stop the self hate messages.

As many of you know, I have been doing quite a bit of soul searching lately which can leave me feeling really good or totally awful.  At about the same time that I wrote this post about all of my faults, our minister gave a sermon on “There is nothing wrong with you!”  In his sermon, he told a story of how The Dali Lama invited some western (mostly American) meditation experts to India and asked them to describe the types of problems that their followers are struggling with.  In their discussions, a phrase that the Dali Lama didn’t understand kept coming up, “low self-esteem”.  This is a very well educated man that understands and speaks English very well, but he needed a translator to help him understand the unfamiliar concept.  It took him a while and then he finally got it.

He said with great surprise, “Your people HATE themselves?”

This story really surprised me.  I was shocked to realize that being hard on ourselves is not an innate human function.  Rather, it is something we learn through our specific culture.  Meaning, WE DON’T HAVE TO TREAT OURSELVES THIS WAY!  When we were young children, we knew that there was nothing wrong with us.  If someone said negative things about who we are, we would avoid them, right?  We don’t tell our children that they are flawed.  They make mistakes or choose a destructive path sometimes, but they are not bad people.

We say to them, “I don’t like the way that you treated your sister because it hurt her feelings.”

We don’t say, “You are a bad person.  What is wrong with you?”

So why do we say that to ourselves?  Why can’t we start focusing on the specific behaviors that we want to change instead of destroying our whole being?  Perhaps we should think about the advice we would give our children in the same predicament before we speak to ourselves.  :)  Anyway, Rev. Dr. Arvid Straube would be happy that I am telling you (and myself) that THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU!

I’ll leave you with some iphone snaps of my girls on crazy hair day.  Peep’s hair turned a lot redder than planned, but she loves it and Breckin was proud that she was able to do her hair all by herself.