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 My Body
- Self-Judgement and Self-Importance are Both Traps
How to Self-Soothe
In my family “self-soothing” as a 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 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 put myself to asleep. It would have been amazing if at some point an adult had said to me, “You’re going to feel really alone and emotionally overwhelmed sometimes. That doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. It doesn’t mean you’re inferior or unworthy. It’s a part of being human. It’s important for you to have a bunch of different things you can do to help yourself get through difficult moments.”
At seven or eight years old, if someone had helped me brainstorm ways I could soothe myself, like noticing my breath and even counting my breaths, visualizing people who loved me, or drawing pictures of my emotions and labeling them, it might have helped me lessen some of my own suffering. It would have also helped me feel emotionally competent.
Luckily, now, meditation is being brought into many schools. There are mindfulness workshops for kids, and there are even mindfulness coaches for children and teens. Holly Martinson, a VA-based mindfulness coach, is one of a vanguard of mindfulness coaches whose specialty is teaching children how to use breath-based awareness to self-soothe.
How to “Listen” to Your Body
Most of us naturally “listen to our bodies” or we probably wouldn’t be here to think about the things we wish we’d learned that no one taught us. Our bodies are always sending us signals, 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 know what I was doing, or that it was a valuable practice–a 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.”
In an ideal world, body-attunement would be a foundational skill we all learn 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 magic spotlight than can be know the feelings, sensations, and thoughts within.
Self-Judgement AND Self-Importance are Traps
I really 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 get caught up in the ego’s story, the same way we get caught up in movies in a movie theater. I would have loved to know early on that we’re actually something much bigger, vaster and more wonderful than the endless stories our ego tell us about our self-importance and/or inferiority.
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 of the pain I experienced ricocheting back and forth between those two ends of the ego spectrum.
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