Weekend Journaling Prompt

Self-compassion and a bird’s eye view

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As you’ll see, I’m posting these prompts a day early from now on. It will give you the whole weekend to work on them, and it also helps me to inch towards my dream of a screen-free Sunday. I’m getting there…

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Hello,

For the past few weeks, I’ve been feeling a little anxious. It’s nothing terrible; most of the time, I can quell the feeling with a few calming words to myself and a change of action. If I’m doing, I tend to feel all right. It’s only when I stop that that feeling – the sense of impending catastrophe – creeps back into me. In the middle of the night, it can feel like a malevolent haunting.

As I wrote in Wintering, I’ve learned in these moments to simply get up and go downstairs. Low lights, no screens, a cup of rooibos tea and a good book: these things set me straight again. My anxiety feeds on the boundaryless dark. When I show it the foursquare, real world, it recedes again.

But I forgot to write about how I learned this habit. It began years ago, in the middle of a rough night when I’d already been awake for hours. I padded down the stairs feeling wrung out and jittery, my eyelids aching. These were my days of self-loathing, when I was permanently disgusted by my lack of aptitude in every area of my life: friendships, work, money, health. I felt as though I should be in control of all of it, and yet, somehow, I never was. I was convinced that, one day, I would find the magic formula to make myself less terrible. Until then, I was waste in human form, an embodiment of failure.

What happened that night changed me. I lit a lamp and sat in my armchair and decided to meditate. I furrowed my brow and tried to work my shoulders loose. I forced air into my cramped lungs, all the while scolding myself for getting like this, when I really should be doing enough to prevent it by now. And then something remarkable happened. I left my body. My consciousness seemed to float up above my head and look down from the ceiling.

From that bird’s eye view, I saw a woman whose pain made my heart break. She was suffering so intensely, and over such small mistakes. Pure compassion washed through me: in that moment, I was her mother, and I loved her unconditionally. I didn’t think she was perfect, but that was completely irrelevant. She was just a poor little human, a tender thing grieving because she couldn’t tame an untameable world. I enfolded her in my love.

I don’t know how long I sat there, experiencing both things at once: holding myself like an infant, while simultaneously being held. After a while, the two perspectives integrated again, and I sat in astonishment as I realised what had happened. I had experienced the purest love toward myself. It was embedded in me now: this sense that I was just another little human, no better or worse, and worthy of love. The experience was incredibly humbling, placing me in my rightful perspective as part of the big, wide world. All I needed to understand was that I was no better than anyone else, and that therefore I should stop holding myself to impossible standards. 

I won’t pretend I’m now a perfect model of self-compassion; I still go pretty hard on myself when I make mistakes, and I still have anxious nights. But I now have that memory to draw on. I can sit in a chair, close my eyes, and imagine that my consciousness floats upwards. I look down on myself, and feel that wash of nurture again. It is enough, most days, to get me through. 

This week’s journaling prompt is about learning to take this bird’s eye view.