I am already half-way through the monthly challenge I am currently completing. My laxity in publishing blog posts is not mirrored in my commitment to challenges and I am hoping to remedy the former starting today. School started up a week and a half ago and I am teaching 5 days a week until September. That on top of the stress of moving to a new city has compromised some of my intentions, but no more!
The challenge for this month is focused on forgiving myself today for the breakdowns I had 5 years ago by choosing to send love to that former version of myself. I realized I was harboring a LOT of bitterness at myself for traits I possessed in the past, some of which are barely present at all in my current state.
Several years ago, I harbored deep bitterness towards certain people in my life and was able to process exactly what I was bitter about, productively share some of this with these people, and consequently experienced a huge burden being lifted off of my emotional bandwidth. This article from Psychology Today proved immensely useful in clearing up a lot of the hang-ups I had with the concept of forgiveness and enabled me to realize forgiveness did not depend on the other person’s current actions or on what I felt about them.
I want to do something similar concerning the bitterness I harbor at myself related to what I went through 5 years ago. There are 2 main daily components to the challenge:
- 10-min RAFTT meditation – This is in addition to my regular meditation. RAFTT stands for:
- Recognize = identify the emotion, thought, situation, or experience that causes discomfort
- Allow = accept the above without judgment; send it love
- Feel = really sink in to the emotions that arise; feel them in your body
- Tease out = disentangle the different components of what you feel, especially if there is a lot of resistance or confusion
- Trust = believe I have the capacity to weather the storm and grow from it
- 5-min breakdown reflection – Immediately prior to meditation, I want to spend some time identifying and processing the various components that led to my breakdown and the bitterness I feel at my former self for engaging in them.
As I have already been engaged in this for the past 2 weeks, I can share some of what I have dug up already.
- Focusing on destination over process
- Embracing a nihilistic worldview
- Deprioritizing social engagements
- Having reticence to spend money and time on enjoying life in the now
- Turning anxiety into guilt
- Being embarrassed to ask for help or be vulnerable
- Committing to figuring things out on my own
- Believing “coming back” from a depressive-addictive spiral was simple
- Believing the arrival of a new day would magically solve things
- Failing to budget time and money on loving myself
- Choosing limiting beliefs because of an attachment to “truth”
When I write an evaluation of this challenge next month, I will elaborate on some of these insights and share what I decide to say to myself to get to a place of forgiveness. An unexpected benefit I’ve already experienced is that I have been absolutely LOVING my meditations, both the targeted ones and the more general ones. They are the highlights of most of my days.
Namaste.