The primary thing I try to make sure I incorporate into my yoga classes is mindful awareness. Mindfulness–defined most simply as full awareness in the present moment–means being aware of the breath and the sensations in the body as you refine and adjust your yoga pose, wait for your car to warm up, sip your morning coffee, or whatever. It can be difficult to find ease into this state of peaceful awareness. The processes of calming the body, un-busying the mind, and un-fusing from emotions is easier said than done, so in my classes, I try to offer specific ways to direct one’s focus. Hopefully, these are also broad enough that any individual can apply it to their own life in some small way.
Recently, each class was offered to consider the voice of their “inner critic,” which is often expressed in different types of negative self-talk. I have spent significant time working through my own negative self-talk, and the rest of this post is really about my process of addressing my own negative self-talk pattern. If you feel like you need specific mental health help, I urge you to seek professional advice from your primary medical provider, for a referral to counseling and/or medication.
My personal negative self-talk is often some version of “How could you have made that mistake, you are so STUPID!” Sometimes an abusive phrase comes rapidly and repetitively through my mind, and wants to shove and shoulder every other thought out of the way. It’s an emotionally painful place to be. Nothing good I have ever done could possibly be of any worth compared to the failure in front of me right now. This is a type of toxic perfectionism that has been among the roots of the major depressive episodes I have experienced. It has made me feel SO afraid to try anything I didn’t already know I could do well. Believing my inner critic’s language has poured adrenaline through my guts and triggered my “Freeze” (as opposed to “Fight” or “Flee”) response, a deep, cold body sense that survival itself is at stake unless the next thing I do is absolutely the right thing. And until I know what that absolute right thing is, I must not move a muscle.
Once, this process flooded my entire system in a class. I forgot to put my phone on silent. It rang. The professor, who had been dealing with this phone crap for weeks during the early days of cell phones, rolled her eyes and said, “And SOMEBODY didn’t turn off their phone.” It felt like I was boiling inside from my toes to the top of my head, but I could barely blink or move my hands to take notes for the rest of class. I have thoughts on why my fear/survival systems were on such a hair trigger at that time, but regardless of why this process started for me, the Inner Critic came right behind that adrenal/rigid/freeze period. After class, I ran to go cry, a lot. Over the phone going off, and what that meant about how inconsiderate and stupid and careless I was and how the professor must know how terrible I really am inside, and no matter how good my class work or tests are, I’ll always know that she knows how I really am. I can look at these words now, and I can tell you rationally about how that was me rejecting multiple types of assessments of me that might be positive (grades, homework). But in the saturation of the post-freeze emotional roil, the only assessment that mattered was the one where I’m a stupid, careless girl in someone else’s eyes. I can call all my big emotions “excessive” and say I overreacted to something ridiculous, but I would still be calling myself a stupid, careless girl if I did that. And what happens if every time I think I look bad to someone else, I believe that that matters more than literally everything else? It means I’ve spent significant time trying to make everything in my life be absolutely right in order to avoid my phone going off in class, or whatever seems like it might set off that Freeze and Shame process. This has meant a lot of me not doing much other than internally torturing myself (rationally!) about the many ways I’m bound to fuck up. I know people who approach this with a “make it rational” idea, and I’m all for whatever works for every person. But for me, I need more than “rational.” There’s too much mystery within the universe and within myself that I care about for “rational” to fully work for me. Today, for this “irrational” suffering I do to myself, in my own yoga and meditation practice, it has been necessary to work to understand the Inner Critic voice, and to develop a peaceful relationship with it.
The process I use to deepen understanding, release attachment, and grow out of my limiting, harmful thoughts of various sorts, is to begin opening to the idea that the negative voice or emotion or whatever it is, is present for some good reason. Anything can fall into disorder or misapplication, but everything in me exists from some place of supporting my survival, my adaptive capacities, and it all wants me to thrive. This is here for a reason. Opening to thinking about what purpose the Inner Critic might serve, I was able to notice a difference between the function of what it was doing, and the language through which that function was delivered. Avoiding mistakes, including social mistakes, is a big deal in human survival, because they can be incredibly costly to our very lives. The Inner Critic, as a function, is only trying to show me where I have room to grow, to do better, so that we can survive and thrive. For whatever variety of reasons, I have given language to the Inner Critic that is harsh and abusive, and that language unfortunately obscures the truth of the Inner Critic’s function in my mind.
“How could you miss that, you are SO STUPID!” is language. It is learned. I didn’t know how to teach the Inner Critic to say, “Hey check yourself, I wanna live!” or “That felt really dangerous, please keep us alive!” I wanted (and still want!) to avoid the feelings of fear and shame that can come with failure, I wanted (and still want!) to feel absolutely sure of myself at all times. I developed a pattern of avoidance of big effort. Other folks develop obsessive, anxious, sleep-deprived lives of trying to exert control over all results. Either way is toxic perfectionism. Now, slowly, in tiny breaths each day, I now ask my Inner Critic “What are you really trying to say?” I try to look at the space the Inner Critic sees, that evidence that I am fallible, capable of wrong, that I see through a limited human perspective. As ever, in yoga, softening and listening happens in the breath.
I breathe to release attachment to my persistent idea that I should already have grown into every observable space. I breathe to invite compassion into my view of my own shortcomings. I breathe to release my desire to avoid suffering by avoiding seeing myself. I breathe to release my desire to control how I am seen by others. I breathe love into whatever kind of stupid, careless girl doing her stupid best I have always, and ever been. I breathe. I breathe.
The Sassafras Cottage 