ultimately worked best against…me. I was giving myself an excuse to be bad, and look at good things as a bonus. While I thought I was being pragmatic and brutally realistic, I didn’t realise that in doing so, I am also missing out the other colours of life.
Self-Narrative: The Good, Bad and the Ugly
Like I said, generally I am a nice guy, and nice things should happen to nice guys right? Wrong.
It’s all the self narrative that I am telling myself in the head, and I realised that I am not giving myself space to just be. It was always something about ROI-Return on Investment, or Cost Benefit Analysis, or something of a quid pro quo. There’s always a condition, a cause and effect. Something’s gotta give, oh yeah, there’s karma, BIATCH! Being a working adult, you’re always looking at dollars and cents, cost-centre, profit centre and all that. My self narrative keeps telling me to be productive, effective and efficient, and I get wound up tighter and tighter and I turned into this uptight, cynical, often hypocritical person who cannot see the good, bad and the ugly as it is. There is always a value adding and it’s getting heavier and heavier.
Why are you so hard on yourself?
I’m not sure how it began but I guess the current cruel and harsh reality really began to wear me down, mentally, emotionally and psychologically. There’s really nothing good in the news these days, and really nothing productive or positive about the COVID-19 era. It is as bleak and dreary as I can imagine. Everyone’s down and there is no way to fake it, there is nothing upbeat to look forward to.
Then one day, I felt this thought floated up, that I am very hard on myself for reasons I cannot really put my finger to. That sub-conscious thought of constantly comparing and measuring myself against this and against that. There is always something external which I can match with my internal psyche, and after all the measurement, and keeping up with the Jones, I realised that it is all crap.
Then the word Compassion came about.
(This is where I stopped typing…to contemplate the word C-O-M-P-A-S-S-I-O-N)
still contemplating….
okay, let’s get back to it… 🙂
In all true sense, there is nothing wrong with my life, sure there are ups and downs, and right now, I’m actually at the down…though in reality, I’m not in a crazy free falling down. It’s a controlled descend and I have whatever in me to stop the descend and climb back up when the time is right. I am fine, really, really fine, and I’m only lousy from all these past bad shit that has happened to me, but it isn’t happening to me now. I’m just bracing myself for bad shit to happen, and in bracing myself, I’m unable to relax and stay open to how life really is, happening.
Thinking about compassion helps me control my sense of helplessness. The internal dialogue in me started to change, it is no longer performance driven, it’s just performing, nevermind the outcome, we can fix that when it happens. It’s about being present and not let a past historical story about the poor sad sorry me get in the way of what is really happening now. I’m still a realist, and being compassionate helps me become more grounded, without the extra historical backstory and baggage, sure they are there, but they stay where they are, in the past. I only use it as a reference point, and not a paint to ruin my ability to see things as it is.
Being Kinder, Not One Kind
It is a more forgiving dialogue, and thinking about giving myself compassion, lets me be me. I’m kinder to myself, and when that takes place, I interprets the world in a kinder manner, and when the cold harsh truth comes, I didn’t get as defensive as before, or let my old angsty story gets in the way and put a scowl on my face.
Being prepared for the eventuality-Death
As I’ve mentioned in my previous post- Death, I had this epiphany that we’re all here on borrowed time, and unfortunately for me, I interpreted the message wrongly. I looked at it with trepidation and bleakness. It’s a simple fallacy of ‘why try when we’re gonna die anyway?’ I lacked the compassion, guidance and wisdom to see the message in a more positive light. All I saw was the end, and nothing more, just waiting, waiting for expiration.
It’s not a Race! Give some Space!
There is no guessing, we are all gonna die, and I thought I was kind of a special to have that sort of death vision and qualifies me to be a little wiser and more introspective than the general population, and of course I wasn’t, I was just outsmarting the person I am meant to be.
We all need space, mental space and physical space, and personally for me, compassion gives me my space. Internally, I am able to tell myself it is okay to f**k up for the umpteenth time, as long as it doesn’t kills me! I can always try again, and succeed at my own time and place. When I do, there is no need for public triumph, just an inner contention that it is what it really is, nothing more, nothing less, because the ultimate success we can find is our ability to stop hurting and start healing ourselves.
theaikidad 