This morning my husband put his alarm on at 4am to get himself up to watch the soccer. The thing is that I went to bed early last night and had put my alarm on for 5.15 and was on alert for it to go off. When his alarm went off, of course it woke me and I couldn’t get back to sleep. At first I was annoyed and tried to go back to sleep and then I realised I wasn’t really that tired. I wanted to get up but then I heard this little voice in my head. One I realised I hear all the time. The one that is making it hard for me to get up earlier every day and why my body was on alert to make sure my husband didn’t hear my 5.15am alarm, in case he asked me the question I was asking myself.
Recently I have been listening to different meditations during the day and at night. The most recent one is by Australian parenting specialist Maggie Dent. It is called The Moonlight Relaxation for Mums. It is a free download, a present of sorts for mums to help them download at the end of the day. In one part it says to let go of all the negative thoughts you might have in your head such as thinking you are useless or not the being the best mum. Well at this part I was kind of like, I don’t have these thoughts…. I don’t hear these kind of words in my brain??? But a part of me knew that I was meditating to this particular mediation because I did have those voices, I just didn’t recognise them, or as I have learnt so early on this promising Friday morning is that I do hear them but I am just so accustomed to them that I do not register that they are there silently whispering in the background of my every thought.
I am also currently learning to be a Peaceful Parent with Dr Laura Markham, I have a bit more about that in this post here. In week two we learn about how and why regulating your own emotions is so important. In the course she gives us information on where to go to find more information on the things she teaches. She added a link that week to a TED TALK by Brene Brown about Shame and Vulnerability. Wow, just wow! No wonder over five Million people have watched Brene’s vulnerability talk and close to two million her talk on shame. When I watched I was like well yeah I know this, but wow, I didn’t really know this! It is hard to explain the effect her talk had on me other than to say that this morning at 4.30am when I was thinking to myself ok, I am still awake and not sleeping why don’t I get up, that I suddenly identified that voice of negativity, it was the voice of SHAME! I had what Oprah Winfrey calls an AHA moment and I identified the words ‘shame’ was repeating over and over to me…
WHAT’S THE POINT????? but unfortunately the words were not in big freaking capital letters, lit like the sky on New Years Eve. They were just poisonous whispers in my subconscious. What’s the point of getting up, you won’t achieve anything. What’s the point, you don’t deserve to become a better person. What’s the point of getting up, you won’t get anything useful done anyway. What’s the point of getting up and trying and becoming better when people will just put you down or make you doubt yourself. What’s the point when you don’t value yourself that highly anyway, you don’t deserve anything. What is the point you’ll never get what you want or meet your expectations anyway…. WOAH!!! Wait a minute – I am telling myself these awful negative things every single day and I had just gotten so used to those venomous whispers that I wasn’t ignoring them, they were just always there the internal story I told myself on repeat. But I can hear the words as though someone else is saying them to me – you are worthless, you don’t deserve, YOU…. I’ve let what other people have done to me in the past rule my present. I have let what I think other people are thinking of me rule my life, I let my fears turn into my beliefs and my truths. And I have just realised how utterly sad this is.
It is funny though how in the same moment in realisation of my shame, that I knew how to start changing my story. I was up in the wee hours of the morning last week with my daughter who at almost two years old is only just getting what I call her fangs, or Canine teeth and she just couldn’t sleep. I don’t like putting on the tv, but after an hour and a half of trying to get her back to sleep I decided to go through my YouTube Motivation Video playlist and I started with a speech by Oprah Winfrey at the 2016 Essence Festival. She spoke passionately about intention. How every action, decision and thought is derived from your intentions and how you need to be mindful and aware of them. So my new story, question and mantra will be WHAT’S MY INTENTION??? When I hear that ugly voice of self loathing ‘What’s the point?’I intend to stop it and and change the whisper to What is my intention – to ‘just live right’ and to be the best me I can be – no regrets on my death bed and it starts today. Life is short, death is long. The past is gone, the future hasn’t happened, today is here and that is why we call it the ‘present’.