Day 416 - Word Critic Bully Character

A little backstory before opening up this character:

While working through level 10 of my vocabulary building program, I came across the word infer, and slowed down to read all the definitions for it because I have long had trouble distinguishing between inference and deduction. This lead to a journey of understanding, aided by the internet and, well, Yahoo Answers. Reading through all the contributions from others, I was definitely starting to refine the boundaries of these two words for myself. Below is one of the more poorly rated answers, but I resonated with it. I thought was a really effective expression of her understanding. Then I expanded the 1 comment, read it, and went through a semi-heavy reaction as I closed the page in disgust of the nasty meanness of humanity online.

I reopened the tab to investigate what this reaction was. Rereading this, O_hutch may have been simply saying that it was funny, and not in a derogatory way. Regardless, my interpretation/reaction of the situation, was such, as to reflect my own nature; and so, I walk the necessary self-forgiveness, take responsibility for my contribution to this uncool aspect of our world/internet culture.

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I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to judge my own and others' words.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to polarize my understanding of the importance of clear understanding of individual vocabulary words, and create a positive experience attached to perfect word choice and execution, and a negative experience/judgment of fumbling my words, incorrect word use, nonsense - and within allowing my mind to polarize and energize this point, I now see, realize and understand that I am absolutely sabotaging an awesome potential to support myself and those around me, putting my understanding of vocabulary to its best use.

Scenarios:

- Listen for the definition mismatch when listening to others. This is accomplished by attentively listening to the whole of the other person to get their context and how it influences their understanding/use of particular words, and then comparing and contrasting it to my understanding. Additional cross referencing is often required, as my contextual associations with my words could just as well be misaligned.

- Use my Vocabulary Builder everyday. This is most clearly an expression of putting my understanding of vocabulary to its best use.


I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that my definitions and understandings of words are more clear, more refined, more accurate, and thus judge myself as superior to all around me (straight up ego design), and TOTALLY MISS how others choose their words according to their own understandings of them! It's kind of a..."duh" thing, but this also shows me how stupid and compromising it can be when I let my ego steer my perception.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to listen to others superficially and from the narrow vantage point of my current understanding, reactively ready to pounce on/judge others when they speak/write with any word-definition discrepancies to my own; instead of (correction) leveling with others and working to understand why/how they use their words to convey meaning, and resolve discrepancies.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to want to be fast and rush through information, and be the first person to correctly interpret what someone means, sometimes even before they finish speaking.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to treat others as intellectual inferiors because of an inflated sense of having comprehensive understanding.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to abuse myself and others within and through operating from a partial understanding, inflated to seem to me like a better or more accurate understanding. I commit myself to humble myself and see the honesty of me operating within and from a partial understanding.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to trust my own understandings, which are actually inferences that I've been making my whole life.

I commit myself to be humble and willing to reconsider everything (311, thanks again for this song)!

I commit myself to actively realizing that we all don't have the same positioning and reach within the English lexicon, and take responsibility for creating shared understanding within what is best for all.

I commit myself to apply active listening to cross reference my initial interpretations and understandings with other potential meanings, especially meanings relevant to the individual speaking. This requires a humbleness and slowing down. Patiently taking in more information than I would normally cruising through my life at mind-speed.

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It's a rather obtrusive personality program in my life, specifically in the realm of communication, which was my field of study in college. Damn, no matter how much I know, I really do need to humble myself and keep learning, all the time.

Bottom line: To have an inflated self-perception of mastery within understanding = not chill.


More to come on: listening, bullying, words, and my life experience. Thanks.

Day 153 - Validity, Self-Worth & Clear Communication

In the environment of high school friends, the primary question that arises is: "What are you doing with your life?"  Everyone is curious to know who each other has become since those high school days that seem like they were long, long ago. I think the curiosity stems from a desire for feedback/validation. In explaining our "life position" to each other, we get to see the reaction of the group and use it to place ourselves into perspective from a relational standpoint. In fact, as I was getting ready for a particular quad-friendship reunion, I experienced a tad of nervousness..

"How well am I going to be able to articulate what I'm doing?"
    - Process doesn't fit into a preconceived idea for how one spends their time, and so it requires a more at-length explanation...assuming other's will ask about more information.
    - Have not yet established a comfortable relationship to explaining what Desteni is.

"Will they negatively judge my chosen life path thus far?"
    - the only reason this matters is because of the point of defining myself from others' feedback.

"Will I still have that same positive, 'funny-guy' personality?"
    - similar point to above. Fear of future, based from positive, past memories. Also fear of change here.

That's the basis of what I allowed my mind to do this morning. My actual experience was heavy on the first point: couldn't articulate what I was doing very effectively. Fear of judgment was lowly charged, maybe because I worked on the defining self within the perceived judgments of my friends a little bit yesterday (obviously still not clear). The third point was interesting, because I didn't have to try very hard at all to fall right back into my old personality. My carefree demeanor was more present than not, but in self-honesty, there was some backchat doubt that I wasn't as relaxed or cool and carefree as I could might have been in high school. Most of the nervousness came from this, but the experience was well suppressed, and overall I was pretty much "myself."

From: desteniartists.blogspot.com

Key point here is dealing with self defined by others, specifically past friends. Second point is related to uncomfortability with speaking about process and self-forgiveness. Let's begin.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to rely on the reactions of others to establish my self-identity and self-worth. Within this mental worry, I've created unnecessary hindrance on self-expression because of fear of the future from living in the past.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to, from the past, project self-doubt into my future interactions and not realize how I've been manifesting the doubt in real-time for allowing myself to participate in the future fear projection.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear that my validity and self-worth exists within how others perceive my life's work and I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel that the need to convince my friends of my validity is all that matters.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear rejection.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear losing my past positive self/other-judgments as moments of accumulated validity and self-worth.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to have defined myself according to the sum total accumulation of past positive experiences while suppressing the negative ones and creating personality characters to discredit the suppressed fears of self.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear being inarticulate with explaining the surface summary of the desteni message.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to create myself as 'inarticulate' through participating with the fear I've connected to not being understood.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to connect fear to not being understood.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel hopelessly misunderstood and not take the responsibility of clear communication within myself.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to project onto others that they must have a hard time hearing me from the get go, before I even give myself the chance to establish effective communication.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to separate myself from effective communication through the allowance of fearing the fear connected to ineffective communication.

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When and as I see myself participating within my mental projections of possible future playouts, I stop I breathe. I realize that this fear of futures is built of the substance of past experience, and that only with my allowance of myself to define myself in and from my past do I create fear of future. I commit myself to letting go of each moment of accumulated self-definition that is a charged memory, positive and negative.

I commit myself to breathing when the tendency is to try and predict how I will be perceived or listened to, so that I may physically direct myself to be effective from the starting point of each breath.

I commit myself to patiently stopping the mental participation of past and future social interactions.

I commit myself to just be me, here, within the stability of every breath, and no longer worrying about future interactions that are nothing more than fear-born illusions that create my present interpersonal demeanor without me realizing it.

When and as I see myself worrying about my future presentation of myself in future interactions, I stop I breathe. I realize this is not who I am. I commit myself to the continual realizing that my participation in mind creates a consequential outflow that affects my personality or personalities.

I commit myself to showing others that these personalities are self-created systems used to navigate the world, and that I can remain stable and effective within a fresh starting point of every breath without creating a personality to augment/manipulate my environment separate from me, here.

I commit myself to the realization process of myself as one with my environment and others so I can effectively create best for all outflows.

I commit myself to no longer simply living in fear of the past definitions of myself being or not being in the future as if the future already exists and is something to be feared.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear a nonexistent future and simultaneously create that which I fear without realizing me as the creator of my world in each lived moment.

I commit myself to living each moment within self-honesty, so that I can correct myself from each new moment and stop the mental participation of which fear had been allowed to create my future.

I commit myself to realizing myself in and as fear, stopping it, breathing, and directing self in alignment with what's best for all.

Thanks and welcome.