Beast To Beauty: The Six Guiding Principles Of The Inward Journey Pt. 2

We continue our exploration of the inward journey by discussing another two of its six guiding principles. This time, Rebecca Victor unpacks surrender and compassion. We live in a world full of judgment but the harshest ones we will ever get are the ones we have for ourselves. This episode will teach us how to surrender judgment in lieu of self-respect and love. Follow Rebecca and witness how beast turns to beauty in laying down the sword and giving up that battle that we can never win against ourselves.

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Beast To Beauty: The Six Guiding Principles Of The Inward Journey Pt. 2

Our topic that we’re going to be talking about is from beast to beauty. When I came up with that topic, it was a way I saw myself. There were aspects of me that learned how to judge myself powerfully and strongly. I had learned the art of judgment very well. I had learned that there were rights and wrongs. People who followed the rights were good people. People who didn’t were not good people, and there were judgments laid. If I didn’t follow those then I was not a good person.

There was a lot of judgment. I learned that well and I practiced it well, much to my chagrin, but I did. That’s been one of the biggest aspects to my growth, that I’ve had to learn to shift and to move out of personal judgment around myself and my life’s journey. There’s so much about who it is that I am that I have yet to discover, and about life itself, that I am passing judgments on stuff that I have no idea what I’m passing it on except for the limited perspective that I grew up with. People gave me their ideas to the best of their ability of what they thought was correct.

I took that information and I followed it as a child. As an adult, I’ve realized that some of that fits and some of it doesn’t. To honor the fact that there are things that don’t as I move in my inward journey, I have to pause and say, “How is this experience of judgment a value to me?” When I said as a beast, it was that angry, self-criticism, self-ridicule, self-judgment, and it didn’t matter. No matter what I did and which way I turned, I had myself. I was good at nailing myself. Sometimes, I sat back amazed. I can remember the teachers that I connected with whose wisdom I respected.

They would often say, “You treat and judging yourself very harshly.” I knew that in the course of my journey, I would come to understand why that was important to become aware of, and then to determine if I wanted to continue to judge myself or shift and make another choice. It took me a while to discover that I didn’t need to judge myself and it wasn’t serving me. It took me a couple of decades because judgment was a tool that I had learned that if I did, then it would keep me submissive in some capacity. It would keep me from doing whatever I was taught that I wouldn’t get too uppity or I wouldn’t get too sure of myself.

The greatest person that binds us is ourselves. Click To Tweet

It became a tool that I could monitor myself and keep myself under control. I would harp on this judgment factor. This may or may not be something that you deal with, personal self-judgment. When I think about the things that I’ve said to myself over the years I’m like, “Should I share any of that?” Even though this isn’t an explicit channel, those things I said were not very nice. It was a heavyweight to carry that judgment on myself. I could turn in support, honor, and care for someone else but I couldn’t give that to myself because I used judgment as that tool of suppression.

In the course of my internal journey, that kept coming up in my own meditations, programs that I was participating in, and always with love. Are you realizing or aware of the harshness with which you speak to yourself? I was proud of that because I thought that meant that I was maintaining and I was doing the right thing. As I began my spiritual journey, I’m like, “That’s not the right thing. Why do I need to hurt myself? What does that do?” Part of the journey required that I do two things. These are the next components that I want to share with you about how I went from being cruel to myself to being kind and gentle in the event that this is something at times you deal with, that maybe you’re in a place that you didn’t achieve what you’d hoped to achieve.

You say some awful things to yourself and you don’t think that what you’re saying to yourself matters, but it does. You’re in a space where you haven’t achieved, you don’t look the way you think you need to look, or instead of losing the pounds, you’ve gained. You sit in the mirror and you say some awful things to yourself, or you don’t give yourself a chance to go out and try out something new and different because, who wants to see you? It’s those negative self-talks to keep us live in a very tiny, small life in which I believe is not what we’re meant to live. We are not meant to live caged, chained, and bound. The greatest person that binds us is ourselves.

Learn To Surrender

If you experienced any of this, maybe some of what I’m sharing will make some sense for you or be of help. There were two principles that I began to play within my own journey in words. They had to deal with surrender and compassion. When I say the word surrender, that often has connotations that people are like, “No.” Often, when we think of the word surrender, we think of it yielding to this power greater than us. Something that controls or takes possession of something we value. We’re like, “No, I have my rights too.” There’s that sense of, “I’m not surrendering to that,” because if we do, then we’re losing something we value. That’s not the surrender that I’m talking about. It’s not about giving up something that we value because another has made a demand on it.

The surrender that I’m talking about is more aligned with the definition of this. It’s to give ourselves over to something such as an influence that’s important to us. It could be that we have been struggling in working, and then we surrender because we feel hopeless. We surrender to the influence of old habits. That’s one form, but there’s also another way to take that word surrender and say, what if there are new ideas starting to come into my life that are helping me or showing me new ways that I can see myself, the situations that I’m in, or the conditions that we’re in? What if those keep coming up in my life? Rather than being a nemesis, they’re trying to show me there’s a new and better way of seeing myself and seeing life, and thus experiencing it, and having a better time? What if this idea that I am wonderfully made was true?

What if the idea that this world is truly a beautiful place, and there are phenomenal loving beings all around? These loving beings that we all are have more power within us than we’ve ever given credit for. We’re so used to looking at the conditions that we are in or the way things have been, and had developed over time that we think that those have greater validity and greater truth than these new ideas that are starting to pop up. What if it’s surrendering to the idea that life is changing? As we are growing as human beings, we’re coming to understand it in an ever more deeper, loving, and compassionate way. What if that were the new idea that we were surrendering ourselves to. In order to surrender ourselves to that, we would have to surrender the ideas about us being unimportant, more concerned with our own wellbeing than those that incorporate others as well?

It’s surrendering the old idea that we don’t have what it takes to have a successful life. That’s what I’m talking about in surrendering. That’s often what happens when we are in the process of this inward journey. We’re surrendering sometimes the mental grip that we have on these ideas that we think because we can lay it out in our mind and it presents a logical argument that it’s right. There are times that I can present a logical argument and it is wrong. The logic isn’t necessarily always accurate. It’s amazing. Somebody says, “If you are someone who works with statistics, you can always find some way to massage the statistics to prove your point.”

This thing that we claim has to be because this is the way it is. If it’s important to us and we need to maintain it, and that’s where we want to go then, that’s your choice. You have a right to that. If you find that it’s getting old and continuing to say negative things like, “Who do you think you are? You can’t trust anybody in the world. I don’t have the power to do what I want to do because I don’t have this or I don’t have that.” Those are all beliefs that we learned. We took in, we may have owned, and they are real for us, but we can surrender those old ideas and embrace a new concept that maybe we do have capacities beyond what we’re aware of to live a life that is delightful, doing what we are passionate about doing. To live a life where we are in love and being loved by someone significant for us, or feeling and experiencing a body that’s energized and happy.

The person who deserves our compassion the most is ourselves. Click To Tweet

My body is a happy body. I always talk to my body. I’m sure that sounds strange to you but if I’m going to say things to my body, they’re going to be nice because I’ve spent too long of a time being cruel. It’s nice to say kind things to my body. I’m a proponent of that. To get back to the idea of surrendering, when we think of surrender, this is not asking you to give up something that is so important to you. It’s almost as if your rights to hold it are taken away. No. This is where when you’re on this internal journey, you are in control.

You get to decide, “Do I want to let this go?” Maybe I’m a little willing. Maybe all I can do is be willing to be willing, stick my toe into what that might be, let it come around, do it again, practice it, feel and experience it so that as I’m learning, I feel safer within the journey. When it comes time to surrender the old idea, I’ve loosened my grip. Instead of being this voracious negative nelly on my back, I’ve loosened up and loose openness for myself. That’s what we’re talking about in surrender because you are in charge.

The Opportunity To Be Compassionate

In this journey, nobody is taking it away from you and nobody is judging you. There is no judgment when you move on the internal journey. That’s a true gift and that’s so different than what we have been taught and what we experience in this life. It’s learning to know that you get to decide when you are ready to surrender an old idea, and to something that feels better to you, more validating, honoring, more in-tune with you and what matters to you. As we’ve played with this experience of surrender, what we learn in the capacity of that is how important this idea of compassion is.

When we think of compassion, it’s an opportunity to be consciously sympathetic to ourselves and to others. In the dictionary, it explains it more as this is what you offer others. I’m going to incorporate ourselves in this idea of being compassionate because first and foremost, the one who deserves our compassion the most is ourselves. That compassion is creating an awareness of something more. When I show compassion whether I’m showing it to someone else or to myself, what I’m doing is I am not locking my perspective in a nice, neat little box and throwing away the key.

 

It’s opening up my perspective and seeing who it is that I’m with, or seeing myself in a way that allows me to see somebody or myself in a more loving fashion. It’s where I create space within me that says, “I’m going to look for something better here.” If I offer compassion to someone, I’m not saying in the offering of compassion that, “Here I am standing here, I got it all together.” I’m saying, “I feel bad for you.” When I’m thinking about compassion, it’s witnessing and seeing someone in their journey whether they are happy or in pain.

Not only recognizing that pain and wanting to honor who they are in their journey, whether you help them in that or you recognize who they are. It’s seeing them in a new way that allows you and them to be more connected. It’s almost like you’re seeing somebody, you have walked in their shoes, and you understand, rather than a judgment around what you’re perceiving as if they need to be pitied. You’re pausing and there’s an awareness of this being who is learning to be who they are, and who may not have a grip on it.

There are times that as we all are learning to be who we are, we don’t have a clue what we’re doing. We’re taking the next best step because that’s all we know how to do. Sometimes, that next step isn’t the best. When we open to compassion, we are creating space to welcome the energy of love. In that energy, we can see anew this person. In seeing them anew, we send a different sense to them. There’s a different feeling and a different energy to them. It’s not an energy of judgment. It’s maybe, “I don’t have a clue of why you’re doing what you’re doing. I know like me, you’re trying to make the best out of the situation the way you see it. What I hope within me is that I am open and that we can have a dialogue on this. I can offer you space to have the feelings and the thoughts that you need to have whether I agree with them or not.”

It’s always creating that awareness that when somebody is experiencing something whether it’s pain, struggle, ease and joy, there’s compassion and sensitivity to them, but a sensitivity that is affirming. It’s recognizing that rather than being so different from one another, we are connected. That’s what this sense of compassion offers in this journey inward. It offers us an opportunity not only to apply it towards someone else, but to apply it towards ourselves. I remember being instructed as I was listening to an audio. The individual sharing in this audio said, “If you can allow yourself to experience the love and not do anything to be worthy of it, just sit there and let yourself be loved. Take it all in and enjoy it.” That has tremendous healing opportunities in it and offers ways to help us become aware of more of who we are which is what this journey allows us to do.

It enables us to discover things that will delight us about ourselves. There’s so much more awesomeness to us than there is the stuff that we want to toss out in the garbage. Hopefully, as you move in, that’s what you will want to look for. When I think of compassion and when someone is being compassionate toward me, they’re recognizing me. They see me and my journey. In that, there’s a sense of respect. It didn’t matter if there’s an agreement but there’s respect and honoring of this process. In that, there’s this connection that we have in their offer.

When we’re looking at this idea of moving from this experience of being the beast which is that experience of judgment and hammering ourselves, we open to the idea of offering surrender and compassion. We can do that so it serves us in our growth. It’s not about doing it when it does not feel good. If it does not feel good, don’t do it. Pay attention to what you’re feeling. We’ll talk about that later because what you’re feeling is a strong indicator of whether or not the action that you’re taking or what it is that you’re believing is truly in service to who you are. If this idea of surrendering doesn’t work for you, then listen to yourself and honor that. As we begin to honor our own feelings, then we begin to develop a sense of trust. That trust allows us to be willing to take risks in ways we might not have before.

The next time we get together, I’ll talk about trust. That will be one of the latter two. We’re going to be looking at trust as one of the last two guiding principles for what it is to turn within that I want to be sharing with you. I how you’ve enjoyed this time and receive some value out of it. I would love to hear from you on what touched you, what ideas you might have about compassion and surrender, the techniques that you’ve used that you have found very valuable. That would be wonderful because I can express it one way. What I have learned as a teacher is when I open up my class and people start sharing, the words that a student could not hear through me, they could hear for someone else in the class. When we all share, you might have the exact words or the way of saying that somebody needs to hear in this moment. I would love for you to share. Thank you again. Until we connect. I wish you a wonderful day and celebrate your life. Here is to you and to your life.