It appears to be highly acceptable these days to be very kind and loving to other people and desperately hard on yourself. I frequently meet people who wouldn’t dream of hurting another person and will go out of their way to make sure they treat others with the utmost respect and yet they are really harsh towards themselves. They criticise themselves all the time and often have almost impossible expectations of themselves.
It looks like this might be the more moral way to be, but I’d like to explain something about energy so it becomes crystal clear why it is so important to treat yourself as well as you treat others. This is vital to understand if we want to stop to the endless cycles of pain and hurt that many people are experiencing.
We are all made of energy – scientific fact. That means we have a frequency or a vibration that emanates from us all the time. Our experience of life reflects that frequency back to us. If we have a frequency of love and kindness we experience a life of love and kindness. If we have a frequency of poverty we are poor. If we have a frequency of resentment or bitterness life will feel harsh and bitter to us.
The frequency we emanate not only affects our personal experience of life. It affects everyone around us as well. So our families, friends and work colleagues receive this vibration from us, whether they are conscious of it or not, all the time.
In fact, since we are all energy, and there is no real separation between us, it actually affects all of us, regardless of distance. This is not fanciful spiritual talk – it is scientific fact. Therefore whatever we think and feel, inside of ourselves, affects everyone else both close to us and further away. It doesn’t matter whether those thoughts are about yourself or about someone else.
So the idea of being kind to others but cruel to yourself simply doesn’t work. If you are being very critical towards yourself you are emitting a frequency of criticism – and guess what, you are going to experience criticism coming back at you. So now we have double negativity. You are already critical and now other people are being critical of you (matching your vibration). The likelihood is that you will end up feeling even more critical or yourself because others are criticising you – and the negativity starts to escalate.
This is a simple explanation of why many good people are suffering a lot, and finding it hard to understand why. There are many deeper understandings of how this comes about, but they are not important here. What is important is to realise what is happening and simply decide enough is enough. A lot can change by deciding to treat yourself with the same respect, love and care that you usually reserve for others. This alone will start the upwards spiral.
When the critical voice starts in your head, ask yourself how you would treat a child in your place. When you are demanding perfection of yourself, or berating yourself for failing to reach that perfection, ask yourself what you would expect of a valued colleague and how you would want them to handle any perceived failure.
What we do to others we do to ourselves, and what we do to ourselves we do to others. It’s the same thing to treat yourself badly or to treat someone else badly. Now you can go and criticise yourself about this too, or you can decide enough is enough. It’s possible to break this cycle and it will be one of the most powerful changes anyone can make – for the sake of all of us.
Photo by Chang Duong on Unsplash
