Judgment Steals Joy

I hope you all had a great week. I cannot believe that my KLARITY Mindsette RESET in Marathon Key is just a few days away. I am so excited!!! As a result of that, my schedule will be modified over the next two weeks so see below for my schedule.

Last week I shared that on my recent family trip I found myself struggling with being present at times. One of those was during the first day of scuba diving with my children. When diving, there is this moment on the boat when you have all your gear on, a tank strapped to your back and extra weights hooked on to you so you can sink to the bottom, where you can feel your heart race and sometimes ask yourself “Why am I doing this?”

Then, as you jump into the water, inflate your BC (which is kind of like a life vest) and peek down into the water you realize you are in the middle of two worlds; the surface and the sea, and you know you are about to have the special opportunity to visit the beautiful world below. As you let the air out of your BC and slowly lower, the anxiety dissipates.

In this particular instance for me, the anxiety did not disappear as it usually does. Perhaps it was nerves around diving with both of my children and my father that made the sensation last beyond our submerging to the ocean floor. I found myself actively trying to slow my breath and my heart and steady my mind.

I have been diving since I was 16 (the age of my son) and I almost always have that “Why am I doing this?” moment before jumping in the water. However this time it was much stronger and lasted much longer than in the past. As I continued swimming through the dive I noticed the “waterfall of thoughts” in my mind; especially the judgmental thoughts; thoughts of anger and frustration at myself for cheating myself out of the full enjoyment of the dive. And the judgement and anger made the enjoyment that much more elusive.

That is what judgment does. It steals joy. So I asked students on the mat this week to notice their own “waterfall of thoughts’ as they moved through practice and to talk to themselves as if they were speaking to a friend.

What we say to others is usually kind and contrary to what we say to ourselves which is often cruel. That negative self talk quickly becomes a pattern, a habit that holds us back from joy. Being kind to our bodies on the mat is a powerful way to practice that process in the mind. As quickly as we create a pattern we can shift it. With patience and practice and a bit of kindness we can take ourselves to another world in the mind just as I visited the underwater world. We just have to consistently “jump in” to kindness for ourselves and over time we will fully submerge and surrender into it.