“One day, a butterfly found a centipede. She had never seen such an animal before, and she was amazed at how its legs could move in such a coordinated way. Her amazement was so great that she couldn’t hide it.
– Centipede, how do you move your feet so precisely?
The centipede had never thought about it; he just did it, it came naturally. However, he paused to reflect on his “amazing ability.”
After a while, and after much thought, he discovered that he could no longer move.”
With Personal Growth, it can be like a centipede. By looking so deeply within ourselves, we can run the risk of going blind. However, although this is one of the greatest risks we run when embarking on the path toward our essence, it’s also one of the least talked about.
Looking inside ourselves can blind us
This idea actually comes from Paul Watzlawick, who said, “Looking inside makes you blind.” He meant that when we try to interpret internal motives, emotions, behaviors, decisions, or thoughts by seeking a cause-and-effect explanation, we can create more problems than we solve.
For example, if you’re trying to sleep and notice your heart starts beating differently, you might panic, thinking it could be a heart attack or a panic attack. It’s likely simply a cardiac incoherence that has no major repercussions, but our fear and, above all, our interpretation of the situation creates a problem that didn’t exist before.
In fact, situations like this can cause a person to experience a true phobia of looking within themselves, developing what is known as experiential avoidance. This concept refers to the tendency to avoid all feelings, thoughts, or situations that generate emotional discomfort. As a result, these people become slaves to this avoidance, unable to live fully and instead living in fear.
Of course, the solution isn’t to stop looking within ourselves and forget about Personal Growth. When Watzlawick said that looking within makes us blind, he was referring to the fact that our language has a linear and causal nature, which is what produces this dangerous interpretive error. Therefore, since reality and our own minds function in a circular fashion, the solution lies in stopping making direct and linear interpretations of our inner states.
For example, a person embarking on the path of Personal Growth may discover that they harbor a great deal of hatred within themselves. And since hatred is socially considered a negative emotion, they may conclude that they are a bad person, begin to feel inadequate, uncomfortable with themselves, and their self-esteem may suffer greatly. This is one of the main problems of looking within without the proper tools, following the advice of the guru on duty.
Growing from acceptance
Personal growth should be a process of gradual self-discovery. It’s almost a truism, so at this point you’re probably wondering how you can get to know yourself if every time you try, you risk falling into that linear causality, if you identify too closely with your opinions and experiences and draw conclusions that end up damaging you.
The solution is quite simple: to look within ourselves without losing perspective, we need protective glasses. And those glasses are called “presence.” Presence is a natural state of attention in which we don’t judge, very close to the concept of “flow.”
To enter that state, there are two rules or variables: yourself and the context you find yourself in. Basically, you must:
1. Develop the skills necessary to move in the context.
2. The context, in turn, must respond positively to what you are doing.
For example, if you decide to play tennis but have never done it before, it’s difficult to get into a state of “flow” because your movements will be uncoordinated and you’ll lose a lot of balls. Inevitably, you’ll feel bad because you don’t have the necessary skills and the environment isn’t providing you with positive feedback.
However, if you work hard every day, you can acquire those skills and eventually enter that state of “flow.”
To develop “presence,” understood as the glasses we need to look within ourselves, the best exercise is “conscious meditation” or mindfulness. This practice, in addition to helping us relax and being very beneficial for different areas of our lives, also provides us with a kind of “secure base” so we can observe within ourselves.
It’s worth clarifying that we all have this “secure base,” but not everyone knows how to use it to look within themselves. In practice, mindfulness allows us to become detached observers of reality and what’s happening within us. We don’t jump to conclusions or make value judgments; we simply observe.
It’s a small change, but it will bring you enormous results because you’ll begin to delve into yourself without pre-established patterns and without criticism. You’ll grow from acceptance, rather than denial.
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