Stop Putting Responsibility For Happiness Onto The Mind and Body And Punishing Them.
The mind and body are beautiful instruments through which we enjoy our perspective on the Universe.
If we identify with them as if they were us, we turn their natural survival mechanisms, which protect them from danger and move them to nourishment, against themselves.
Believing in the separate self is a kind of autoimmune disease in this regard.
What would otherwise remain a healthy mechanism for moving the body is resisted psychologically as if something were wrong.
Thinking we are the body, we confuse ourselves with bodily sensations, and we depend on their stability for our sense of wholeness. Any disturbance causes psychological resistance, aka anxiety, and the arising of personal desire that seeks security in transient experience.
The mind and body’s natural diversity, which prefers some situations to others or tires in some situations, is turned into a pathology.
The capacity to perceive contrasting patterns, necessary for survival, is turned into paralysing self-punishing criticism and comparison.
The capacity to think rationally is turned into endless self-defeating black or white all-or-nothing rumination.
The capacity to imagine situations is turned into catastrophising about an imaginary past and future.
The capacity to eat and drink is turned into a self-soothing tool to try and quell emotional discomfort.
By not identifying with the mind and body but instead being the aware reality in which the mind and body appear, we do not make the state of the mind and body the determiner of wholeness, and the intense physiological harm this does stops.
We do not judge them for anything, including their quirks, neurological traits, particular rhythms, superficial appearance, gender, skillfulness, vocal accent, social status, innate levels of intelligence, mistakes, illnesses, or demise.
On the contrary, being clear about the true motivation, which is to be and shine universal love from this localised position for no other reason than its own sake, we love the mind and body and behave like an infinitely patient, loving parent towards them, as if the mind and body were our children.
We love and cherish the mind and body as they are and work with them lovingly and compassionately.
Let's drop the term “self-compassion,” for it reinforces the notion of a separate self identified with the mind and body that must learn compassion.
Let´s drop the term “self-development,” for it reinforces the notion of a separate self identified with the mind and body that needs improving.
We need to recognise that we are the aware reality that is already whole and then talk about how to cherish the mind and body as vehicles for our innate wholeness.
In this respect, all minds and bodies are portals of universal love, not inadequate people.
This has a name – Non-Duality or Oneness!
Love
Freyja