Criticizing yourself because you are sick or overweight or because you are not taking better care of yourself is self-persecution. Once again for the millionth time, I find myself judging myself. This time because I caught myself using my mind to create anxiety. For many years I have interpreted anxiety as a misuse of my mind. I am aware that anxiety breeds more anxiety and that I can choose to better direct my thinking to create the good and beauty I desire. However, once again I discover that I am using coercion as my strategy for caring for myself. I am mean to myself to get myself to do what I think I should.
This is condemning the anxious; the afflicted, poor, sick, imprisoned, the PERSECUTED.
I have done this—lived my life criticizing myself for not living up to my own standards. Demeaning and rejecting myself, I am deliberately rude, threatening and abusive to myself. I treat myself as if I really could be doing better but I don’t because I am simply too lazy or too afraid or too stupid.
It had not occurred to me that I might be innocent. Perhaps I do not do better because I am not able.
A cripple cannot dance. An asthmatic cannot run.
Inspiration is beyond the means of the depressed.
I, Charley Cropley, I am and have been injured, ill, afflicted. In my own ways I am weak, poor, impoverished, incapable. I suffer and I don’t know how to Heal myself. What I have learned in my own experience; what Buddha and Christ have taught me, what Naturopathic Medicine is founded upon is the Healing power of Kindness.
Kindness, my own kindness says:
I forgive you, Charley. You may remain anxious, sad, angry. I forgive you. I am not the judge of anxiety, but the Forgiver of anxiety. I love you. I am you. You have not known how pure, powerful and good you are.
There is no one else here, uttering these words, only me. I get to be kind to Charley while simultaneously being Charley. I create Charley in my image and likeness. My kindness enables me to express this kindness in the ways I most want to express it. For me personally, I express kindness as health and healing.
It is not by criticizing our self that we heal, but with kindness.
Anxiety is affliction. Self-judgment is more affliction. Condemning the persecuted is just that— Punishing the sick for being sick; the weak for being weak. Cruelty, all too familiar.
Kindness is not something we earn, like a reward for being good.
Kindness is our true nature...
We all long for kindness. But, to date, we have held kindness at a distance; a reward for good behavior.
Kindness is good behavior
It is is the power to do those really difficult to do actions, like eating less, moving gracefully, becoming less anxious or angry. Kindness is the power to actually do what is truly beneficial; to believe in yourself, reduce the sweets, do the workout, silence the critic. You long to do what is good for you. You know that if you do not do what is truly good you will never experience the beneficial results you long for.
Know with certainty that the Healthy body and mind you long for will definitely come to you if you do the required actions. The Universal Law of Causation assures this. Our challenge is how do we get ourselves to actually perform beneficial action?
This is where the rubber meets the road.