BE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND WORKSHOP
We all have a voice in our heads who likes to put us down and tell us where we don’t measure up, pointing out to us all our failures and reasons not to try and do the things we wish to achieve. The extent of your inner criticisms and the particular areas it focuses on may be different for everyone but the effect is still the same. It undermines your confidence and self esteem and encourages you into negative behaviours to reinforce familiar feelings of inadequacy, mistrust of yourself, shame and denial. It an be extremely damaging and make life much harder for us that it needs to be. This leads to a destructive cycle of behaviours and attitudes that keep us from living our lives in the way we think we should, it encourages negative comparisons, fear, stress, and unhealthy behaviours.
Most of the time the inner critic operates from the subconscious mind, playing out patterns and ideas we adopted at an early age from parents, teachers, caregivers, friends, siblings and society. Our subconscious resists change so it thinks it is helping to keep us safe when actually it is hindering our growth as individuals and our ability to move forward to live the life that we want to.
In order to unravel these voices and ideas we are telling ourselves over and over, we need to listen to what we are actually saying to ourselves.
Imagine you are on a beach. You are on holiday with a friend. You have been gifted this holiday, maybe by the friend you are with or a family member but you haven’t paid for it.
You are so lucky, you have received a free holiday. The weather is glorious, the resort is beautiful, you have nothing to do but relax and enjoy yourself.
Except you can’t. Inside somewhere you feel you don’t deserve this holiday. Maybe you couldn’t have paid for it and you feel like a failure. You might feel guilty about the gift, burdensome. What if they resent you? Dressed for the beach you feel exposed and vulnerable, you could have got in better shape for this holiday. A late night at the bar can have you feeling ropey and full of remorse for your lack of self control even though your were letting your hair down and having some fun. There are so many ways we berate ourselves and we are often completely unaware we are doing it, and if we do notice it, it can be so frustrating when these thoughts refuse to turn off.
So we’re going to
Identify them
Release them
Feel better
Ready?
In this part of the meditation you have a worksheet and a piece of music. Listen to the piece of music below and, while it is on, notice what goes through your mind. There is no need to try and clear your mind or concentrate on anything. Just notice what you are saying to yourself behind the scenes, eavesdrop on your subconscious narrative. I also want you to colour in the worksheet and, most importantly, write any negative thoughts towards yourself in the circles as you colour. You might colour the whole thing, fill all the space around the circles, only colour the circles, or only colour one circle. The main thing is you fill in the bubbles with the things that you think and feelings you have and the thoughts that are not you being friends with yourself. Choose whether to meditate with the music and fill in the sheet afterwards or complete the worksheet while you listen, it is up to you, you can’t make a mistake here, there isn’t a way you can do it wrong.
Please click the button to the right to download and print your worksheet, if you don’t have a printer you can draw your own worksheet.
When you have finished your worksheet, please listen to the audio meditation below:
Audio Meditation Transcript
Picture yourself on the beach, you are laying in a lounger feeling the warm sun on your skin as you hear the gentle sounds of the waves as a delicate breeze floats past. All those thoughts are still in your system, because thoughts don’t just live in our heads, they affect our cells and our bodies too. So you are going to wash them away. You stretch and rise up from your lounger and you look around at the blue sky and the palm, trees and smile. You put your hands on your hips in a power pose and you say to the beach. ‘I am strong.’ ‘I am beautiful.’ ‘I love myself’. ‘I CAN do it’. Then you walk gently towards the sea. When you get there you slowly wade into the warm shallow waves until you are fully immersed. You feel a thrill of excitement to be in this water, in this location. Holidays are good! As a wave rides towards you, you jump and duck underneath it, feeling the pull as it washes over you taking all your internal negativity with it. Imagine the circles with your inner critical thoughts as bubbles, watch them rise to the surface of the sea and pop, the contents dissolving into the air. You thank them from trying to keep you safe but tell them that you don’t need their help any more and you are releasing them to make room for some new thoughts. You float on the surface for a while feeling light and clean and clear as the water around you supports and carries you as it sparkles beautifully in the sun.
When you are ready, you can make your way out of the water and back on to the lounger to resume your life or your holiday in a new world filled with positivity and possibility.
Now that you are washed clean of your old unhelpful beliefs, it is time to make them into a more friendly version so that when they try to creep back in, you are able to flip them on their heads.
The next stage is to take each one of the critical thoughts from your circles that you coloured in and rewrite it in a positive way and in the present tense.
For example, if you wrote “I will fail at everything I try” this can change to “I will succeed at everything I do”. “I will never have enough money” can become “I find ways to create all the money I need” take each one at a time and turn each negative thought into a positive affirmation. Then, either write them down, make them into a piece of art, you can print another sheet with the circles and write them in there, maybe turning the circles into flowers. I have created a page for you to print off and write them in if you want to.
Now that you have your positive affirmations written down, put them somewhere you will see them regularly, but, importantly try to memorise them, say them as often as you can until they are able to override the negative voices that were so deeply ingrained. In time you will recognise a familiar thought and replace it with the opposite affirmation.
