For a long time I remember being overthrown by what seemed to me my own thoughts. The majority of my thoughts were unlovingly, towards myself and towards others. Poison seemed to control my mind. It took me at least thirty years to discover that most of them were not real. It took me thirty years before ever taking a stand. Standing up for myself and taking responsibility for all my toxic thought patterns never even appeared to be a possibility for me. I simply wasn’t even aware of this situation.
In truth, I hated myself and gradually it made me hate others around me too.
It was a strange situation to say the least. People who have known me all my life would say that I was kind hearted and cheerful. I wonder if they even knew all the things I was thinking about them. On the outside I was wearing a mask. I was showing them an obedient and servant girl, catering to other people’s wishes. Trying to make other people happy by doing what they thought was best for me.
And yes, there was a cheerful part of me that existed for a long time, but looking back it was superficial and lacking. All the fun I had was merely a distraction for all the venom I endured on my own. For the longest time it took me hours to fall asleep at night. Ugly thoughts were racing through my mind and I entertained them. I let them. I genuinely thought they were my own and it was wearing me down. I gradually became more and more tired.
It created situations that weren’t real. Whenever I would hit a point where I could not uphold my mask any longer, I would burst out to people, people I love. For them it must have been a big surprise, for me it had been brewing inside my mind since forever. I let my bucket overflow in silence, I let my bucket overflow due to what seemed to be my own thoughts.
Where they really my own thoughts and how does this work?
After my “point of no return” I decided that I needed to turn everything around and for the first time in my life I found that I needed to learn things that were never taught to me in school or by anyone else. I started reading self-help books and one of these books was called ‘Addicted to love’ by Jan Geurtz. It made me realize that I had little to no self-love and with it I had no love to give to others. All I had was the concept of love for others and in fact it was not love at all, but a distorted version.
It was only then that I noticed how out of control I was. Never before had I even questioned these thought patterns and I let all this poison overtake me without resistance. It took me many more books about related subjects to understand that not all of the thoughts running through my head are mine. And as I was reading these books and gaining more wisdom, I started to guard myself against these heinous convictions.
But where to start when you’re at the bottom? It is hard to lie to yourself and telling myself ‘I was pretty’ or ‘I was enough’ felt like bogus. I had entertained my thoughts for so long that I actually believed them to be true.
So how to grant yourself self-love when you yourself don’t actually believe it?
It was clear to me that I needed to reprogram myself and I needed to start somewhere. I started collecting inspirational quotes on Pinterest. I slowly filled a whole Pinterest board with these quotes but it didn’t feel real enough to have any impact. So I decided to print the best of them and I decorated my bathroom door with all these quotes. Whenever I would go to the bathroom, I would read them to myself out loud. These were mostly gentle quotes, nudging me to self-acceptance.
Then I decided that I was no longer allowed to think negatively regarding myself whenever looking in a mirror. I started thinking little things like ‘I like my eyes today’ or whatever came to mind. It still felt a bit fake, but at least I was trying.
Back then I didn’t know where all of this would lead. I didn’t know what would change in my life if I would just love myself. But I continued and I expanded this mission.
After saying nice things to myself, I started doing nice things for myself.
Varying from changing small habits to trying new creative hobbies, I slowly started to declutter my mind.
I read in a book by Eckhardt Tolle (the Power of Now) that you need to question your thoughts as if you were to defend them in a courtroom. And I knew my poisonous thoughts would not hold in front of a judge. Before I had never even looked at them, let alone questioned them. Now I was questioning everything entering my mind. And, it was a lot. All day long I continuously thought poorly about me and everyone and everything around me. It needed to stop, but the things I was doing did not seem to be working.
And then it hit me. Maybe you cannot think away your thoughts. Maybe I needed a different approach. These thoughts kept entering my mind and yes I was questioning them but the fact remained that they occurred to me approximately every second. I had been thinking negatively all my life and now I was trying to think away these thoughts. It sounds as ridiculous as it was.
Fortunately ‘The Power of Now’ taught me about meditation as well. Prior to reading this book I always thought that meditation was nonsense. I thought it was something for people that I simply could not relate to, not for me. But after reading this book, it dawned on me that meditation was nothing more than practicing the art of simply ‘being’. Practicing a conscious mind, a mind that is able to just be, without thinking.
All of the sudden this concept seemed very relatable to me. All of the sudden it felt like I had hit the jackpot. Maybe thinking was not going to save me from my thoughts, maybe just being would lead me to where I wanted to go.
I downloaded the app ‘Headspace’ and I started my free trial. After only two weeks the difference was staggering. My poisonous thoughts were entering my mind still but on a lower frequency. So fewer thoughts were coming in and all the thoughts that did make it in were questioned by me.
It was a level of awareness that I had never before experienced. Meditation created a pause moment for me between a thought entering my mind and an actual emotion exploding afterwards.
I started to feel a sense of presence. Finally I experienced moments of peace and that is why I continued this practice.
A decade later and I still at times meditate. I’ll be honest, I don’t sit down every day, but whenever I need it this tool is here for me. I am more aware of what is running inside my head and whenever I feel overwhelmed I choose to sit down the next day and meditate.
I guess sometimes the things you resist the hardest are the things you need the most. This is what starting to love yourself can look like. It doesn’t mean the same thing will work for you, I’m just trying to tell you that sometimes your comfort does lie outside of your comfort zone. You wouldn’t know it of course, unless you try it.
It seems to me that when you are feeling low, you resist all sorts of things that you love. You lash out to the people closest to you as you do lash out to the remedies that you need the most. Think about it. What are you resisting and might it be exactly what you need right now?
“What You Resist, Persists — What You Accept, Transforms.”
