Control & Self-Compassion: A (Video) Ramble and a 7-Day Meditation Challenge
The 7-day self-compassion and control challenge invites you to meditate every day with a different phrase, one that circles the topics of healthy control and self-compassion. In addition, every day, you have an assignment that will help you reflect on what you can and cannot control and where you have and don’t have enough self-compassion, culminating in a few small changes that you can potentially make.
Download the PDF guide here.
The guided meditation you can use for each day of the challenge can be downloaded here.
After recording the video, I played a bit more with my dog who was annoyed by my talking into a phone and then I came home and played the video again to see if I was absolutely and utterly incoherent or only mildly incoherent. Turns out, it only a mild case of rambling (for my standards) so I was happy with that. It was an interesting experience to speak to the camera like that and it feels like an experiment worth repeating. I felt confusion, confidence, anxiety and curiosity all at the same time. It turns out, getting out of my comfort zone isn’t necessarily a scary, bad thing. I decided not to edit anything, so what I recorded is what you get. As I said in the video, if I’m going to talk about limits of control, it’s only fair if I step outside of my own comfort zone to avoid being a complete and utter hypocrite.
As I was listening to the recording later today, there was one thing that I felt needed additional context and perhaps not many would care about this, yet I do. In the part of the video where I talk about our lack of control of external events, I used dramatic example: the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the currently escalating conflict in the Middle East. I talked about how we will all be affected through the economic impact and that we have no control over that. I stand by this as it seems like an obvious point. So what’s my problem? I was talking, in my mind, to my client who lives in the United States, and who is, like me, only indirectly affected by those conflicts. But many people who may stumble on that video may be more directly involved in those conflicts and I felt I didn’t honor those who lost family members or who were murdered by senseless violence, and I wanted to mention that as well and acknowledge and honor that suffering because I didn’t do so in the video.
For a while, I thought about re-recording the whole video, but that would defeat the whole purpose of experimenting with control, imperfection, and self-compassion. Putting more pressure on myself to say all the right things isn’t very self-compassionate and who says that next time around I wouldn’t forget something smaller but then feel compelled to re-record it again. Adding a paragraph here is appropriate enough and with video already recorded and uploaded, the best that I can do.
On a completely unrelated note, here are a few photographs of the park where I made the video, along with my dog, taking a break from all the exceedingly difficult exploration. :-)
