When professor of Counseling Psychology Shauna Shapiro was 19 or 20, she spent twelve days at a silent retreat in a monastery in Thailand. This was her first experience with meditation, and nobody around her spoke English, but she figured out that she was supposed to sit quietly and focus on her breath going in and out of her nostrils.
“How hard could this be,” she thought, “to pay attention in the present moment to the breath?”
Well, pretty hard indeed, as she quickly found out. Her mind wandered all over the place, and she became more and more frustrated and annoyed with herself.
“Damn it, Shauna,” she said to herself, “what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you do this? And who do you think you are to try to be a meditator? You’re not a meditator; you don’t know what you’re doing!”
Three days went by, and Shauna got angrier and more frustrated. Then on the fourth day, an English-speaking monk flew in from London. In desperation to escape the silence, Shauna requested an interview with him.
She was granted the interview, and the monk came in and said, “How’s it going?”
“Not so well,” said Shauna. “I’m trying, but I’m getting really angry at myself, anxious and judgmental and striving.”
The monk looked at her and said, “Oh, dear, you’re not practicing mindfulness. You’re practicing frustration, anxiety, and impatience.”
Then he said five words which changed Shauna’s life:
What you practice becomes stronger.
This is not just a metaphor. Neuroscientific research has shown that repeated experiences literally shape your brain.
But you don’t need a neuroscientist to understand this. You know this from your own life. If you do something enough — play guitar, paint, write, throw a football — you get better at it.
How many of us think about this in relation to how we talk to ourselves, though?
When you say to yourself, “God, I’m an idiot,” or “Geez, how stupid was that?” or “You are so ugly/stupid/lame/[insert insult here],” you are practicing self-loathing and meanness, so self-loathing and meanness become stronger. And you are practicing accepting mean treatment and believing you deserve it, so accepting mean treatment and believing you deserve it become stronger.
This is not the route to a happy, fulfilled, full-color life.
What you practice becomes stronger.
When you practice talking to yourself in a loving way, instead of a nasty way, you are practicing not just acting with kindness, but receiving kindness. You are practicing believing you deserve to be treated with kindness.
This is true on the meditation pillow, and it’s true in every other area of your life.
Knowing this, doesn’t it make sense to start to pay closer attention to how you talk to yourself?
As my Golden Formula says, self-awareness + self-compassion = the key to everything good. (Click to tweet!)
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!
