Displaying items by tag: self compassion

Typically during the last weeks of the old year, people set goals or intentions for themselves to carry through into the next. The most common ones include weight loss, exercising more, saving more money, watching less television or social media, or drinking less caffeine. Some less common ones might be being more mindful, starting a meditation practice, or getting more sleep. 

Sometimes we say we want to work on ourselves, but it’s normally in a vague sense of, perhaps thinking more positively or communicating more effectively with the people in our lives. We even may set our sights on altering a personality trait that has been our vice for a long time. Granted, we can’t change everything about ourselves, nor would we want to completely. However, we can work on cultivating more positive attributes from what we already have, or amplifying those areas where we may lack. 

Do you remember when you were in school there was always that quiet kid in class who barely spoke but always seemed to excel on tests and projects? They normally kept to themselves and had few friends, yet aced quizzes and tests. Maybe they were called weird or shy. They were the ones that the popular kids didn’t associate with. I remember those kids in school, mostly because that shy kid who barely spoke was me. Maybe you can relate.

The first time I noticed it was in second grade. I was laying in my childhood bed, staring at the shapes that looked like faces on the wooden wall next to me, sobbing. I missed my best friend and couldn’t wait to see her again at school on Monday.

It was Saturday morning and she had just left minutes ago from a Friday night sleepover at my house. The night before we ate pizza and watched Disney movies in the basement, then we played with my collection of My Little Ponies, which I had meticulously spaced out in rows and columns by color on the basement floor. If we slept at all, it was in sleeping bags in front of the fireplace. Mostly we stayed up, giggling and laughing, me not wanting the night to end because of the emotions that would come for me when she left. 

As a child, I couldn’t begin to understand why I felt immense sadness after my friend left on Saturday. I just knew that I missed her and missed what I thought was the best night of my life. 

I was probably 12 or 13 years old when it started. I was sitting at the kitchen table in my childhood home, feeling left out, depressed, and envious. Nanny was in the living room with my younger sister and brother, and they were joking and giggling about something. I don’t recall what they were laughing about, and I don’t think it was at my expense, but at that moment I told myself no one loved me and I didn’t belong. 

Rejection happens to everyone. It can come in the form of being overlooked for a promotion or being turned down by a potential date. Rejection happens to me quite frequently. This type of rejection is not work related, relationship related, or health related. It’s the rejection that comes from literary magazines where I send a piece of myself, of my writing, to potentially be shared with a bigger audience. No one else, except for me, or a few close people I choose to share it with, know about it.

There is a story in the Buddhist tradition about a clay statue of the Buddha in a monastery in Thailand. Over the years, it was protected in the monastery from outside invaders. One day while it was being relocated, one of the monks spotted a crack in the clay. When the monk looked closer, he noticed that underneath the clay there was solid gold. The clay statue had been made of gold the whole time!