From the moment we're born, we're learning. We learn how to share, how to work, how to interact with others. At home, at school, we're constantly figuring out ways of being in the world that will serve us, protect us, connect us to others, and make our lives and relationships easier. We're homeschooled or we go to grade school, elementary school, high school, college and sometimes, graduate school. Online programs help us learn no matter where we are, outside of traditional educational institutions. We've always learning.
But there's a lot we DON'T learn. Here are three things I wish I'd learned early on.
- How to Self-Soothe
- How to "Listen" to Your Body
- Self-Judgement AND Self-Importance are Traps
How to Self-Soothe
In my family "self-soothing" as thing was never mentioned–not once over the course of the eighteen years I lived in my parent's house. Intuitively, I developed self-soothing habits, like talking to my favorite stuffed animals and writing daily in my diary, but I never knew the importance or function of these slightly odd, solitary activities. As a result, I couldn't appreciate what they did for me or amplify their benefits. I also developed many unhealthy self-soothing habits, like smoking cigarettes and drinking from the bottle of Bailey's in my parent's wet bar to help myself fall asleep. It would have been amazing if an adult, my mother or father, or even a teacher, had said to me, "You're going to feel really alone and emotionally overwhelmed A LOT. That doesn't mean you've done anything wrong, or that you're flawed or unworthy. It's a part of being human. It's important for you to have a repertoire of things you can do to get through difficult moments."
At six or seven years old, if someone had helped me brainstorm ways I could soothe myself, like visualizing people who loved me, or drawing pictures of my emotions and labeling them, it might have saved me a lot of unnecessary suffering, and empowered me to feel more emotionally competent. Luckily, now, meditation is being brought into schools, there are mindfulness workshops for kids, and there are even mindfulness coaches for children and teens. Holly Martinson, for example, a VA-based mindfulness coach, has made a specialty of teaching children how to develop mindfulness and use breath-awareness to self-soothe.
How to "Listen" to Your Body
Most of us naturally "listen to our bodies" or we wouldn't be here to think about how we wish someone had taught us to listen to our bodies. Our bodies are always signaling us, giving us messages about what it needs and wants, whether it feels safe or scared, and how comfortable it is with the surrounding environment. As a child, I naturally listened to my body, but I didn't really know what I was doing, or that it was something valuable, a sort of built-in GPS system for life and relationships. Until I started practicing Focusing, a whole-body method of getting in touch with the subtle, internal "felt sense" within us that can help guide us toward better decisions, I didn't recognize that there was a critically important distinction between "listening to my body" and listening to the anxious or judgmental voice in my head that was always spouting "shoulds" and admonishing me for messing up.
In an ideal world, body-attunement would be a foundational skill we're taught early on in our lives. It would be taught in Pre-K, Kindergarten, elementary school and beyond. It would be taught in public schools and private schools. Children might receive instruction every day on the power of their awareness and the importance of turning this awareness around like a spotlight than can be used to see the feelings, sensations, and thoughts within them with.
Self-Judgement AND Self-Importance are Traps
I wish someone had taught me about the ego, when I was a kid. Not through a religious lens, with the focus on a supreme being and my less-than-ness or sinfulness, but in the context of my own and others shared divinity and shared humanity. I wish someone had taught me that all human beings have an ego and that it's normal to who we are for the ego, just as its normal to get caught up in the story of a movie you're watching. I would have loved to know early on that we're actually something much bigger and more wonderful than the story our ego tells us about ourselves.
Although I read about the ego as an adolescent, heard about it, and thought I knew what it was, I didn't really understand the fragility and illusoriness of the ego until I experienced brief moments of ego-lessness in silent meditation retreats at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. Maybe if someone had helped me look at my self-judgement and self-importance as distinct from who I truly was, it would have spared me quite a few years vacillating between those two ends of the ego spectrum, with their distinct forms of suffering.
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The post 3 Things I Wish I Learned But Never Did appeared first on The Good Men Project.
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