Looking to Live Well?
By: Sylvia Clare Msc. Psychol
Tags: Mindfulness, Self, Compassion, Relationships, Love

There are some questions you can ask yourself repeatedly each day that can make you a better person and can make you life better in the process

Am I in self judgment mode or self acceptance mode?

Does this hurt anyone else that I am possibly aware of?

Does this bring me instant gratification or pleasure or will it bring lasting happiness?

Am I being my best self in this moment?

These are important questions to ask yourself each day that might help you to.

Let us take a slightly deeper look at each of these questions and I can share some of my own struggles with them too.

Am I in self judgment mode or self acceptance mode?

This is one of the trickiest since judgments flow from our consciousness far to easily and appear so rational and normal that we are unaware that they are judgments.

Judgments come from one of two positions, right , or wrong. I immediately ask — whose perspective is that? I have been under the assumption that I have been deeply wronged ad done deeply wrong things in the past. And yet over time I have found that those very things that ‘hurt’ me so deeply turned out to have been for my benefit. So even my own mistakes can be viewed as someone else’s potential to turn their lives around, since my motivations were almost certainly not vindictive but mostly either defensive or misjudged. Can I or do any of us need to beat ourselves up about getting things wrong? I think not. we simply need to accept our self as flawed but a work in progress. This perception certainly does not allow for complacency though in terms of personal growth or development. It is all an opportunity for learning to be better, or more skilful, which is the buddhas term for our tendency to goof, and sometime badly. I have rarely intentionally wanted to hurt anyone or if I did, not to act on it. But I can be unskilful at times, like everyone else. That is where humility comes in, allowing ourselves to be mistaken and to learn from it with self acceptance rather than judgment and denial. And always to look at the bigger picture.

Does this hurt anyone else that I am possibly aware of?

Following on from above, is how I behave, the choices I make and the behaviours I enact harmful to someone else, and is that what I want to do? Stepping aside from the above points, there are many other areas of behaviour that can be and possibly should be part of this process.

Is how I consume hurting others? Do I check for modern day employment slavery and appalling employee terms and conditions. Am I condoning cruelty to animals, to indigenous people I will never meet? Am I assisting in environmental destruction.

Motivation is what matters more than anything. We can make mistakes but we should attempt not to be intentionally unkind. and we can consider the longer or wider implications of our choices. Systems exist on this planet which do bring great harm to many living beings, human or otherwise, and to live a good life we should attempt to avoid contributing and sustaining them as much as possible. Those systems would crumble if enough people said no and just stopped accessing them, educating themselves between want and need and responsibility to all other living beings who co exist with us and without whom we could not survive. By hurting them we also potentially greatly hurt ourselves. We can only do as much as we are individually able to respond to , which we are responsible for, but by being responsible more mindfully or thoughtfully we can do a lot less harm in this time

Does this bring me instant gratification or pleasure or will it bring lasting happiness?

I love this teaching and have used it more often than anything else. The example I use is mostly for myself is chocolate cake. I love chocolate. I love cake too, but as I get older I am less and less able to consume unessential calories without detrimental effects on my body else where. Although still pretty physically active in my mid 60’s I am a lot heavier than I was easily when two decades younger. I do have excellent overall fitness for my age so am not worried about flexibility, heart, blood pressure and other major killers, though dementia figures highly in my family and also diabetes. So eating chocolate cake for me — with all that sugar, could be seen as potentially very harmful to me longer term, sugar being connected with neural damage in the brain.

So what should I do? Enjoy a piece of cake once a week and no more, abstain completely or indulge and blow the consequences. This outline can be applied to almost everything I do consume or decide not to do. Exercise, eating, buying, spending time doing - they all come under this decision.

Am I being my best self in this moment?

My best self. Who might this person be? I am still getting to know her but actually she is unfolding or evolving every day anyway. All I have to do is to keep up. I have had a hard challenging journey through life, so have many others. I have learned a huge amount along the way. So my best self is the one who is best able tp put that learning into practice as much as possible. Walk the talk myself as it were, since I write about these topics too.

But my ‘best self’ gets knocked sideways sometimes by triggered re-traumatising events an experiences, and sometimes anticipations also. sometime I come from fear or anxiety and then my less skilful reactions kick in and I am less responsive and more likely to make a mistake.

Which brings me back to my first point. Not to judge that vulnerable self who messes up from a position of fear but instead to hold her firmly and calmly and re-assure her that it will all be ok in the end. She can release those layers of fear inside herself and work towards disempowering the triggers a little more and use the experience not to beat herself up in but to grow and become an even better best self.

In conclusion then, this cycle of questions to ask yourself, to live by, can be enormously powerful healers as well and building your sense of self worth and love for all that exists. It breaks down our self interest and enables us to become part of the collective to which we already belong, and to contribute to that collective more effectively for the greater good from which we benefit the most. It can be our way of living with love in our hearts rather than fear, greed, ignorance. It can be the basis of living a very good life.