Tag: self-worth

Reflections during my sick leave

Published on by Vanessa2 Comments

A week ago, I woke up to start our day as ‘usual’ since the start of the lockdown. I turned in bed to get ready to get up, and to my big surprise, I became so dizzy that I just couldn’t sit up. Whenever I tried, I would feel so dizzy that I would get nauseous. What to do? Well, as with any other illness, stay in bed.

I spent two whole days in bed, unable to read, or do anything else than keep my eyes closed to avoid getting even more dizzy. Interestingly enough, I wasn’t sleeping that much, so I was awake, in bed, doing nothing. Since I practice Yoga, I thought this would be the ‘perfect’ opportunity to just be. Be with myself, with my thoughts and try to breathe through the whole thing. Some kind of forced silent retreat.

Halfway through the second day, my mind was driving me crazy, so much that I decided I couldn’t just lie down there, so I forced myself to get up, take a shower and try to ‘act normal’. My mind was driving me crazy because of two main reasons: recurrent painful thoughts and the feeling of being useless by just lying there without even having a feber.

My mind was going around and around thoughts of regret, loss, lack and worthlessness. Thoughts that I usually try to tame in my everyday life, but that I had to face when I had nothing to do. I keep noticing that I want to use yoga teachings to become someone else. Someone who doesn’t have these thoughts. Someone who doesn’t ‘need’ anything but unfortunately, given the chance, my mind keeps bringing me back to them. So, I decided to just allow, to allow my mind to go where it wants to go, to accept that this is how I really feel at times. Am I reasonable? Well, what is reasonable? Who gets to decide?

I am now able to sit up and move around, and do stuff almost as usual, but the dizziness keeps coming back so I am in a sick leave for a week. Once I just allowed these thoughts to be, they became less strong and I moved to another kind of thinking. Or is it reflecting? Life is slowly going back to normal here in Norway. Schools are reopening, some people are allowed to go back to work. This is, of course, great news, but I have some resistance to the idea of going ‘back to normal’. Although I think my life isn’t necessarily stressful, it is a busy life. The main activities that occupy my mind and my time are being a yoga student, my work as a teacher, being a mother, and trying to establish myself as a yoga teacher. I want to be good at everything I do and I keep feeling guilty about all other things I don’t do because I don’t have time/energy. For me, doing anything halfheartedly is mentally impossible, I need to put my 100% in everything I do and still, I go around with bad conscience for not doing better.

So, these days, I keep thinking about the importance of silence. Internal silence. According to many traditions, it is in silence that we finally hear our call. That we finally hear what we are here for. I find my three main activities in life very meaningful, but I keep doubting myself. I am tired of running from one thing to another and constantly feeling that I come too short.

There are certain things I feel I cannot let go of. I can’t leave my job because my salary is important for our family budget. I can’t stop being a mum, I don’t want to stop being a mum. Shall I stop teaching yoga? Am I pushing too much? Yoga for me is a personal journey and I started teaching because I want to share what I feel has helped me a lot in my life, but there are hundreds of yoga teachers out there. Does the world ‘need’ me as a yoga teacher? I don’t know.

I also notice that I ‘use’ yoga to put pressure on myself. This sounds very stupid, but I am very honest here. I ask myself? Am I making progress in my spiritual life? Do I need to study more? Am I applying these teachings appropriately? How much do I have to do and how much do I have to let in the hands of the Universe/God/Divine providence/ or whatever you want to call it?

I feel also that I am tired of being part of a system I don’t agree with. I am more and more concerned about the natural world. I feel more and more bad conscience about the way we are destroying it. How we feel entitled to do as we please. I want to be part of a solution and not continue being part of the problem, but to be honest, I have no clue on how or what to change other than the regular small things. I am reading a book by Satish Kumar called You Are Therefor I Am, it i so inspiring. If I could choose, I would take my family and my cat to a place where we can live a simpler life. A life where the important thing is to be in pact with nature and in pact with ourselves, and not to live according to the standards the capitalist society dictates. I keep thinking how important it is to find a passion, a call, but most of our kids are busy doing what we tell them is important to do, and when they have spare time, they are mentally and emotionally numb in front of their electric devices. ‘As long as they do well at school’, we repeat to ourselves. But really? Is that what will bring them peace? Is school giving children a sense of meaningfulness?

So, I am thinking that for the months to come. I will practice more silence. I will do less. I will put my heart in my daily chores. I will be more mindful. I will flow. All this with the hope that clarity will come to me. Where to go? What to do? What to change?

Rejection

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About two years ago, I had to take a course for my work and I found that I could take it in Paris. Since I lived in France for a few years when I was a student, it seemed like the perfect excuse to visit the French capital and see friends that I don’t have the opportunity to see often.

One of my closest friends lives in Paris and although we had not seen each other for a long time, we had maintained contact during the years in a slightly irregular way. For some periods, we would talk over the phone almost daily, and sometimes it could be months without we even exchanged a single message.

It had been six months since we last had exchanged messages, but when I knew that I could go to Paris, I sent her a message sure that she would tell me that we could see each other every day after her work.

To my surprise, her answer was rather dry ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have time’. I first asked jokingly if not even for a coffee, but she didn’t seem to like the joke. I wrote to ask if she was angry but the more I tried to find out what was happening, the more it seemed to make her angry. It got to the point that she told me that I was harassing her. Maybe I did insist too much, but I found her behaviour so strange that I even thought maybe she was in some sort of trouble.

I went to Paris and I didn’t see her. I sent her a message to tell her that no matter what, if one day she wanted to be in contact again, I would be happy to do so. But I must confess that her attitude hurt me so much that I erased her from my Facebook friends (hahaha, I know, how old am I?) And I didn’t contact her again…

Until last Christmas when I sent her a message to wish her happy holidays, and then this summer to tell her I was thinking about her, and finally this week, to wish her a merry Christmas.

This time, she answered by saying that she has nothing against me, but that our ‘incident’ two years ago made her realize that her life is better without my friendship.

I am not trying to put her in the ‘bad’ box and myself in the ‘poor martyr’ box, there must be something I did that made her angry, but what is frustrating is not to know what the heck I did. I would have liked her to tell me.

As usual, the most interesting thing in this story is to observe my own reactions. First of all, I felt pain and confusion. Then, I do not deny it, anger because in my expectation of what a friend ‘must do’: misunderstandings are spoken about in order to give the opportunity to repair the damage. Followed by a feeling that she doesn’t really know who I am and what she’s missing, and finally a consuming feeling of self-doubt.

This friend is one of the few who knows everything about me: my achievements and my mistakes, my good sides and my weaknesses. I came to think that maybe she no longer wanted my friendship because of the mistakes I made that made her see me as not worthy anymore. I felt unfairly treated because she didn’t know or seemed interested to find out how these mistakes had made me reflect, and what I learned from them… ‘if she only gave me the opportunity to show her that I’m a better person than I she thinks I am’, I thought. But why would it be so important for me to prove anything to her? Who am I trying to convince? Her or myself?

Finally, yesterday, I started to have some fun observing my thoughts. We all have our weak spots, and I believe that rejection is definitely one of mine . It is as if by rejecting me, people confirm to me what I ‘know’ about myself: that I am not perfect, that I have many flaws, that I am not as good a person as many can think, and so on. How is it possible that from one episode in my life I can waste so much energy on useless and negative thoughts? I do not know.

What is my conclusion? I have to know when to let go. It was a pretty friendship as long as it lasted, but it is over. I am not perfect and I will never be so all I can do is to keep walking, keep learning and try to do less harm than good around me. Accept my mistakes, forgive myself, ask for forgiveness and avoid making the same mistake over and over again. Maybe most importantly, don’t put my self-worth in anybody else’s hands, it will always be flickering and confusing.

How do you measure your worth?

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I was talking with some ninth grade students the other day about their experience during work week. Where I live, students in ninth grade (and in some schools in eighth grade too) work for one week during the school year to learn the whole process of writing a curriculum, taking contact with the employer, sometimes even being interviewed, and get the experience of working for a week.

For some students, this is the first time they have a “real” job, and it is always very nice to hear their experiences. It is not surprising that some of them find it more meaningful to be out in the world learning a profession instead of spending their days at school.

We started a nice discussion about how nowadays, the worth of a student is measured mainly by her grades. Furthermore , it is assumed that in order to be successful in life, you have to do well in school and go to university. There are very few professions today that do not require higher education. But this is not the point in this post. The point is that one of the girls I was talking with was telling me that she doesn’t feel like a very intellectual person, she struggles to get what is considered good grades, and this of course affects her self-esteem. We then started talking about what makes a person valuable. This is always a very interesting topic to discuss with teenagers.

I once had a discussion about self-value with another student from tenth grade. For him, what made him a valuable young man was his performance at school and in sports. When I asked what would happen if he had an accident that made him sit in a wheelchair and unable to continue studying, would this mean that he would be less valuable? His answer was, yes, he would be less worth because he would not be able to do anything of ‘value’. I was shocked by his answer, and he was shocked when I challenged this idea. I sincerely believe that we cannot measure our worth by our achievements in the practical world. It is a dangerous thing to do so because when we fail, we loose our ground. So, if our worth is not connected to our achievements , what gives us value as humans?

Some of us, place our worth in comparison with other people. I know that for years, I have been struggling to imprint in my mind the fact that in reality, no one is more or less worth than I am. Nothing that I do or don’t do affect my value as a human.

I don’t know how it is for other people, but now that I am more aware of my thoughts, I have realised since I was a kid I’ve been comparing myself with other people. I often thought other kids my age were cooler, funnier and more exciting to be with; other girls were prettier and more interesting; my brothers were smarter and so on.

The other uglier side of this habit is when I believe that I am ‘better’ than other people by looking at their “flaws” and rejoicing in the fact that at least that, I don’t do. It was honestly embarrassing to discover the boost of self-esteem (fake, I would add) I get from this kind of thinking. Without trying to justify it, it does make sense, doesn’t it? We all suffer from insecurities, we know very well our weaknesses, but we rarely know our strengths. It is then comforting that some mistakes other people make, we don’t make.

But, am I more worth than the people that make the mistakes I haven’t made? Or than the people that behave in what I perceive as inappropriate? What about when I make my own mistakes or behave in inappropriate ways? Does my worth go down then? How do we measure? Who is in charge of measuring? Who has the right to measure?

I think that going around comparing our value with others’ only creates separation. Separation from our deeper self and separation between the me and the other. In my opinion, this is just an illusion.

For years, I knew this person that I perceived as difficult. I would hear stories about this person’s challenging behaviour and think ‘I do better than that’. I kept comparing myself with this person, until one day, I found out that we were going through a similar problem. I then identified myself with the feelings this person was experiencing, and suddenly, the gap between us disappeared. This reminded me that at the end of the day, we all want the same things in life but seek them in different places in different ways.

I think it is important at some point in life to reflect on this. Where do we anchor our self-value? Which criteria do we use to value other people? Can we see the same potential in everyone and accept that we all are limited by our minds in different ways?

These days, I’m savoring the concept of Pure Potential. I’m sure I’ll write a little text about it in the future, but in the meantime you can listen to this lecture from my teacher, Prasad Rangnekar, about it.