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How to Meditate: Meditation 101 for Beginners
10 Science-Backed Benefits of Meditation
What is Meditation?
How to Meditate: Meditation 101 for Beginners
10 Science-Backed Benefits of Meditation
What is Meditation?
Benefits of Mindfulness: Mindful Living Can Change Your Life
Mindfulness 101: A Beginner's Guide
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Is a past failure or mistake holding you back? Mark offers a wise and personal perspective for how to view mistakes.
Hello, Mark Coleman here.
I've been asked to answer the
question, how do I stop beating myself
up after I've made a big mistake?
So thank you for that question.
A really important one.
And of course, in life,
natural that we make mistakes.
We choose the wrong thing.
We make a decision that turns
out not to be the wisest.
We let people down.
All kinds of things in life happen
that we regret the course of action
that we've taken or what we've said.
The first thing to remember is part
of being human, part of being alive,
part of living is we make mistakes.
We have errors.
We're not perfect.
Have you ever met a perfect human being?
No, they don't exist.
I can look back at my life and
think how many, many times I've made
mistakes, done things that I wish
now I'd chosen a different path.
I think about the time that I bought a
small cottage just before the housing
crash and crisis of 2008, 2009.
And of course the house that I
bought was probably at its highest
value, inflated in the United States
by the easy accessible mortgages.
And then the financial crisis
happened and house prices plummeted.
And I was left with this property
upside down, where I owed a lot more
money than what I'd paid for it.
And now sitting on a big loss.
And guess what?
My inner critic had a lot of things to
say about that, had a lot of judgements.
Why did you buy that house?
Why didn't you do better research?
Why didn't you wait?
You could've got better consultation,
And then of course starts to universalize.
Oh, you always make the wrong decisions.
Why can't you handle your
money better than you do?
Why don't you be more cautious or
more studious before you do these
rash things like buy a house?
And so I had to work a lot, both with
feeling frustrated at the larger economic
situation in which I'd made his decision.
And hadn't really been aware of
the eminent crash of the financial
markets and the housing markets.
And like Thousands, if not millions,
of others was upside down and had to
listen to my critic, having lots of
views and judgments and making big
generalizations as the critic likes to do.
And so it's important that we
pay attention to the critic
and what it's saying and learn
to meet it with some clarity.
And in the course, I
teach about forgiveness.
Forgiveness, one definition, it's
letting go of all hope of a better past.
And I can hear, sometimes when I
say that, people's voices saying,
well, I can't forgive myself.
It sounds like letting
myself off the hook.
And certainly that's what the
critic would have to say about that.
And forgiving oneself isn't about
ignoring what you've done, so
you go ahead and do it again.
But it's an attitude of learning from our
life and our choices and our mistakes.
Of course, even the word mistake
you can hold with a question.
Are there any real mistakes in
life or they're just choices?
Some are more skillful than others,
some lead to better fruit than others.
And in the moment, what seems
like a mistake in the moment
can actually be a great benefit
in the long run and vice versa.
What can seem really great in the
moment, like someone could have bought
a house in 2007 and thought great, I've
made all this money between 2007, 2009.
No mistake.
And then suddenly see the value of
that house dropped in half and by 2010.
So important also, just
to notice that frame.
Was it a mistake or was it just
a series of choices or decisions
or actions that weren't optimal?
So one of the things that's important
to learn with the critic is it will
try to convince you, as it does me at
times, well, if I just keep telling you,
you made a mistake, you did it wrong.
You should have done this.
You should have done that.
You should have done research.
You should have got consultation, blah,
blah, blah, that somehow all that judging,
berating, criticism will somehow make us
better off when we make the next decision.
That all of that chastising and
criticism will make us smarter,
wiser, clearer in the future.
The sad thing about all of that judging is
it just makes us feel bad about ourselves.
We might feel stupid.
We might feel unworthy.
We might feel shame.
We might feel contracted.
So we don't actually do anything,
always so frozen to make the next
decision because of expecting or
fearing the wrath of the critic.
The challenge with the critic is because
it's busy judging and shaming us in
our actions, we don't actually learn.
We just feel deficient and unworthy.
Far better to not listen to the critic,
but to simply try to understand,
well, what actually happened here.
I made this decision based
on this thinking, this logic.
And remembering that we make the best
decisions and do the best we can in
the moment with the information and
the resources we have in that moment.
If I'd had a crystal ball and saw the
financial collapse of 2008 and nine,
of course, I wouldn't have bought a
house as would have millions of others,
but we don't have the crystal ball.
The critic thinks we should have one or
looks back and condemns us for decisions
based on a lack of information that we
didn't have, because we couldn't have had
it because we couldn't know the future.
So it's understanding that the
judging and criticism doesn't help.
What helps is we bring a spirit
of inquiry, of investigation.
Oh, what happened?
What was this decision?
What is this thing I'm calling amistake?
How can I learn from this?
Maybe I can discuss it with others.
Maybe I can learn something about myself.
Maybe I do make rash decisions.
Maybe I do need to consult with someone
before I make a big financial decision.
But to load on judgment after judgment,
doesn't actually facilitate understanding.
It just facilitates
feeling bad about yourself.
So I hope you can use these words as
a way to work with yourself, to see
the different ways that you might be
beating yourself up, to understanding
that we do the best we can, and that
to judge and shame ourselves does not
help us learn and grow and therefore
not make the same mistake in the future.
So thank you for your questions
and for your practice.
And as you work with this, remembering
it's so important to be kind and caring
with yourself which is so opposite to
how the judge works, which is coming
from harshness and sometimes cruelty.
So please enjoy your practice.
Thank you.
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