Please be kind to your driver.

I was sat on the bus, on my way to uni, in an early morning daze. I glanced up at a poster on the wall and saw, “Please be kind to your driver.” This made me stop day dreaming. It was the second part of this poster that got me, “They’re working hard to keep your buses moving.” It started a chain of thoughts that went: Why are we being told to be kind? Why do we have to be told to be kind? Who isn’t being kind? Why are they not being kind? Are they surrounded by people who aren’t kind to them? How do they treat themselves? This last question stuck with me.

How kind are we to ourselves? I’m not talking about having a big ego or thinking we are the best thing ever. I’m questioning how we talk about ourselves to ourselves and to others. The throw away comments we say, that we might not even be aware of or ones we say that we are aware of and it’s a form of self-defense or protection. Maybe this links to being more self-aware, a lack of confidence, or its conditioning we have received from others in our lives. Either way, we deserve better. One sure fire way of being kinder and feeling kinder is speaking to ourselves with kindness, its starts from within.

We are our own worst critics at times, I know I am. I am capable of saying the most malicious, self-deprecating things about myself as a form of self-defense. Guised as humour, a really poor joke. My husband will pull me up on this, every time I mutter, “Oh Lara, you idiot” or I make a joke about my fat arse. He will lovingly say, “ Excuse me, you are not an idiot. Never have been, never will be” or tell me that my “fat arse” is one of the things he loves about me the most. It takes someone else to remind me that I am intelligent and that “fat arse” of my mine is something that people pay good money to have. Why though, should it be someone else stopping us in our tracks that is the thing that ends this narrative? We should be doing this for ourselves, every day, with every moment we have.

If we are saying these awful things about ourselves, it also gives others permission to talk about us in that way. How we show others what we accept, is how we will be treated. As a child I used to be confident, I would walk into a room and want to talk to everyone, this was not the case for most of my 20’s. I spent several years being told I was stupid, I was fat, I was worthless, no-one liked me and I was crazy. I did not want to exist, I did not want to get up in the mornings, I hated myself. The first few times these things were said I didn’t correct this person for fear of upsetting them, what a mistake that was. This gave that person permission to carry on, with more vicious intent and extreme behaviour. You hear it enough it begins to stick and you believe it. This manifested itself in PTSD, anxiety, depression and I stopped taking care of myself. Its only been through years of intense therapy (my counsellor is an angel on earth), daily self-work, meditation, one husband and two dogs that I am believing in the goodness of myself again.

If someone else is capable of having that much of an effect on you through their words and actions, why on earth would we say this absolute nonsense to ourselves?! We owe ourselves compassion, forgiveness and most importantly self-respect.

One of my meditation workshops that I love to lead is all about self love and affirmations. We walk on a beach, sit by a fire and have a chat with our younger selves. We think about how we would talk to our younger selves, it wouldn’t be with malice or hate, it would be with guidance, love and protection. We discuss our beautiful qualities, the things about ourselves that make us smile and make us us. We then bottle up all the unnecessary, useless thoughts we have and we throw them in a fire. They do not serve us. We fill ourselves back up with phrases of forgiveness, self worth and empowerment. We tell ourselves that we love the person we are, the work in progress we are and that the love we have for ourselves is enough. The joy and comfort I see people leave with is incredible. They created this in themselves, it was not magic, it was not an item, it was them talking to themselves with kindness. How powerful is that?

So, what is the point of this? I would like anyone reading this to be more self aware in the next few days about the thoughts they have about themselves. How can these thoughts be reframed and why are we saying this? Replace these thoughts with ones that make us grow, that make us glow and that we would say to a younger version of ourselves. You all deserve this love.

Please be kind to yourself, you are working hard to keep yourself moving.

With kindness,

Lara