Mistake: An Inner Daemon That We Have The Strength To Tame

When was the last time that you told someone that he was wrong or that he made a mistake? When was the last time that you teased someone telling him “…because you don’t deserve it!”? I would like to kindly invite you to think about how you felt after having judged that person based on the perception of the mistake that he made.

What is a mistake?

My suggestion is to consider a mistake as nothing more than an unhealthy way to look at the result of an action. According to a certain behaviour, the action that follows leads to a result. If the result isn’t in line with our expectations and ethics, then it is labelled as a mistake. The possible consequence is that we start looking at whoever made the mistake happen as a bad person who needs to certainly adjust his behaviour to provide a result that is conform to our expectations and values.

This attitute contributes to create an environment where people feel judged without any possibility to explain themselves. They are going to be judged and sentenced without even knowing why the whole process is occurring. Usually, with the judgemental attitude, a close minded attitute follows. If we start labelling results of actions as mistakes, we then tend to defend our opinions making a dialogue impossible to take place.

How did you feel when that judgemental attitude towards you came from inside your mind?

But if we pause a bit, if we look at ourselves from an outer perspective and we see our body getting excited and our thoughts coming through, then we can easily try to look at the whole picture. This mental exercise can lead us to a new perspective:

what we label as a mistake now, can be seen in few days as a step that needed to occur.

How many times did you feel judged? How many times did you hate realizing that your action was labelled as a mistake and you were labelled as bad or stupid or not good enough? How did you feel when that judgemental attitude towards you came from inside your mind? And what happened when life showed you that what others considered a mistake was for you a great lesson?

Here is the daemon

That’s what I am talking about in this post: the daemon that talks to us, telling that we were bad because we had some thoughts or that the way we talked or behaved was a mistake.

Forgiving ourselves because nothing deserves to be labelled as good or bad makes room for listening to our needs.

Whenever we give power to those voices and let them rule us, we are at the mercy of a powerful psychic side of our mind that is rooted in our fears.

Then, what can we do to deal with those whispers?

Redefining the concept of mistake

One of the possible ways to deal with the voices that tell us how a mistake was to speak the truth or to break up an unhealthy relationship or to decide to say a great and needed “no”, would prescribe being kind to ourselves. Forgiving ourselves because nothing deserves to be labelled as good or bad makes room for listening to our needs. Once we descover the peace we bring upon ourselves when we exercise forgiveness, we experience an amazing transformation. We turn from people pleasers, approval needers into love givers. We start loving our wounded inner child and a healing transformation begins. As soon as the transformation begins, we will most likely discover that we are more open and willing to accept other points of view. Chances are that we will start shifting in perspective by keeping an eye on how everything seems to have contributed to let us come who we are.

We will then start to see that if we keep an open mind, everything can be seen as a lesson that can enrich us

If I want to give a schematic representation of the healing process, I would say

1. Let’s start practicing the “looking at us from an outer space” exercise.
2. Let’s gain a perspective of our whole life. We will then start to see that if we keep an open mind, everything can be seen as a lesson that can enrich us.
3. At this stage, it is important to love and forgive ourselves. It is of vital importance to make room for actions without judging them.
4. Once we are detached enough from the urge to judge, we can allow the daemon to speak freely because now we can see where the daemon is rooted and how distant we are from its judgemental attitude.
5. We are healing, bit by bit, moving towards our way to look at life, our way to redefine ideas.
6. Once we learn how to deal with the mistake-labelling daemon, we are ready to tackle another daemon. We will move from daemon to daemon allowing ourselves to grow by both disempowering the inner voices and empowering our free will.

What I showed here is one of the possible journeys to learn how to make peace with our idea of mistake and the urge of judging whatever crosses our path. I don’t pretend to have answers. I aim to give food for thought to stimulate a healthy conversation with the wounded sides of our self.

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Keep growing.

Originally published at www.yougrowwegrow.net.