Any sports person or athlete would know that to compete
successfully, you must train continuously both in order to improve
fitness and to perfect skills. In sport you discover a talent, it is
nurtured as you grow up, you train, you compete, you succeed and know
that whatever happens you will be the best you can be. After
retirement it is good to keep up some level of training, both for
your physical and emotional health. It might also be that your
emotional health can be maintained by coaching the next generation.
What about those of us that have never been remotely sporty? It
seems to me that where as sports people and young musicians work with
a natural talent and train to perfect it as they mature, whereas many
of us travel in the opposite direction, at least emotionally.
Children, it seems, are born with an innate ability to be OK so that
provided they have nourishment, shelter and love, they can
emotionally flourish.
For a child, life is simple and the world of imagination and play
provide outlets for discovery, for practicing emotional skills and
the discovery of healthy emotional living. Only as we grow older do
relationships become more tricky as social pressures are placed on
us, albeit mostly well meaning, by parents, teachers and friends.
This is particularly true when we reach our teenage years. It seems
that many of our life transitions present us with emotional
challenges, whether it is leaving home, entering or leaving
relationships, becoming a parent, redundancy, retirement, children
leaving home … The list is endless.
In the same way that keeping physically fit helps to reduce the
risk of illness or helps us enjoy an active physical life, there is
growing evidence that some form of “emotional keep fit” could
help us to enjoy better emotional health, particularly through these
transitions. It could help us stave off depression or anxiety, or may
help in our relationships. A bold claim but let's think about this
for a moment.
Our first relationship is with ourselves with parental
relationships providing the prototype for each person's unique
internal model of the world. This model then goes on to determine our
ability to trust, our ability to love and to be loved, how we relate
to the world. It is what we use to construct our sense of self. If
our parents help us to create a positive sense of self, it remains
with us for life and helps us to face up to and survive the many
challenges we will face through life. This is not to say that our
emotional health depends on perfect parenting but, as Eric Burn
pointed out, with good enough parenting we create positive life
scripts and these set us on the path to an emotionally healthy path.
In reality, many of us have flawed internal models where we find
the world more scary than it sometimes should be giving rise a
general feelings of anxiety or powerlessness. Depression, for
example, is widely regarded in psychoanalytical to arise from anger
against the self and which may well have its roots in poor self
image.
In counselling, a common first objective is to create a
“reparative” relationship with the client to enable them to build
a more positive self image. In this style of relating the client is
not judged and learns not to be their own worst critic. Building a
positive relationship with ourself provides the foundation for our
relationships with others, with our loved ones, and with our
colleagues. Not everyone needs counselling and for most of us,
learning to be mindful can help us to nurture kindness towards
ourselves, more create a more positive self image and to realise just
how amazing our internal working model can be in guiding us through
the joys and perils of life.
Think of mindfulness as a kind of emotional keep fit where you
develop expert skills and being in the moment, each moment, without
judging either yourself or others, and without judging the moment. We
can learn to be mindful by using meditation to develop the skills of
the internal observer, the part of us that can see each unique moment
with wonder. However, mindfulness is not just meditation but takes
the learned skill into our everyday existence so that, for example,
you might find joy in the crunch of frost beneath you feet in the
winter, or being fully present in a conversation with a child.
In a way, it is an attempt to return to a more child-like
curiosity with the world, the curiosity that is lost as we grow older
and more cynical with the world and, worst of all, with ourselves and
our loved ones.
To learn more about counselling or mindfulness, please visit my website. http://www.innercalm.co.uk
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