The Thriving of the Nurtured

Hello everyone,
It’s been a long time since I wrote. This is my first post of 2020. I just finished participating in a zoom group meditation. Sitting with others is very powerful for me. Tonight I could feel my mind wandering into thought. Noticing my thoughts I could feel the familiar pull of my judgement of myself as a loser meditator with a litany of familiar evidence against myself, as in, “you have been sitting for all these years and you still spend it mostly thinking about stuff. What is wrong with you?”
My favorite quote came to mind, Freedom is the pause between stimulus and response. This quote is by Victor Frankl. It originated out of his experience of being a Jewish prisoner in a Natzi concentration camp during World War 2. Contributing to his survival was the realization that there is a choice to do what we’ve always done on automatic pilot or to pause between the stimulus and our usual response and give ourselves the freedom of looking at our options and choosing something different.
Sometimes when I am up against my own habitual harshness with myself, I dive into proving I am inadequate and flawed. I feel awful and defeated and somehow comfortable. I get to be right.
More and more now, I can use the smugness of being right that there really is something wrong with me and I did it wrong again, to become aware of my body. I recognize that I feel heavy and my body feels tight. I investigate further into the tightness. There is pressure in my belly and my heart feels constricted. I breathe into my torso and notice deep sadness and fear. My belief that there is something wrong with me comes from being a child in a family where my mother’s anger and blame was very scary for me. I learned to blame myself and scramble inside to try and make her happy. Believing I had done something wrong allowed me to avoid feeling the terrifying lack of safety of growing up with unstable adults. My brain rut became blaming myself and desperately looking for what I could do to make things better. My mother’s narcissist raging happened when my father wasn’t home, which was most of the time. Her rage was intermittent enough that I would be lulled into trusting in her caring until the next episode sent shockwaves of self-hate through my body. I learned to mistrust in caring and became hyper focused on my mother’s moods, always hoping to make her happy so she would be the loving mother she could be sometimes and I so needed her to be.
 The inconsistency has deeply impacted my ability to relax around others and trust in their love. Uncertainty often leads to high levels of anxiety. When I don’t know what to do I want to pick my nails or overeat. Uncertainty has led me to become a seeker, looking for answers to what makes me and other people react the way we do. I embarked on a lifelong journey of self-discovery in which  I have discovered self compassion. I have learned to be the mother of that little girl inside me who lets that little girl know that she didn’t do anything wrong. I can comfort myself and know that it’s safe now to experience and release feelings, and to speak my truth from my heart.
I have learned to pause and reflect and choose the option of curiosity over harshness with myself.
What else could I say to myself right now besides you suck? How about “maybe you don’t suck as
much as you think and could you investigate what you are feeling right now and see what you most
need?  Lately my journey has been inspired by Tara Brach’s RAIN process. RAIN stands for:
Recognize
Allow
Investigate
Nurture
So I recognize the harshness and anger toward myself, allow it to be there, and investigate what it
feels like in my body. Usually embracing self-hate moves into the hurt or sadness or fear underneath and I can breathe into experiencing the feeling and show up for myself with nurturing. What does this feeling in my body most need right now? What would nurturing myself look like? Would it help to rest or move my body around or cry and shake or write or call a friend? The harshness transforms into compassion for myself. Self-compassion enables me to be more compassionate toward others. Kindness with myself  allows me to be kinder toward others.
I call this post Thriving of the Nurtured. What if our survival necessitates a shift from greed to collaboration? What if thriving comes from learning to take care of ourselves and care for others?
What if we really are all one ? What if our behavior could really reflect that deep inner awareness of the interconnection of all beings?
In the presence of the uncertainty of Covid-19 there is an opportunity to take care of ourselves and
care for others to a greater degree than before. We get to pause and reflect on our familiar busyness and our patterns of basing our sense of self-worth on material success and external validation. We get to say, “What else is there?” and explore slowing down sourcing our own self worth and being kinder to ourselves and to others.  Nurturing ourselves and caring for others may lead to the freedom that is the pause between stimulus and response. The Thriving of the Nurtured.