Heal Yourself First

Transcript

Welcome beautiful thinkers. 

This is how your life is already wonderful. I was thinking about healing yourself first.  So of course you probably know this passage from the Bible where Jesus says to people: take first the log from your own eye and then it will be easy to remove the speck from others eyes. 

Or as I often quote this citation attributed to Albert Ellis: We can only understand others to the extent and in the manner that we understand ourselves or as Jordan Peterson says “Clean Your Room” because when we have our own house in order it becomes much easier to make change in the world.

Now I also remember this sweet moment I had. When you’re on a plane, many of you know one of the things they mention is the oxygen masks. In English they say “Put the mask on yourself before helping others.” 

I remember once I was flying on some Latin American airline. I don’t remember which one it was.  

But because of the translation, they had translated these from Spanish so it said something subtly different.

It said: Put your mask on first and then help others.

I thought “Huh, what a wonderful metaphor for life?” 

And we do have so many tools to look inside ourselves. In a sense our own souls are our laboratories.  We can find our own emotions, we can pick up that journal and begin to write and examine our own motivations. 

Ask ourselves what was the belief that caused me to feel this emotion? Something we do a lot in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. 

We do have this opportunity every day of our lives to look inside and feel our own emotions.  As Cat Bonandin said in her interview “You’ve got to feel it to heal it.”

Of course a lot of us will be in denial about our emotions, that happens a lot! 

We might try to distract ourselves but when we bring our attention clearly to those emotions we can begin to absorb the lessons. Understand the wisdom that is hidden within.  

We can begin to heal ourselves, we understand ourselves.  It’s really quite amazing, astounding when I do this practice, when I continue to learn more about myself I look at others and I see that I understand their problem.

Of course I need to listen thoroughly because sometimes we get ahead of ourselves and think we understand a problem when its actually someone else. Yes a lot of the time I will say this is exactly what I think it is and your thought process is like this, causing you to feel like this. 

You believe for example I have a problem with abandonment issues and you believe when someone leaves me that means I am worthless or I am not important to them or not important in general.

We can see these sorts of things once we explore ourselves, and it is absolutely a blessing the fact that we can exercise our discernment by looking within to find out what is going on in there and learning how to handle our emotions. Not merely to cope, not to survive but to thrive. 

To use those emotions, those feelings, those struggles as a tool to better understand ourselves and better understand the world. 

As I said Im a big advocate of journaling.  If someone knows any other tool with the same power I’d love to hear about it.

Journaling is a fascinating way to explore ourselves and ask ourselves those questions. 

We know our own motivations deeply. Our own assumptions and finding out what is really going on within us so we can more efficiently explore the world. 

Yes know yourself and so much will be revealed to you, I assure you. Heal yourself first.