(Margaret J. Wheatley)

This is one element that never would have crossed my mind until recent years. To reflect on myself, my life, my thoughts, my choices, why would it even matter? Was I not just like any other person coasting through each day, just doing what needed to be done, working to live and living to work? Why would I even have thought that by taking some time out to analyse my true self and my life choices that I could give myself direction, enthusiasm, motivation, drive, commitment and a zest for living each day to the best potential that I could?

Nowadays, I love to have an opportunity to self-reflect as a person and on my life choices. I love to deeply identify and uncover the elements that help to grow and enhance myself as a person and also those elements that are destructing my ability to believe in myself, in my hopes and my inspirations. So, what is self-reflection about? It can be defined as:

“The activity of thinking about your own feelings and behaviour, and the reasons that may lie behind them”

(dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/self-reflection)

When you combine self-reflection with mindfulness, the result can be truly life-transforming. As mindfulness is about paying attention, on purpose, to your present experience, whatever that experience may be, without judgement, you can experience a deep level of self-compassion and respect when you reflect on your life in a meaningful and mindful way.

So why do so many of us not realise the importance of self-reflection? Perhaps it may be because it can be hard to meet and see ourselves as others meet and see us. We’ve often heard the saying that sometimes ‘the truth hurts’ and this may be one of the reasons that we often avoid delving deep into our hearts and souls for reflective questioning and answers.

We may sense ourselves that we could be doing better in our lives, that we could be more patient, kinder, more caring, more understanding, more positive, make better life style choices and we may not want to face this head on by spending time reflecting on this. But when you commit to live more mindfully and treat yourself with kindness and compassion, these elements that you may perceive as ‘flaws’ can be viewed upon as a part of who you are as a person and when you let go of any self-critical or harsh judgements about them and towards yourself, you will find a way of being able to mentor, coach and empower yourself to make whatever changes you may desire in your life.

A quote I love to illustrate this point is:

“Before I ask you to sit with me, I must be able to sit with myself. Before I ask you to accept my pain, I have to accept the pain myself. Before I ask you to love me, I have to be madly in love with myself”

(C. Thorn)

Some people love to spend time reflecting on their lives, their choices, their views and opinions especially as they approach a year end and before they start a new year ahead. When we learn to slow down, to take time to self-care and reflect, we gain more clarity and enhanced vision, as if observing our lives from a higher perspective. We tend to be able to see things differently and can start to realise that ‘we do have a choice’ in our lives.

We can choose what thoughts we want to entertain, just as we can choose how deeply we are willing to let ourselves get overwhelmed and consumed by our emotions and their associated physical sensations. But this wisdom and insight only comes from a commitment to spend and invest time into getting to know yourself, by being willing to go places within your heart and soul that might hurt and feel uncomfortable, that you may not want to address. When you learn to do this, you will see that:

“Everything in your life is a reflection of a choice you have made. If you want a different result, make a different choice”

(quotesthoughts.com)

It’s important to acknowledge that sometimes, as humans, we can experience difficult life challenges, health challenges, relationships and much more. Even though each individual person could be living with a similar or different life challenge, the one thing that we do have in common is our ability to ‘choose’ how we wish to respond to these life challenges every second, minute, hour, day, week, month or year of our lives.

A thought to leave you with as you may contemplate whether to self-reflect at any time of the year or if self-reflection is a ‘help or a hindrance’ is:

“Don’t become too preoccupied with what is happening around you. Pay more attention to what is going on within you”

(Mary-Frances Winters)

HOW to create a time for Self-Reflection in your life:

The following is a step by step guide on how to create a time for self-reflection in your life:

1. Commit to yourself that you will create a space of 10-15minutes each week to sit alone in your own presence and to deeply listen to what your heart and soul wants you to know about your life.

2. Each week choose one element of your life that you would like to address, reflect on, enhance or change.

3. As you hold this element as a focal point in your mind’s eye, use your breath to navigate you through any thoughts or feelings that may arise. Just breathe in and out as you normally would.

4. Just be aware of any thoughts, feelings, emotions or hurts that may be present and commit to yourself to be non-judgemental towards them or towards yourself.

5. You may find it helpful to journal or write down some bullet points on each element you reflect on weekly so that your have a clear, concise and accurate vision and plan for any changes you may wish to implement.

6. Be confident in the knowledge that you have the internal strength, power and choice to embrace any self-reflection questions and to overcome and implement any answers that may arise as a result.

Thank you as always to Brian O’Loughlin and his team at Celtic Media Group (https://www.anglocelt.ie/, https://www.con-telegraph.ie/, https://www.meathchronicle.ie/, https://www.offalyindependent.ie/, https://www.westmeathexaminer.ie/ and https://www.westmeathindependent.ie/ for all their wonderful help!

As published by The Celtic Media Group in The Anglo Celt, Connaught Telegraph, Meath Chronicle, Offaly Independent, Westmeath Examiner and Westmeath Independent newspapers w/c 28/12/2020)

The answer is very simple! You create a time and space in your day, each day and you learn to sit with yourself. You learn to breathe with yourself. You learn to listen to yourself, encourage, motivate and empower yourself. You learn to nurture and care for yourself and most importantly, you learn to love yourself, from the inside out.

Learning to love yourself is without doubt a very challenging task. So many of us cannot bring ourselves to give a compliment to ourselves or others and are even worse at accepting a compliment from someone else. It is an instinct for our egos to take over and intercept before we graciously let ourselves blush in confidence and pride. How many times has someone said to you “wow, you look great, have you lost weight?” How many of us have answered “oh well I could do with losing a lot more!”. This is the ego sabotaging our good work and rail roading our progress. Wouldn’t it be a completely different scenario to reply to the same question by saying “thank you so much, I feel really great at the moment?” A completely different concept really.

My ethos is based around ‘healing ourselves from the inside out’. This is how I transformed my own life. There was a point in my life where I could not stand or sit in my own presence for even a few minutes. I continuously distracted myself with housework that ‘needed’ to be done or calls that ‘needed’ to be made. Anything was easier than having to be present with just myself. So how could I possibly heal or transform myself? I needed to get to know ‘the real me’. I needed to give my mind, body and emotions time to disconnect from each other, repair individually and then reconnect with one another. They needed to reconnect with me, as a communicative and functioning being.

I found the analogy of a butterfly’s life cycle so empowering and healing during this stage of my life. When you think about it, does the caterpillar ever think it will transform after complete metamorphosis into a beautiful free flying, free spirited butterfly? We will never know. But I do know that during this difficult stage of my life, I could never see myself as anything past that caterpillar stage. I felt so uncomfortable in my own skin, so full up of past trauma’s, worries, anxieties and fears that I was about to burst. Just like a caterpillar shedding its skin five times before entering its Pupa stage, letting go of the excess plants it had eaten so that it could become more comfortable and lighter in its own skin, I needed to shed layers of my own demons before I could start my transformation.

To do this, I meditated daily, enjoyed yoga, filled numerous notebooks by gratitude journaling, spent a lot of time walking outside with Mother Earth and started to speak kinder to myself. I accepted with compassion the difficult thoughts, the fears, the days which did not seem to go as I wished. I grew to accept and gained comfort from knowing that I was never going to be perfect, I am only human after all. As humans, we will never be perfect, what is perfect anyway? We and life are continually changing and evolving and so we are always on a continuous learning path. We may never be perfect, but we can learn to enjoy the journey.

Upon shedding and letting go of excess baggage, the butterfly then enters its Cocooning stage, it’s protective stage. This is a period of self-growth, of transformation. I used this period of my life as a protective time of self-recovery, of retreat, of reflection and of personal connection. Once I had shed my baggage, I used this time to restructure my mind, to reinvent my thoughts in a positive, kind and compassionate manner. This was a very intimate phase in my healing journey. It was a stage where I wanted to be cocooned with only me, with only my new positive and nurturing mindset and with my new understanding and compassionate way of living.

Slowly over time, my protective cocoon started to break open. I was becoming free. Free of my previous thoughts, memories, anxieties and I was now ready to launch myself and to fly high in life. This is the last stage in a butterfly’s life cycle. Now ready to propel itself into nature as a newly mature butterfly. It breaks free of its cocoon and takes a leap of faith as it waits for its wings to start flapping and flying. This beautiful butterfly completely unrecognisable from the bulging caterpillar a short while before, now a life completely transformed, completely renewed, oozing with an abundance of clarity, of hope, of dreams, of influence, of happiness and of health.

Another interesting concept to think about; ‘can a butterfly fly with only one wing?’ I wouldn’t fancy its chances. We can apply this theory to ourselves in creating and or enhancing our own healing journey or life transformation. Think of one of the butterfly’s wings as comprising of Kindness and Compassion for ourselves and others. Think of the second of the butterfly’s wings as comprising of Mindfulness. Just like the butterfly needing both of its wings to fly, we need Kindness, Compassion and Mindfulness to aid, enhance and facilitate our own personal transformation, healing and life journey.

We can envisage ourselves needing both these wings of Kindness, Compassion and Mindfulness to work together, in sync with one another, in an agreeable and equally effective rhythm in order for us to fly high in our own lives. We are all equally capable of entering a cycle of transformation in our own personal journeys. I guess some of us will decide to do it sooner than others and others will do it later in their lives but maybe at a different pace. There are no rules. Just like every butterfly, we can decide when we are ready to enter our protective cocooning stage and ultimately when we are ready to emerge as a newly transformed being.

We all have this innate ability to develop this deeply intimate relationship with ourselves, to deeply connect with ourselves and to learn to love who we are and to love who we can transform into. The question is, ‘are you ready to spread your wings of Kindness, Compassion and Mindfulness and soar high above your expectations? Are you ready to heal and transform yourself from the inside out?’

Leona McDonnell

(As published in the Westmeath Examiner Newspaper on 16-6-2020 and in
The Anglo Celt and The Meath Chronicle Newspaper on 17-6-2020)