Beware inner fake news 💭

 
Beware inner fake news.jpg

We live in such polarizing times. There's a saying that goes: "The world is divided into those who think they're right." And that's the whole saying. 
 
As I explored in last week’s letter, we all have an inner critic that focuses on what’s wrong with us, others, and our circumstances. I think of it as inner fake news.  
 
Believing “something is wrong with me” divides us against ourselves. Believing “something is wrong with you” divides us against each other. When we feel inferior or superior, we lose touch with the intrinsic worthiness of everyone. We are not connected to a deep sense of belonging to ourselves, each other, and nature.
 
In these divisive and challenging times, it’s so easy to fall into judgment. I catch myself every day.
 
Gandhi said: “Our beliefs create our thoughts. And our thoughts create our feelings. And the thoughts and feelings create our behavior. And our behavior creates our destiny.”

Our limiting and fear-based beliefs stem from our childhoods, generations past, and our culture. I grew up with a deeply held belief that once I become “perfect,” everything would be alright. I’d finally be worthy of love and belonging. I behaved in ways consistent with that belief (being in perfectionist mode) and ended up getting responses that reaffirmed it. So we get caught in a cycle – our beliefs lead to behaviors that strengthen them in turn.
 
The first step in freeing ourselves from limiting and fear-based beliefs is to become aware of them. When we notice we are getting caught in emotional reactivity, we can ask: What am I believing right now? And we can pause and bring awareness to what's actually going on in our lived experience.
 
We can realize that our limiting beliefs are real but not true. And we can find out who we really are underneath them. We can trust the goodness, love, and presence that is our being. 

Whatever we practice grows stronger. We can actively replace our inner critic and limiting beliefs with a kinder and wiser response. 
 
What would your life be like if you didn’t believe anything was wrong with you (and others)?

Below are a few resources that I hope might be supportive for you.

With love,

Sarah-Marie

Resources 

[PRACTICES] 

Self-Reflection: Investigating limiting beliefs  

The following questions, adapted from Byron Katie's work, can be helpful for investigating and loosening the grip of limiting beliefs: 

  1. What am I believing? 

  2. Is this really true? 

  3. What is it like to live with this belief? 

  4. What does the vulnerability (hurt/fear) under the belief need? 

  5. What stops me from letting go of this belief? 

  6. What would my life be like without this belief? 

  7. Who (or what) would I be if I no longer lived with this belief? 

Thanking Your Inner Critic

When you notice your inner critic as you go about your day, you can stop, take a conscious breath, and say "Thank you for trying to protect me. I've got this. I am OK for now." You can focus your attention on your breath, sound, or the sensations in your body to not get hijacked by the inner critic/judge and come back to the present moment.

Poem

Excerpt from “Peace is This Moment Without Judgment” by Dorothy Hunt 
“Peace is this moment without judgment.

That is all. This moment in the Heart-space

where everything that is is welcome.

Peace is this moment without thinking

that it should be some other way,

that you should feel some other thing,

that your life should unfold according to your plans. 
 
Peace is this moment without judgment,

this moment in the heart-space where

everything that is is welcome.”

Guided Meditations 

 

Free yourself from the critic within ✨

 
Befriend your inner critic

Yesterday I received an unexpected blast from the past. A former classmate of mine from Germany sent me our 7th grade class photo after rediscovering it while cleaning out the basement.
 
As I looked at the image of my 12-year-old self, I felt a wave of tenderness wash over me. I didn’t like myself very much and felt like a total misfit in my life. I was quiet, nerdy, and athletic with a mysterious vibe (I used to disappear to visit family in the US each summer which stirred up some rumors). I hid my insecurity behind my cool US clothes and a veil of silence. I had a deeply held belief that once I became “perfect,” everything would be fine. I’d finally be worthy of love and belonging.
 
That belief helped me survive my childhood and push myself to accomplish things. It was also deeply limiting to my unfolding and fulfillment as a human being. I wasted a lot of mental and emotional energy to fulfill the relentless standards of my inner critic; carried a lot of stress and tension in my body; limited possibilities to contribute and learn; and limited my authentic self-expression. I was terrified of failure and rejection.
 
We all have an inner critic regardless of our circumstances or upbringing. It had an original survival function to keep us safe physically and emotionally. It often replays old messages from childhood about what we need to do to be worthy of love and acceptance. It focuses on what’s “wrong” with us, others, and our circumstances. It gets us into inferior and superior comparisons. It causes much of our feelings of guilt, regret, shame, anxiety, anger, and disappointment. It limits our learning and taking risks to do something new or different.
 
How do we free ourselves from the inner critic?
 
The most effective way I’ve found to respond to self-judgment is to recognize it, have compassion for it, and replace it with a kinder response. We can turn to the inner critic knowing that it’s a worried part of us that wants to keep us safe. We can say: “Thank you for trying to protect me. I’m ok for now. I’ve got this.” When a part of us feels seen, it can relax. We can focus our attention on our breath, sound, or the sensations in our body to not get hijacked and come back to the present moment.
 
It’s been a long journey since 7th grade. My inner critic and drive for perfection still sometimes get the better of me. Now though, I deeply know that I’m worthy of love. Just like you are. I’ve learned to befriend and accept the inner critic and don’t believe everything they say anymore. I've realized that I can see the goodness below my conditioning and accept where I'm at while acknowledging all the ways I yet have to grow. I’ve learned to feel the fear of failure and rejection and do things anyway.
 
If you struggle with your inner critic, know that you’re not alone. Befriending and freeing ourselves from the inner critic is within our reach. 

The world needs you fully alive and free to make your contribution now more than ever.
 
Below are a few resources that I hope may be supportive for you.
 
With love,
Sarah-Marie

Resources 

[PRACTICES] 

Self-Observation: Patterns of Self-Judgment/Inner Critic

To deepen your awareness of your inner critic, I invite you to reflect and journal on the following:  

  1. What judgments did you make about yourself?

  2. What judgments did you make about others? 

  3. What circumstances, events or relationships were associated with these judgments? 

  4. In what ways was your judgment grounded? 

  5. What were the impacts of your judgments?

  6. What pattern(s) of judgment(s) are you beginning to notice?

  7. What action will you take from what you observed in this exercise?

Thanking Your Inner Critic

When you notice your inner critic as you go about your day, you can stop, take a conscious breath, and say "Thank you for trying to protect me. I've got this. I am OK for now." You can focus your attention on your breath, sound, or the sensations in your body to not get hijacked by the inner critic/judge and come back to the present moment.

Poem

Excerpt from “Awakening Now” by Danna Faulds

““I’m not worthy, I’m afraid, and my motives aren’t pure.

I’m not perfect, and surely I haven’t practiced nearly enough.

My meditation isn’t deep, and my prayers are sometimes insincere.

I still chew my fingernails, and the refrigerator isn’t clean.”

Do you value your reasons for staying small more than the light shining through the open door?

Forgive yourself.

Now is the only time you have to be whole.

Guided Meditations 

 

What's on the other side of your comfort zone?

 
Befriend Your Discomfort

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” - Anaïs Nin

What stands between you and your most important contribution? 

As a wise mentor told me, "this is no time for playing small." Ruth Bader Ginsberg didn't play small. May we step up and carry forward the torch. In these challenging times, we need all of our gifts and contributions more than ever, whether in big or small ways.

Having a long history with "hiding until I'm ready," I made a commitment to take the exquisite risk of being seen in service of my purpose. The more I stand in the truth that it's not about me at all, the more I'm free to create a context of healing, belonging, and contribution for others.

I've kept this line by David Whyte as a daily reminder: "To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others." 

Leaning into purpose is not comfortable but even more so is not leaning in.  

We all can get in our own way. We avoid things that could move us closer to our contribution and learning goals because they are uncomfortable. For me, it's typically things that bring up the possibility of rejection, incompetence, conflict, or failure. And the emotions I'm feeling are fear, anxiety, and shame accompanied by tightness in the chest and throat area.

Depending on the thing we're avoiding, we may divert our attention through self-judgment (my #1 go-to), judging and blaming others, rumination, worrying, questioning everything about our life, addictive behaviors, victim mindset, projects that suddenly seem urgent, etc. 

The impacts are massive. We limit our contribution, learning, and growth. We carry stress and diminish our sense of presence and aliveness. We waste vast amounts of mental and emotional energy. We may carry a sense of shame and guilt for letting others and ourselves down. The list goes on.

How might we befriend our discomfort and overcome resistance? 

In the long run, avoiding things we know are important is always more painful than facing and working through the discomfort.

Rather than seeing discomfort and difficult emotions as problems, we can open to the experience and let them move through. As Jack Kornfield writes: "Free" is not free from feelings, but free to feel each one and let it move on, unafraid of the movement of life." And we can bring kindness and self-compassion to our experience and remind ourselves that it's part of being human to want to avoid discomfort. 

Then we can re-anchor ourselves in our goal or intention for how we want to contribute or what we want to learn. And do the work. 

How's life calling you to contribute? What's the work that needs doing? What's worth risking being seen for? 

The world needs you and your contribution. 

Below are a few resources that I hope may be supportive for you.

With love,

Sarah-Marie

 

Resources 

[PRACTICES] 

Self-Reflection

  1. What are the things that you routinely avoid that would move you closer to your goals? What are the things you know you need to do but are making you most uncomfortable or anxious?  

  2. What thoughts and fears come to mind when you think of those things?

  3. What emotions or sensations arise?  

  4. What's the impact on you or others of avoiding those things? 


Power Hour

Purpose: To make progress on something important you've been avoiding. 

  1. Block off a 1-2 hour time period and eliminate potential distractions as much as possible.

  2. Write down your inner critic's chatter and any fears related to the activity.

  3. Write down your intention or goal for the activity. Why does it matter? What could you learn? 

  4. Set a timer for how long you want to focus on the activity and start working. 

  5. As you work, write down any fears and mind chatter that comes up. Reground yourself in your purpose/goal as needed.

  6. At the end, reflect on the experience. How did it go? What did you learn? What do you want to focus on in your next power hour? 

Pro tip: To make this even more effective, do power hours with an accountability buddy. :)


RAIN

Purpose: Through the practice of RAIN, we can bring mindfulness and compassion to difficult emotions and experience. It invites us to be with our emotions and actual lived experience with self-compassion.

The acronym RAIN stands for:

  • Recognize: Seeing clearly what's going on and how we are stuck inside an experience;

  • Allow: Creating space to be with the experience just as it is; 

  • Investigate: Moving from the story and beliefs to getting in touch with the actual lived experience, with kindness; and 

  • Nurture: Offering kindness inwardly. 

Here's a ~16 min guided RAIN practice. 

 

[READING & LISTENING] 

Below are a few resources that I've found helpful in my own journey of befriending discomfort and overcoming resistance. I hope some of them may be supportive for you as well.  

 

[Quote] 

“Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do.

Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That's why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there'd be no Resistance.”

- Steven Pressfield, The War of Art 


Guided Meditations 

 

 

Remember the gold ✨

 
Remember the gold

"Perfection is not a prerequisite for anything but pain." - Danna Faulds 


There's a 10 feet tall Buddha statue at a monastery in Thailand. It was made from plaster and not particularly beautiful. A number of years ago, cracks appeared in the statue during a long dry period. The monks brought their pen flashlights to look inside the crack to maybe find out something about how the statue was built. When they shined the light into every crack, a flash of gold was reflected back. So, they chipped away at the plaster, which was just a covering, and rediscovered the largest pure solid gold statue of the Buddha in all of Southeast Asia. (Thai monks had covered the statue several hundred years earlier to protect it from an attack by the Burmese army.)  

Much in the same way, our layers of conditioning form our protective covering to try to shield ourselves from hurt. We are all products of our conditioning through our childhood experiences, our biology, and our culture. In the process, we can forget the gold underneath - who we really are. We start believing we're the covering, the ego-driven self. We believe the judgments of our inner critic and might feel shame, unworthiness, a sense of being deeply flawed, ... 

I've been examining and chipping away at the plaster for years. It's been a continuous practice to build my self-compassion muscles and free myself from the grip of my scathing inner critic. 

Who would I be if I didn't believe anything was wrong with me? 

I've been holding that question, which I first learned from Tara Brach. It's been a powerful inquiry. 

Recognizing that it's our conditioning, we can honestly see and work with our biases and counterproductive behaviors. We can treat ourselves with self-compassion and kindness as we work towards realizing our full potential. 

Who would you be if you didn't believe anything was wrong with you? 

Remember the gold. 

Below are a few resources to support you.

With love,

Sarah-Marie

Resources  

Poem

Excerpt from “Awakening Now” by Danna Faulds

““I’m not worthy, I’m afraid, and my motives aren’t pure.

I’m not perfect, and surely I haven’t practiced nearly enough.

My meditation isn’t deep, and my prayers are sometimes insincere.

I still chew my fingernails, and the refrigerator isn’t clean.”

Do you value your reasons for staying small more than the light shining through the open door?

Forgive yourself.

Now is the only time you have to be whole.

Now is the sole moment that exists to live in the light of your true Self.

Perfection is not a prerequisite for anything but pain.

Please, oh please, don’t continue to believe in your disbelief.

This is the day of your awakening.”

Thanking Your Inner Critic

When you notice your inner critic as you go about your day, you can stop, take a conscious breath, and say "Thank you for trying to protect me. I've got this. I am OK for now." You can focus your attention on your breath, sound, or the sensations in your body to not get hijacked by the inner critic/judge and come back to the present moment.

Guided Meditations