And continuing with my back story in relations to my self-investigation with the Desteni tools,
I wish to reflect on a past experience that I had written about 2 years ago. It was Christmas 2011 and my family had decided that instead of buying gifts we would take a vacation to Hawaii. It was a lot of fun for most of the time, but interesting family dynamics popped up that week of close proximity. In retrospect, I realize that I have been highly egocentric when I'm with family. In the context of others, depending on my comfort level, I would show or hide the cockiness/self-importance. I will continue to unpack my self-importance character soon.
This is a story about deep seated shame for who I am in relation to my brother. He is two years younger than I and I have abused him my whole life by putting him down so I could feel superior. I essentially used him to propel my mental concept into a state of superiority / confidence that I would bring with me into the rest of my relationships with my peers. Lets just say I was petrified of failure and inferiority to such an extent that I didn't care about my negative effect on others. It hurts to write this out. Shame 2.
Shame 1: Which this post is supposed to be focused on. While I was on the airplane, I had a real moment of realization, like really powerful. I had fought with my brother about wanting to sit in the isle seat, (I like the freedom) but my boarding pass indicated that I had the window seat. This gave him the chance to assert his control by not permitting me to trade with him (consequence, reflecting my past behavior toward him). When we had just taken off and exciting things were to be seen out of the window, my brother had looked over to see out and I placed my hands over the window so he couldn't see.
That was my response. Another power-play, so that I could again have the last say. Preserve my control over him. I still react to this writing with quite a sadness (indicating point isn't clear yet). I sat with my mind and after the emotions of the moment subsided, I thought to myself how I've been doing this shit for way too long. A different emotion came up, one of great shame/sorrow. I spoke one forgiveness statement under my breath, and couldn't hold back the tears. Funny, that he was sitting one seat away, listening to music, while I am sobbing and writing forgiveness about how poorly I have allowed myself to treat him...as if I hadn't really, realized it before...maybe only acknowledged it lightly, then back to my self-centeredness, likely.
"I forgive myself for continuing to allow myself to play childish ego games with my brother. I now respect him as an equal."
At least this is what I have written. You may read the raw writing below, as I have decided to include it in this post. This moment stands out hardcore as a moment of self-change through deep shame. And my relationship with my brother has greatly improved since then. Not perfect, I'm still learning. But there was a real change. It was the most moving realization I had ever experienced. It was also the first time I had really worked with self-forgiveness on an intimate, hard-hitting, personal level.
I haven't gone back to look at what I wrote until today, which was kind of a cool experience in itself. Having this self-made record of stuff I thought was significant at one point in time is going to be fun to go through, and I bet I will find many opened points that can be walked more thoroughly with writing self-forgiveness. Tomorrow, I will expand on this writing from my old red process journal with a flow of self-forgiveness and just take it from there. Thanks for reading me.
Thanks for sharing Dan!
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