Imagine if you will, a flea-ridden cat who judges himself for having fleas. This cat slinks around ashamedly avoiding eye contact with other cats. It tries to scratch itself surreptitiously so no one will notice. It rubs itself against chairs trying to seem cat-like when it’s really just trying to scratch its itch. It silently begs the fleas to leave him alone. ‘Can’t you find some other cat to bother?’
Its owners try every remedy they can think of and still this cat has fleas. They’re both fed up and exasperated. They too feel judged. ‘What will people think of us for having this flea-infested cat? We’re bad people. If we were better owners, the cat wouldn’t have caught these fleas in the first place!
So the cat judges itself and the owners judge themselves. And the fleas? Well, they just blithely carry on being fleas with no self-judgement whatsoever. They’re just busy doing flea stuff.
What does this have to do with being a nice guy?
Sometimes you’ll be nice and sometimes you won’t, but that doesn’t mean you have to act on your not-nice impulses. You can simply notice those impulses in your mind and choose to act on them or not. There’s no point denying them. There they are, showing up as not-nice thoughts in your mind.
You only judge those thoughts because they don’t fit in with your idea of yourself as a nice guy.
Yet what if your nice guy persona was also just an act? Maybe you’re trying to be a nice guy but actually, you’re full of judgements. Perhaps those judgements are towards other men or mask your misogyny towards women.
What if sometimes you were nice and sometimes you were not nice? You could try all the remedies available to try to rid yourself of your not-niceness. Yet those thoughts or impulses would keep rising up from your subconscious.
This is because you’re human and when you’re human you have nice thoughts and not-nice thoughts. You have loving impulses and unloving impulses. You have violent thoughts and non-violent thoughts. You can be sweet and tender and not so tender. These feelings and emotions can all be there.
It’s only as you become more aware through not judging your not-nice self, that these impulses, thoughts and feelings are then able to enter your awareness.
Back to the cat.
The cat is not its fleas. Those fleas came to it because of a variety of factors. They just happen in this case, to be a super-strain of fleas that resist all remedies. They didn’t choose this cat in particular. They were just looking for a host they could feed off. Yet it is the cat that judges itself harshly for something it had no control over.
You too may judge yourself harshly for the centuries of conditioning at the heart of your nice and not-nice persona. Your persona is not who you are.
In this analogy, your persona is the fleas. It’s neither good nor bad. It’s simply the result of certain factors, such as the conditioning and societal rules that created it. You’ve learned to identify with these factors because they’ve been around for so long. Now you can’t seem to get rid of them.
Yet when you begin to loosen your attachment to these rules and conditionings then who you are beyond nice and not-nice rises to the fore.
The true you is not weighed down by conditioning. It does not see itself as nice nor not-nice. It doesn’t see women or other people as somehow vastly different from itself. It neither places them on pedestals nor sees them as the enemy.
They are just like itself. Bodies, with personalities and conditionings that cause them to act out and behave in certain ways.
When this is seen, what arises is a natural compassion.
That compassion is both towards yourself and any others you come across. Compassion doesn’t try to be nice. It just is. That compassion is not directed towards any particular person, race or gender. It is simply uncluttered with the conditioning that would cause it to act in unloving ways.
It sees why people act as they do and what’s at the root of their acting out. It chooses how it responds to those people. It is not concerned with whether these people are women or men, straight or gay, etc. It just responds from a natural space of compassion. This compassion may be perceived as nice or not-nice, depending on who’s viewing the response.
The compassionate self has the power to choose. It can choose its response because it isn’t locked into the idea of itself as some rigid expression it calls nice.
It can allow thoughts to arise that may be seen as nice or not-nice and not identify with either. That’s because our nice behaviour comes and goes, depending on our moods and levels of awareness at that moment.
True compassion is steady. It is present and aware and remains steady because of its awareness.
Do you give yourself permission to be aware of what’s really going on within you so you can own it all? Both the nice and the not so nice aspects of your persona? Are you willing to go beyond these extremes to discover the one who knows they’re no different from anyone else? Because it is in that recognition that true compassion gets to reveal itself.
What about the cat?
Well once the cat understood that the fleas were absolutely nothing to do with him, he stopped caring so much, stopped giving them his attention. Remarkably, as he did so, those fleas just happened upon a new self-judging cat much more to their liking and left him in peace.
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Yve Bowen is a passionate writer and copywriter. As a copywriter she provides engaging content and marketing copy for stressed out Sole Traders and Entrepreneurs. Find Yve at https://keeper.marketing.
