“One day, a butterfly met a centipede. She had never seen such a being and was amazed at how she was able to move her legs in a coordinated way. His astonishment was such that he could not hide it. - Millipede, how do you move your legs so precisely? - Churches. The centipede had never thought about it, it just did, it felt natural to him. However, he paused for a few minutes to think about this extraordinary ability of his. After a while, and after thinking a lot, he realized he couldn't move anymore. ”
personal growth can cause us what happened to the centipede. By looking excessively within ourselves, we run the risk of going blind. And while it's one of the biggest risks we take as we begin our journey to our essence, it's also one of the least talked about.
Actually this idea is from Paul Watzlawick, who once said, "Looking inside makes you blind." By this he meant that when we try to interpret our internal motivations, emotions, behaviors, decisions or thoughts in search of a cause-and-effect explanation, we may be causing ourselves more problems than we are trying to solve. sleep and you realize that your heart starts beating differently, maybe you get scared, thinking that it could be a heart attack or a panic attack. It is likely that it is a simple cardiac inconsistency that has no repercussions, but our fear and, above all, our interpretation of the situation, creates a problem that did not exist before.In fact, situations of this type can cause a person to experience a real phobia with respect to looking inward, thus developing what is known as "
experiential avoidance". It is a concept that refers to the tendency to avoid all feelings, thoughts or situations that cause emotional distress. As a result, these people become enslaved to this avoidance, unable to live fully but live in fear. Of course, the solution is not to stop looking within and forget about personal growth. When Watzlawick said that looking into ourselves makes us blind he was referring to the fact that our language has a linear and causal character, which is what produces this very dangerous interpretative error. Therefore, since reality and our minds work in a circular way, the solution is to stop making direct and linear interpretations of our inner states.For example, a person who begins the path of personal growth may find that within himself he has a strong hatred for himself. And since hatred is socially considered a negative emotion, she may conclude that she is a bad person, she may begin to feel inadequate, uncomfortable with herself, and her self-esteem can suffer greatly. This is one of the main problems that arise from looking within oneself without the proper tools, following the advice of the guru on duty.
Personal growth should be a process of gradual self-discovery. It almost seems obvious and, therefore, at this point you are probably wondering how you can know yourself if every time you try to do so you risk falling into this linear causality, if you overidentify with your opinions and experiences and draw conclusions that end up hurting you. The solution is quite simple, to look inside yourself without losing perspective you need glasses that protect you. And those glasses are called "presence". Presence is a natural state of attention in which we do not judge, very similar to the concept of “flow.” To enter this state there are two rules or variables: yourself and the context you are in. In practice you must: 1. Develop the skills necessary to move in the context 2. The context, in turn, should respond positively to what you are doing For example, if you propose to play tennis without having done it before, it will be difficult for you to enter a state of "flow", because your movements will be uncoordinated and you will miss many balls. Inevitably, you will feel bad because you do not have the necessary skills and the environment does not give you positive feedback. But if you continue to strive every day you will be able to develop these skills and, finally, you will enter the state of "flow". To develop the " presence ”, understood as the lenses necessary to look inside ourselves, the best exercise is“ mindfulness meditation ”, or Mindfulness. This practice, in addition to helping us to relax, is very useful for different areas of our life, it also offers us a "safe base" to look inside ourselves. It must also be said that we all have this "safe base", the problem is that we don't everyone knows how to use it to look within. In practice, the
Mindfulness it allows us to transform ourselves into detached observers of reality and of what happens inside us. We will not make hasty conclusions and we will not make judgments, we will limit ourselves to observing. You will grow from acceptance rather than rejection.
