Self understanding is getting to know yourself.
Do you really know yourself? Do you want to?
If self-understanding is knowing ourselves, how we are, then why do we say that we want to understand ourselves and yet spend a huge chunk of our time avoiding how we feel?
Think about that for a minute. If we want to get to know a new person or a new task, we have to spend time with that person or doing that task before we really get to know them or it, don’t we?
In the same way, to get to know ourselves we would have to spend time with ourselves, not in the way of just being alone but in the way of not avoiding how we feel every few minutes.
We are too hot so we turn the air conditioner on, or too cold so we put a jumper on, or we feel hungry for more than one second and have to eat as soon as possible, but what is being missed are huge opportunities.
To understand ourselves we need to be willing to feel EVERYTHING that is inside us.
To understand yourself is to understand nature, human nature on the micro level. If we understand ourselves fully, then on the macro level, we will understand everyone.
For me, self-understanding began when I took an interest in nature, plants and more specifically, gardening.
As my interest in it grew, then I wanted to know all there was to know about the topic so I immersed myself into reading about it to gain knowledge but the real understanding came from immersing myself in the feeling, smelling, touching and tasting of the plants. Using my senses to investigate whether what I read was actually what was happening in my garden. I relished looking closely at the beautiful, tiny details of the plants, even using a microscope. I felt and touched and smelled the soil. I wanted to be in the garden, in nature, no matter the weather or the time of day. I wanted to know all the how’s and why’s. Nothing was too insignificant, smelly or gross – I wanted to understand it all.
By immersing myself in nature this way, I came to understand it at the micro level to understand the fundamental basics of it, breaking it down to its smallest parts. To understand the fundamental basics of how it functions. And because of my interest in it, I came to understand the fundamental basics of myself because I am, as we all are, part of nature.
That might not make a lot of sense so I will explain a bit more.
All living things function in the same fundamentally basic way. That is, that we all respond to stimulus. If the sun outside is shining or if it is raining and our skin is exposed to those elements, then we will feel it. We either feel the warmth of the sun or the moisture from the rain. Our bodies have no capacity to not feel it, in exactly the same way that a plant would sense the sun or rain. It’s just cause and effect. And it is immediate, healing is immediate, we don’t feel the rain 5 minutes after it touches our skin, we feel it at the moment of contact.
The understanding that I gained of nature and how it functions wouldn’t have been possible if I had just read about it or gone to someone else for them to tell me about it. That would have been all academic. If you have ever tried applying academic instruction to watering plants, you’ll see how it just doesn’t work. If you have ever tried to explain to someone how to care for a plant you will know what I mean. You can’t say to them take 1 cup of water and give it to this plant every week and the plant will grow well, because it won’t. As I explained before, the plant responds to stimulus so if the weather is hot, it will need more water and if the weather is cold it will need less. It’s pretty basic, right?
You can give an idea of what is approximately needed but then you need to UNDERSTAND what is causing the plant to need less or more water.
We are exactly the same. We can’t read about or be told about ourselves to REALLY understand ourselves and what it is we need. That can give us a place to start or something to investigate but we won’t KNOW in the way of truly understanding until we FEEL it in the moment that it is happening.
This interesting fact is that while I was trying to understand gardening and nature, I was also trying to understand myself.
I was very distressed and depressed at the time and was trying in that academic way of getting to understand myself. I read about human nature and healing and mental health and spiritual health and went to counsellors and psyches so that they could tell me about myself, which was just ridiculous. It had the effect of making my situation far worse but at the time it was all I could think to do.
Looking back, I can see that I instinctually knew that if I came to understand nature, I would come to understand myself. And I did!
Can you see that in the same way, to really understand a garden or plants, you need to be able to FEEL whether the soil is damp and to SEE if the leaves are wilted and so on.
We can’t understand ourselves by thinking about how we feel. We need to FEEEEEEEL it!! And feel ALL of it.
Do you think your body is only expressing something when you feel pleasurable things? Of course not. The body has something to say with every single sensation that we feel, from the tiniest twinge to the pain that has us gasping for breath.
All those sensations contain information, but we are too adept at getting away from our feelings so the information is rarely noticed. Even though it is there and is available to us all the time.
So, you can see that self-understanding can’t be possible unless we take an interest in and spend some time with everything that we feel.
Self understanding requires us to feel.
Understanding this cause and effect is to understand that there is a reason WHY we feel the way we do. When we allow ourselves to fully FEEL, the body responds immediately the way plants respond to sunlight – the power of nature takes over and healing begins.
If our thinking stays out of the way, healing won’t stop until the job is done; there is no way for it not to.
