Am I Ever Really Mindful?

Sometimes I get perplexed.  I keep living my life and moving from day to day, but I don't seem to be advancing all the time, getting better at the things that I really value.  Instead, I seem to keep falling into the same behaviors and thought patterns, allowing myself to be pulled down or pulled here and there by my emotions and my thoughts, rather than being somewhat in control of what I think.  I get frustrated, only to ask myself, "Why did I get so frustrated?"  I lose my cool, only to ask myself later, "What the heck did I lose my cool for?  It makes no sense!"

Sometimes I start to think that I'm actually progressing, that I'm getting all that I can out of life, and then I suddenly realize that I haven't done anything really fun for the last few days--or anything to help another person, or to encourage a person, or to contribute to the positive energy of the world.  And there are even times when I catch myself being negative, looking on the darker side of things, being childish and vindictive and hurtful.

What does it take?  What does it take to be mindful all the time and working towards our own personal betterment all the time.  I'm not judging myself harshly here--I'm simply observing what happens in my life and pondering it.  Pondering what happens and why it may happen, and what I may not be doing that I should be doing.  I truly do want to be a more mindful, more patient, more compassionate and kind and loving person, but so often I fall short of all that, and I fall into the human traps that I'm well aware of and that I warn other people about, and I feel that I haven't progressed at all, in any way.

I truly want to be mindful, for if I am, I can help other people more--I can love them better and see their needs and do more for them.  If I'm mindful, then those days when I feel crappy can't happen because I'll be mindful of my blessings and allow them to be the dominant influence of my life.  If I'm mindful, then I can live each day with complete awareness of all that is good in the world, and I won't succumb to doubt and despair and discouragement.

Though being mindful, of course, also means being aware of the bad things that go on in life.  We can't pay attention to just the beauty and the blessings, or we face the risk of being overwhelmed by the negative if we don't recognize it in time.  Being mindful of our relationships allows us to recognize changes; being mindful at work allows us to see potential problems earlier; being mindful of our living environments can help us to be aware of things going bad early in the process.

So I want to be mindful--but am I really?  Am I able to see the things I need to see, or do I just go from day to day pretending that I see them?  Do I call myself mindful while I go through life blindly, constantly doing the same things and getting the same results?  Am I mindful enough to be able to help others when I recognize the need for help, or am I just fooling myself into thinking that I'm more mindful than other people are because I've been introduced to the concept of mindfulness?

Good questions.

And at this point in my life, I'm not sure that I can answer them completely accurately.  I know that I want to be mindful, but I often doubt if I truly am.  And this truth leaves me with a seemingly obvious course of action:  I need to keep on working at it.  I don't want to be harshly judgmental of myself if I'm not being mindful, for I am trying.  Constantly.  But I also want to keep in mind that I do need to be true to my desires and my intentions--if I claim that I want to be mindful, then I need to constantly monitor myself to be sure that I'm at least trying to make that my reality.  I don't want to be someone who says, "I'm going to be more mindful," only to just keep on doing what I've been doing forever.  Fooling myself is not a good way to go through life.

What Do We Do with Criticism?

 Do what you feel in your heart to be right--for you'll be criticized
anyway.  You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
-Eleanor Roosevelt


I used to let criticism rule my life, in a way.  Most of what I did, I did to avoid criticism just as much as I did it to accomplish something or get something done.  As with most things, of course, this dynamic resulted from the way that I grew up, but the fear of criticism decided to hang around much longer than my growing-up years.  Or rather, I made room for it and gave it a home in my life rather than banishing it to some remote place where I'd never have to deal with it again.

And it's still her in my life, to be perfectly frank.  I still have the fear of criticism as one of my more dominant motivators.  It isn't nearly as strong as it used to be, but my guess is that it's going to be around until the day I die.  My task at hand, then, is to learn to live with it so that it doesn't affect me in negative ways.

I think that my fear of criticism is strongly related to the fear of not being liked.  Somehow, I learned to associate criticism with people not liking me, probably because I felt that if I didn't meet their expectations, there was no way they could like me.

But of course, the source of my fear isn't nearly as important as what I do with it now.  I still don't like being criticized, but I respond to criticism differently now.  For one thing, I've learned that much of the criticism that we receive has to do more with the person who is criticizing than it does with me.  For some reason, they want to put themselves up higher than me, or consider themselves better than me, even if it's just on a subconscious level.  In order to get that feeling, the only strategy they have is to criticize me or what I do, to put me down in order to build themselves up.  It's a horrible strategy, but one that many, many people employ.

And if their criticism comes as an effort to make them feel better about themselves, then it should mean absolutely nothing to me.  When I recognize this dynamic going on nowadays, I'm able to completely reject whatever they have to say in favor of maintaining my own peace of mind.  (I think that being a teacher has helped me to develop this ability--the number of times I'm criticized because someone didn't get a grade they thought they wanted, for example, is quite significant.  Teachers are among the most-criticized people on the planet, in general.)

But the fact that I've learned how to deal with criticism hasn't changed the fact that I still fear it.  It's not a debilitating fear that causes me to break down or to experience great anxiety, but it is a very real fear that doesn't feel good at all when it raises its head.  I do my best to recognize the fear for what it is--something that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but that's there anyway.  I accept it and let it be, and I do my best to make sure that the fear doesn't change the way I act or the things I do or say.  The most important thing for me is to recognize that the fear is involuntary--it comes on its own--so I shouldn't be upset that I feel it, nor should I let it control me.  It is what it is, and the ways that it affects me are up to me.

You will be criticized.  I will be criticized.  Tons of people on this planet have adopted criticism as one of their main driving forces, so they spread it far and wide in an attempt to make themselves feel somewhat superior to others.  Sometimes, the criticism will be justified, and in those cases we can use it to help us to improve ourselves.  Often, though, it will be empty, and in those cases we can recognize it for what it is and reject it completely, and move on with our lives.  It's not always easy, but it is always possible.

More thoughts and ideas on criticism