What do you avoid?

Strategies we use to avoid.

Avoid what? Well, that is another question.

And a third question is: Do you embrace life fully? Is your life rich?

I don’t mean that you need to go off on adventures to embrace life fully. There is an internal adventure going on right now inside you. And by asking if your life is rich, I don’t mean money-wise, or love-wise, or experience-wise. These might be part of your life or they may not. They make no difference to whether your life is rich.

So to embrace life fully and to have a rich life, I suggest that we need to not avoid.

A big one for me is to avoid conflict. And criticism. And judgement. I know that these bring up feelings inside me that are uncomfortable. The feelings may be unworthiness and unloved……loneliness and hopelessness. Even despair with my mind telling me I can never get it right.

So recently I put myself into a situation where I might be judged. Intention – not to limit my life by avoiding potentially being thought of as not good enough to do a job. And I have been super aware of what was going on inside me. I was aware that other people see the situation differently from me. It depends on their understanding and expectations. So each time I wondered whether I was being judged, I had an internal conversation and really realised that I am probably not being judged. And then, even if I were, it actually didn’t mean that I am not good enough. It would be just one person’s interpretation of what was needed in that job. I can step out of the way and do what I think is appropriate, and not worry about what others think. In that situation anyway. (By the way, if someone said I was good, that is also a judgement and someone else may not think I am good. Or I might not.) Judgementless does not mean good judgements, it means doing what is true for you and the situation regardless. My parents used to tell me that my piano playing was good when I knew it was definitely not – too full of mistakes!

I suspect that not avoiding conflict, criticism and judgement will be a work in progress for me. A need to be vigilant, not about what other’s think or say, but about what I am feeling and how I interpret things.

So this has been my adventure recently, and it leads to living a more rich life.

What has been your adventure lately?