Episode Transcript
We Americans enjoy a wonderful and powerful way of life, but internally and in relationships we may wish for better. Join me as we look beneath the surface and gain insights to transform every aspect of your life. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare, and this is the Spiritual American. Hello everyone and welcome to the Spiritual American. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare, and I'm your host. And today we will be talking about merciful self-observation. This is a pretty pivotal idea and topic. It's kind of like karma, that it can be a very transformational technique and idea. So I hope that you all are able to use this, what I'm about to share, because it had really transformed my practice and helped me to be able to progress in my spiritual journey. So what is merciful self-observation? Well, maybe I'm self- observing now, but maybe I'm not merciful. So let's break it down like what the words mean. So mercy, I'm gonna say there's three aspects of mercy. One is love you, love you have a good wish, and you care about what you feel mercy towards. You care about it. The second thing is that you have understanding. You understand what they're going through, so you have a kind of knowledge or wisdom also. So you care, you have wisdom. And the third piece is that you are a little detached. You're not affected personally by what's going on. So you're giving energy of care, you're giving understanding, so you're providing a sense of stability around the person. Let's say if they're suffering, but you're not interacting with them beyond that. There's, there's no transfer of emotional energy. I'm not taking sorrow. I'm not giving sorrow. I'm not feeling it. It's not like empathy. Where you kind of understand how they're feeling or compassion, where you're feeling what they're feeling. So I'm not feeling what you're feeling. In mercy, I understand what you're feeling 'cause I've been there or I have wisdom about it. I really have like a overall understanding and then I care. I truly care, but I'm not interacting beyond that. So that's mercy. Self-observation. You could talk about, I think in two ways. One is observing my inner world, and the other thing is observing my behavior. So merciful self-observation means that I'm going to observe myself. I'm gonna observe my mind, my inner world, my feelings, my reactions, my memories, everything going on inside. And also my behavior with mercy, from a merciful standpoint. So I will just say that maybe we are already, like I said, in the habit of looking at ourselves, not mercifully, meaning maybe I'm looking at myself with judgment. Maybe I'm looking at myself with disdain. Maybe I'm looking at myself with impatience, and I would say that whatever I'm doing to myself, I'm generally doing with others too. So if I'm impatient with myself, I'm probably impatient with others. If I'm judgmental of myself, I'm probably judgmental with others and vice versa. This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Jesus he said, love your neighbor as yourself, and I find that that's a law. So the reason I'm getting at this is the, the, the title of this is Merciful Self-Observation. But when I transform the way I see myself and the way I treat myself, I'm definitely gonna change how I treat and see others as well. So it works like that. It's a law. It happens automatically. So what is merciful self-observation? It is the first step on the journey of spiritual growth, let's say. Now, why am I saying that? Let's say that you are a good student and you studied a lot, and you got your degree, and you got your job, and you got your career. But internally, you can't stand yourself. Internally you think you're never good enough and you think that, you know, other people are not to be trusted. And so you did all the work. You did all the stuff on the outside, but internally, you're having negative self-critical thinking. Is it fair to say that that negative self-critical thinking is having an impact on the quality of my life? Even though I studied and I have the career and I have everything on the outside, it's affecting me. Same thing the other way around. Maybe inside I feel like, oh, I'm great. I'm wonderful, but I can't, my behavior is not good. Maybe I'm being lazy, or maybe I'm being careless, or maybe I'm not taking responsibility for myself. So, merciful self-observation is the first step in the journey of spiritual growth because I am beginning to look at myself from a detached standpoint, a loving standpoint, and an understanding standpoint. And I'll give an example of this. Let's say that I have grown up in a circumstance where it's very all about scientific thinking, how to fix it, how to do it, how it's gonna get done. Organizing. This is how I did grow up. So this is how I did train myself. Sometimes I say I'm an Olympic level organizer, an Olympic level judger, an Olympic level scientific fixer, scientific analyzer. And so let's say I wanna do spiritual practice, and I say to myself, okay, now sit down and be quiet. Really? I'm so used to being so active both internally and externally, and then just to say, okay, now sit there and be still. And where I'm getting with mercy here is that I can judge myself for not being able to be still. I can judge myself for not being able to be peaceful during meditation, or I can have merciful self-observation and realize. Of course, I'm not gonna be able to be still right away. Of course, I'm not gonna be able to shut down my mind right away. Look at where I came from. Part of merciful self-observation is also bringing the past, present, and future to bear on whatever I'm looking at. Of course, if I grew up like that, and that's all I knew and that's how I thought life is, and now I'm trying to change it, of course it's not gonna change right away. It takes time to change a worldview. It takes time to change behaviors. It takes time to change feelings and beliefs also, so that's not gonna happen right away. I know that if I keep doing that and I don't feel peaceful, it's affecting my health, it's affecting my relationships. It's so I can see the past, present, future. I have an understanding and I have mercy on myself. I care. I want to get better. But I'm not suffering. So there's a little detachment. I'm not suffering. I'm watching, i'm caring. I'm helping. I'm supporting by that merciful self-observation. Here's another example. So let's say I was angry and I was yelling and having a fight. I could be mad at myself about that behavior, especially if I'm trying to get better and trying to work on myself, and then I get mad at myself for that behavior. If I start judging myself for that behavior, it's more of the old stuff. This is so subtle. It's so subtle because it's like our judgmental way of thinking hijacks our spiritual progress. I'm gonna say that again. Our judgmental way of thinking about ourselves and others hijacks our spiritual progress because it's masquerading as something positive because I tell myself that I'm trying to progress and how am I gonna progress if I keep on acting like this? And this means that I'm not a good person and so forth and so on. But what it's stopping me from doing is it's stopping me from feeling peaceful. It's stopping me from feeling love. It's stopping me from feeling hope. So if I remember and say, okay, merciful self-observation, I am gonna look at why I was behaving that way. So instead of judging the behavior alone. Let me take a look at why. 'cause I need to build some understanding. So first of all, I'm gonna establish that I care. I do care about myself. Whatever I did, I care about myself. I'm not abandoning myself anymore. That's it. Second thing, I need to understand what's going on with this behavior. Why am I acting like that? Why am I feeling so out of control? Why am I feeling so helpless? Let me take a look at that. Caring. It's funny. We're so impatient with ourselves and we're so desperate for love. We're so desperate for caring. We're so desperate for that kind of help. I find that this thing that I'm talking about now, merciful self-observation, is when you're giving that to yourself, you're giving yourself the caring presence, you're giving yourself a chance to be heard, a chance to be understood. And I'm here to say that once that energy starts coming in on a regular basis, that merciful self-observation, self-criticism comes down, criticism of others comes down, you start to develop this different relationship with yourself. And I find that all the if you wanna say negative personality traits or all the weaknesses that we have begin to become less important and less pronounced. It's more important for me to feel loved. It's more important for me to feel heard. It's more important for me to be able to feel peaceful and understand what's going on with myself. Can you see that if I start to do that, then I would be able to be able to extend that to others as well? That maybe I won't react to them? I know it's, it's really interesting what happens when I work on myself as my own. Sometimes you say it's my own laboratory, but I don't wanna necessarily say that because it's not science, it's love. I love myself. If you care about somebody, you wanna help them. If you care about someone, you understand where they're coming from and you don't judge them. So do I love myself? So. I am beginning to pay attention to myself. I have interest in learning about myself, interest in learning about what's going on with my thoughts, what's going on with my behavior, what's going on with my feelings, and little by little, and I'm telling you this thing that I'm talking about right now, merciful self-observation can be, you wanna say a game changer, you are really beginning a spiritual journey by doing that. Because you're not necessarily running on the old tapes anymore. You're generating the kind of energy that allows a transformation to occur in a natural way. There was a psychological experiment, I don't wanna say it exactly, but there was an experiment done where they tested how babies react when they're, they have no human contact. And then when they have human contact, now it's controversial. That whole experiment was controversial, but what they found was that the babies did very, very badly and got, you know, some of them didn't, didn't survive, if I remember correctly. It was something like that. They didn't survive without human contact or they did very poorly. Even plants, they say, talk to my plants and stuff that, that presence, that caring presence, we all need that. So think about it for a minute. Let's just do a little reflection on this. So reflection one, how do I relate to myself? Am I kind to myself? Do I care about my progress? Do I care about myself? What kinds of activities do I do? And what kinds of thoughts do I have that are supportive to me? Do I have those thoughts? I wanna interject that merciful self-observation can help us to generate those thoughts. We're not changing anything, we're just watching and trying to understand. It's a very gentle way of being with myself. Second reflection. If I am noticing that I'm judging myself, and maybe I'm not so kind to myself, ask yourself, what would I need? If I could ask for one thing to help me, what would it be? What would be the thing that would really help me to feel better inside? See what that is. I think for me it was love and understanding. It's pretty simple. I think we've forgotten so much of this just human way of being. We've forgotten simple truths about what people need, what we as human beings need, and the third reflection, take one behavior or one thought process or feeling emotional process that you have. Just take one. Think of one and think of one that you'd like to change. Okay. I'm sure you can think of one and then see if you can look at it this week. So we're gonna maybe make a commitment. Can I make a commitment to practice this merciful self-observation? I am not changing anything. I am just going to watch it and try to understand it better. And care. I'm going to care. I'm gonna try to understand it better and so forth and see what happens. Okay, so I'll leave it there. I hope that it gave you something to think about and I really do feel, like I said before, this merciful self-observation, this practice, it doesn't, it isn't like I ever stop. I keep doing it because something will come up that's emotional. I'll have a reaction to something that's going on, and I just watch, just watch, just watch. Because I am not interested now in winning the battle that's happening now. I'm interested in winning the war, let's say, if you wanna say the war, I'm, I'm interested in being victorious or being successful or becoming a more natural spiritual person, let's say. That's what I'm interested in. Being harmonious. As a human being. Being kind and peaceful. That's what I'm interested in. So if I am, forceful and negative, and how am I gonna create a peaceful, harmonious personality if I'm forceful and negative with myself? So let's practice this week, kindness, mercy, caring, love, understanding. You're not changing anything, you're just watching. So I will leave it there. Remember, our slogan is Heal, Empower, and Serve. And until next time, take care.
