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Posts tagged with “self-awareness”

Mind Over Melodrama: 5 Lessons on Self-Awareness and Healing

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“Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are.” ~Julius Charles Hare

In a few months it will be the two and a half year anniversary of my mental breakdown.

I don’t really celebrate the date, partially because I don’t know it—it’s not the sort of thing that you remember to mark on your calendar—and partially because my entire life since then has been a celebration of what I began to learn that night.

I began to learn about myself.

It’s been a wild ride of healing, helplessness, forgetting, and remembering. Many times, I …

Why We Lie to Ourselves and How It Creates Tension

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“That I feed the hungry, forgive an insult, and love my enemy…. these are great virtues.
But what if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me, and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness; that I myself am the enemy who must be loved? What then?” ~Carl Jung

Mornings are delicious in the desert. In a summer climate that pushes above 100 degrees day after day, you learn to appreciate lingering cool gifts of pre-dawn hours.

I’m typically awake by 5am these days. …

Develop Self-Awareness and Improve Your Relationships

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“Our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as being able to remake ourselves.” -Gandhi

The other day I got upset over something silly that triggered difficult feelings with deep roots from my past.

In short, someone I love made a reasonable request that, for various reasons, I didn’t want to honor, partly because I felt this person wasn’t taking my feelings into account. But I had no good reason to suspect this.

I thought this because it’s a pattern for me.

For most of my young life, I believed my needs wouldn’t be met …

Being Honest with Ourselves and Removing Our Masks

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“Our lives only improve when we are willing to take chances and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.” ~Walter Anderson

For almost two-and-a-half decades, I hid behind masks. I sensed as a very young child that I lived honoring my true self, like most children do, but as I got older, I started putting on masks as a way to fit in. One of my first masks was that of a juvenile delinquent.

Over time, this mask became almost embedded in my skin. I discovered the world of alcohol, drugs, …