We Are Never Alone

“We delight in the beauty of a butterfly, but we rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve such beauty.”  

-Maya Angelou.

This is one of my favorite quotes because it really sums life up, don’t you think?  

As we continue the integration of self-compassion into our daily life, I share a new challenge. Try to truly think about the meaning of this quote as you continue your journey. Consider your history of and potential for deeper personal transformation. 

Dare to look back at your life. Where have you worked at transforming yourself? Give yourself the loving gift of acknowledging the beautiful, wise and strong parts of you that were the result of that work. Self-compassion is rooted in knowing that, yes, we are all works in progress.

I also wonder what insight you have gained this week as you have tried to formally capture your daily inner dialogue. 

As you know, most of my professional life has been dedicated to elementary education, loving and learning with the most beautiful communities of children, professional staff, and families.  Each year, as school began, I would walk from classroom to classroom and see beautiful jars containing eggs attached to deep green milkweed leaves on hand-cut twigs. You might wonder, why would so many teachers want to share the journey of the monarch butterfly with so many students with such a wide range of ages as each new school year began?  I learned that at each grade level, students were developmentally challenged each day to become scientific researchers and observers.  As students grew through the grades, they were offered the opportunity and encouraged to look more deeply into this evolution, and apply their observations and insights to real-life experiences. 

Consider this: Monarch butterflies go through one life cycle with four life stages within one year. The four stages of life include the egg, the larvae (caterpillar), the pupa (chrysalis), and finally they become the most beautiful monarch butterfly.   Ultimately, after these four stages of life, what was once a caterpillar is transformed into the most amazing monarch butterfly. All monarchs experience the same evolution, in jars in classrooms, as research projects, and in nature all over the world each year. The life cycle of the monarch butterfly is actually a metaphor for the life cycle we all share in our common humanity.

I recognize that as humans, we are born into many different families, with different homes, and distinctly different resources. However, for the most part we possess the same emotional qualities that define our common humanity and our life journey. As we navigate our lives, we search for opportunities, and physically need to experience love and happiness through our relationships with others. We strive to succeed, to be accepted and included, and to build strong connections. Throughout this journey, we may also experience fear, loss, and disappointment, which lead to pain and suffering. We live in a world that promotes perfectionism, and we all share the reality that there is no perfection; yet still, we strive for it. This often creates that inner story filled with feelings of inadequacy, failure and hopelessness, furthering our experience of pain and suffering. As we learn more about self-compassion, we come to understand that recognizing and understanding our common humanity is an integral element on the road to self-compassion.

While pain and suffering are the most important elements of our common humanity, it is important to acknowledge how differently these words are defined.  

Yes.  Pain is unavoidable in our lives.  We fall in love. Relationships end. We experience death. We are afraid of something every day.  We are disappointed by an expectation we had of a family member or professional colleague that was diminished or dismissed. These are hard and painful events that everyone has in common.  It is important to stay mindful of the pain that each life experience produces, so that we are able to process this pain, and ultimately move beyond it.

In contrast, suffering is created in the story we tell ourselves as we ruminate over each painful event.  Think about the pain we experience at the end of a long term friendship. In the moment, it feels like our lives will never be the same. We experience suffering in the inner dialogue we create as we move forward and torment ourselves with the critical stories about what we could or should have done to save the relationship.  We might further suffer through the creation of critical stories about the friend who let us down, and broke our heart.  

When we experience painful events and suffer from the consequences, we are inclined to isolate and feel alone. Maybe we withdraw because acknowledging pain can be seen as a sign of weakness.  We default to believing that no one else experiences this because everyone around us appears strong and brave.  

By recognizing that pain and suffering are part of every human experience, we feel less isolated and alone.  This further enables us to change the story we tell ourselves from negative and critical, to supportive and encouraging.  The creation of a positive inner dialogue is essential as we learn to recognize and value our common humanity.  Sharing messages with ourselves such as “I know this is painful right now, but it will not last forever. Pain and suffering are a part of life and everyone experiences them at different times,” helps us to endure through the suffering.  As we acknowledge our common feelings of pain, loss, failure, disappointment, and fear, it is important to remain present in these emotions, and take control of the inner dialogue that follows our thinking.

In this new week, I encourage you to build on your practice of recording your default negative inner dialogue, and responding to the negative messages with kind, gentle and supportive self-compassion.  

The new positive messages will empower you to recognize the strength you have to connect with our greater humanity.  Remind yourself that when you face struggles and difficult challenges, you are never alone. Practice the same kindness with yourself that you would bestow on a friend or family member going through a difficult experience.  

Try to record your efforts each day with this new strategy as you enter this new week.  

Next week, we will integrate the three elements of self-compassion as we move forward in our journey of practicing self-compassion. 

Until then, be safe, be mindful, and be kind to yourself.