“Piglet?” said Pooh.
“Yes Pooh?” said Piglet.
“Do you ever have days when everything feels… Not Very Okay At All? And sometimes you don’t even know why you feel Not Very Okay At All, you just know that you do.”
Piglet nodded his head sagely. “Oh yes,” said Piglet. “I definitely have those days.”
“Really?” said Pooh in surprise. “I would never have thought that. You always seem so happy and like you have got everything in life all sorted out.”
“Ah,” said Piglet. “Well here’s the thing. There are two things that you need to know, Pooh. The first thing is that even those pigs, and bears, and people, who seem to have got everything in life all sorted out… they probably haven’t. Actually, everyone has days when they feel Not Very Okay At All. Some people are just better at hiding it than others.
“And the second thing you need to know… is that it’s okay to feel Not Very Okay At All. It can be quite normal, in fact. And all you need to do, on those days when you feel Not Very Okay At All, is come and find me, and tell me. Don’t ever feel like you have to hide the fact you’re feeling Not Very Okay At All. Always come and tell me. Because I will always be there.”
I’m Sorry, I Forgot Myself……
What do we mean by “I forgot myself”. The chances are we are apologizing for some behaviour we don’t feel good about. Perhaps we said or did something that our conscience is telling us was wrong or perhaps we didn’t do something we promised we would do. We are not behaving in accordance with our highest ideals.
So why “I forgot myself”? Because it’s true. Our mind was probably elsewhere, being angry, being worried, being frightened, being so engrossed in what we were thinking about that we quite literally forgot ourselves.
What is the antidote to forgetting yourself? It’s obvious, “remember yourself”! Has anyone heard of that? It’s not an expression that is so well known. In the work of G. Gurdjieff and P. Ouspensky it is mentioned quite a lot. They call it “self-remembering”. When we remember ourselves those conscience pricking incidents tend not to happen.
How do you remember yourself? There is a video below of Roy Whitten, a founder of More To Life explaining it and offering some practice. Roy calls self-remembering, split attention but they are very similar. Roy and his colleague Brad Brown wrote a course called The Power of Self Esteem.
It’s a course I call “A Course for a Happier Life ~ The Power of Self Esteem” and I run this course in London and Surrey throughout the year. If you would like to know when and where please ask via our Contact Page.
An now over to Roy