The way we feel about ourselves dictates how we process our reality. According to the HRSA, Health Resources & Service Administration;
“Two in five Americans report that they sometimes or always feel their social relationships are not meaningful, and one in five say they feel lonely or socially isolated. The lack of connection can have life-threatening consequences, said Brigham Young University professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad, who testified before the U.S. Senate in April 2017 that the problem is structural as well as psychological.”
Bonds are important because apart from making us feel like kids again, bonds reduce the risk of mortality and help to speed up recovery when we are ill and acts as a buffer for developing certain diseases. So how do we open up ourselves to the gift of friendship?
We train ourselves to withhold judgment not only with others but with ourselves too.
To judge or not to Judge? It’s not even a question. We all judge. It keeps us safe from obscure situations. Being able to judge circumstances is a survival instinct that humans carry and it serves us well, but when it comes to making connections it can create barriers for us.
When I was younger I was not as social as I am now. I lived a rather preoccupied life with lots of emotional baggage and because of this, I missed many opportunities to get to know most of my peers. That’s something that I regret. I realized with maturity and inner work that I was living with this filter which made me feel rejected and different from others. Because I felt this way, others perceived me as such. I held a divisive attitude and my peers mirrored this back to me completing the self-fulfilling prophecy.
After much contemplation, I saw that it wasn’t that my peers were rejecting me, it was I who was rejecting them. However, at the time, I took their rejection as confirmation of my strongly held beliefs.
I decided to proactively work on this and the crucial step that I took was to work on the most important relationship I could have. The relationship with myself.
You see, how you feel about yourself matters. It matters tremendously!
This is what it means when people say that you create your reality. Your thoughts influence your emotions which influence your actions and then the world mirrors this back to you. It’s a cause and effect.
So ask yourself what are some strongly held beliefs that you carry and are they serving you well? If there are some beliefs that you would rather toss out, trash them. Nothing is keeping you from finding beliefs that support the experiences you want to have.
During yoga class, we did a backward bend. Upon returning to a sitting position, I felt a whirlwind of sensations, it was very uncomfortable and disorienting. While I was feeling terrible and dwelling on the negative sensation, the yoga instructor said to the class, “Just because we are uncomfortable we don’t have to attach suffering to it.” This was the golden nugget of wisdom!
“ Just because we are uncomfortable we don’t have to attach suffering to it.”
It will be uncomfortable to shift strongly held beliefs, but along with this discomfort there need not be suffering. As we assimilate the beliefs that seemed so foreign to us they eventually will become second nature.
-K