A Request (for love): The Importance of Kindness and Respect

My eye. 

Owing to the fact that I harp endlessly on and on about being a trainee counsellor all the time, one of my favourite humans sent me a text yesterday with a question. I’ve decided to answer it here because writing lots of words on Whatsapp is painful, but writing lots of words on my bloggo is rather enjoyable. Plus, someone else might read it and they might like what I’ve got to say. It’s quite long and it might not make sense, but hey who giveth a shit? Not me. Oh, and if you can tell me how many times I’ve written ‘I mean’ in it, you *might win a prize. So with that in mind, here is the thing that the thing which it is is:

The text message:
“Hey I have a psychological question. How do I accept my appearance a bit more? As I’m getting older I keep putting on weight and maybe I just want to say, ‘Fuck it,’ but I can’t help but feel shit about myself, especially since I’m pretty judgey about other people’s weight.” 

Whenever anyone asks me a thing, and wants an answer from a psychology point of view, I go through a special process: first, I feel flattered. It makes me feel like an expert, and I like that feeling.
However, about three seconds later, I feel like an arsehole because I just noticed myself getting all big headed and self-congratulatory. I mean, I’m not an expert. I know a bit of some stuff about some stuff, that’s all.
But then a few seconds later I find myself thinking about the question anyway, and I start finding it interesting. I’ll show you. Look what happened yesterday:

I read the message, and I thought, ‘Eeee I’m so amazing. Ugh I’m so fucking full of myself. But never mind that; what was the question?’ …And I read the message again, and I thought, ‘Yeah good point, how do you accept your appearance a bit more?’ …And then I went and had a shower.
Pretty cool story so far, huh? I hope it gets better.

My first thought was that my friend (who is dieting) will feel better about their appearance when they’ve lost the bit of weight they’ve gained during lockdown. That’s fair enough, right? I’m sure, in a way, that they will feel better when that’s happened.
But… I brushed my teeth before my shower, and I realised then that my friend is already in shape. OK, they might want to lose some weight, but this is someone who looks ace anyway so… Who cares?
So that was one conclusion that I came to. I could answer with a text: “Who cares? You look ace anyway.” Buuuuut that’s not an answer to the question; that’s just flattery. So I didn’t send that. Instead, I washed the toothpaste dribble out of my beard and thought some more.

My next thought went: “You say you’re judgey about other people’s weight. That’s a good thing to be aware of. Plus, we all judge everyone else, so I can’t blame you for it. But maybe you could deliberately get to know some people who you negatively judge on first impressions, so that you can find out what makes them a lovely person. It might help you to ease off on the judginess.”
Because everyone is a lovely person, aren’t they?
I reckon I know what you’re thinking. It’s probably this: ‘No.’
Well alright then, but what I mean is that everyone is lovely somehow. Everyone can be loved by someone, so why leave that job to someone when you could do it? I’m not saying you have to spend loads of time with people you don’t get on with, but you can still be kind to them and show them respect. Even if they’re not being kind to you, or showing you respect, it doesn’t mean you have to treat them badly in return.
And, bonus: there’s a Cool Thing that happens when you’re kind and respectful to people. It makes you like them more. AND, quite often when people are on the receiving end of kindness and respect, they sort of… Sometimes… Become kinder and more respectful too. Which is a Cool Thing. See? Told you. 
I quite liked this thought, because I’m currently a bit fixated with the idea of being kind and loving to all the people. It’s not always very easy in practice, but nonetheless I’ve started to believe that kindness and love and respect are all that we’ve got, and if we give anything other than kindness and love and respect, then… Well, then we’re missing an opportunity to be kind and loving. And who in their right mind would choose not to be kind and loving? That just seems bonkers.

So I almost replied to my friend with that advice: “Make friends with some fat people and you’ll stop judging them.”
But that doesn’t answer the question. The question was, “How do I accept my appearance a bit more?”

Bollocks. And ‘Hmm’.
I looked in the mirror and I started to think about the time when I couldn’t bear to look at myself. Good grief, I went through a phase of strongly disliking my reflection. I was cross with me then. I was cross with me because of the mess I’d made of my life and I didn’t like having this goof looking back at me in the mirror, who always seemed so innocent and full of hope. He seemed to be totally unaware of the muddle I was in, and laughably he seemed to expect me to do something about it all. Me! I was the idiot who got us into that mess in the first place! How the hell was I going to get us out of it? Fuck you, reflection, I don’t like you.
That’s how I felt.

Is that how my friend feels too? I hope not. They have no reason to. I mean, this is someone who is SO easy to be kind and loving and respectful to, because they’re SO kind and loving and respectful, that I can’t see a single reason for them to feel like I did when I was in my big deep misery place.
It feels odd to realise that some people must have felt that way about me once upon a time. But that’s not the point. Why don’t I just answer the question?

Well OK then I will. But first, let’s just clarify something.
Nobody feels better just because someone tells them they look good. It doesn’t work like that. OK, maybe they’ll feel perky for a few moments, but approval from others won’t make anyone feel truly good, in a meaningful way, about themselves. In fact, there’s a fact that I know for a fact (which I haven’t quite got my head fully around yet) which states that nobody makes you feel anything.
Unbelievable isn’t it? The idea that your feelings are yours, and that it’s your job to feel them? It’s your job to take responsibility for them? To own them, as you should, because they’re yours?
Nobody makes you feel anything.
It works without the italics too:
Nobody makes you feel anything.

Shit, well who’s making me feel all this stuff then?! Fuck! Is it… No, it can’t be… Is it ME?! All of it?! Oh for fuck sake man.

It’s so easy to blame other people. We do it all the time and we’re surrounded by other people doing it all the time too. Blame is all over the internet nowadays. Just look at anything on Facebook that mentions vaccines, Brexit, lockdown, peaceful protest, abortion, murder, jackdaws, crisps… The list goes on. Look at anything anywhere on the internet and everywhere, all the time, all you’ll find is people who’ve forgotten that the only thing they really have is kindness and love and respect, so instead they feel a great unease and they search for someone to blame it on. Because if they do that, it means they don’t have to look inside themselves and face whatever small innocent mistake they made that 100% accidentally led to them forgetting to be kind and loving and respectful. Funny isn’t it? Funny, until you get swept up in it and accidentally start blaming people too. Then it’s not so funny – when that happens it’s more kind of painful and sad.

Hhhh.
What was the question again? Oh yes. “How do I accept my appearance a bit more?”
Well. For a start, what is your appearance? When you look in the mirror, you don’t see you. Your reflection isn’t an accurate representation of you. It’s the wrong way round. When someone else looks at you, they don’t see you that way round. When you look in the mirror, your left side is on the left of your reflection, but to the entire rest of the universe, your left side is on the right. So… Stop believing everything you see. I think that’s the first way to accept your appearance a bit more.
Plus, (and this is a big plus, so for emphasis I’ll put it in italics)… Plus… Your reflection doesn’t have a back story. All you can see is your face and your body. But you can’t see your beliefs, or your values, or your fears, or your assumptions, or your memories, or your etceteras. It’s so easy to forget that. You see your face and your body (the wrong way round) and you go, ‘Oh. So that’s what I look like,’ without taking any of the Life Things into account. I hope you see what I mean.
I hope you see what I mean because this means everything, in a way.
Hmm. I think I might have to talk about the universe for a while now, to make the next thing make sense.

Everything that you know only exists inside your head. Every experience you’ve had, all the memories, all the images of how the universe looks and behaves and your understanding of everything ever ever ever only exists in your head. Time, space, music, money, crisps… The sound of a hovercraft engine going ‘RGRGGRGRGGRGRGRG’… All those things; they’re just thoughts that you have. And I’m sorry to be morbid, but when you die, they will all be gone. For you anyway. Or, you’ll whizz off to a higher plane of consciousness where you’ll transcend the limitations of your physical self and where you’ll probably forget all the things, but where (in my imagination at least) you’ll probably have a greater understanding of some mystical thing called ‘Truth’ (whatever that may be) which you’ll bring back to the great big one-eyed conscious thing which is the actual universe. Or something like that.
So… Either way, while you’re here, you ought to make it nice hadn’t you?

See, I think all thoughts come from feelings. I think we feel first (that’s our physical reaction to a thing) and then we think about the feeling and make sense of it (that’s our conscious reaction to the thing). I’m fairly sure that’s how it works. I’m also fairly sure that we’re very good at tricking ourselves into believing that we think first. It seems laughable writing it down. I mean, what sort of dummy would think they’re in charge of any of it? The idea seems ludicrous.
Essentially I think I’m saying that you’re having two experiences all the time. Yeah, that’s what I think. I’ll explain this immediately.

Actually, first, I’ll tell you this: I’ve seen two things in my life that blew my head off. They were quotes. I won’t go off on one about them here (I’ve got a question to answer after all) but I will write them now so that you can read them and allow them perhaps to blow your mind too:
“The mind is the universe’s way of looking at itself” (I think this is from ‘Prometheus Rising‘ by Robert Anton Wilson). 
“The universe is made of one kind of entity.” (From ‘The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment‘ by Thaddeus Golas).

Let’s just take a second to think about those things.

OK. Where were we? Oh yes. you’re having two experiences all the time.
Experience 1) If there is a place where all consciousness returns when we die (and I kind of think there might be), then I think we’re already there. On a conscious level, anyway. I think that the ‘you’ who you think of as YOU is already just consciousness, still in the big place where it always exists, trying its hand at having an identity for a while. And the more I think about this, the more it makes sense. We’re all just another YOU. We’re all a part of the same entity, trying its hand at having various lives. We’re the universe looking at itself.
Thing is, nobody knows how a brain works – sure, we know that it’s connected to our eyes and our tongue and stuff, but we don’t know with any certainty whatsoever, if it’s got consciousness inside it. It’s true. Nobody has any idea if that’s the case. Most of us think it does, but what good does thinking do? We already know that thoughts aren’t so special – they’re just tricks that we tell ourselves when our feelings are responding to something.
So there’s a great case for the idea that consciousness could very well exist beyond our brains, and our brains are just like a… An antenna, which translates signals from consciousness into the physical world and which translates physical experiences into conscious understanding. Or something like that.
I really like this idea, especially when I remember that the only thing we’ve got, at the end of it all, is kindness and love and respect. Those are the gifts (for anything else that we give is not a gift – it’s an insult) that we give and receive in the physical world, which we use to measure the quality of our experience of our unique universe.

Which means:
Experience 2) Physically, I think you’re a beastie that has feelings and senses that get transmitted to your brain, where you process them consciously with your mind (which is quite possibly not inside your brain), and which you turn into thoughts. YOU do that. I’m serious. 
And get this: the beastie that you are, with its physical feelings (what you think of as your emotions), has no concept of time. It doesn’t know how old it is. It’s the same beastie that’s been here since wayyyyyyy before you learnt a language, or learnt how to do numbers, or to talk and read and write. Those were all tasks that your conscious side carried out. Your physical body doesn’t really have an identity, or an age, or a name. It’s just a thing that wanders around trying to feel nice. And your consciousness is in charge of putting it in places where it feels nice, and putting other things that help it to feel nice in those places.
Now that means that you really are responsible for your feelings. Blimey. 

Oh yeah, there’s also this: the thing that connects the beastie to the conscious realm is not your brain. It’s YOU. I forgot that bit. 

Anyway. What you’re seeing in the mirror isn’t real, but what you’re thinking is real (to you), because that is a part of the very real substance of your universe. It is your experience. It belongs to you, and YOU are the experience of what it is to experience things. I really hope I don’t seem like a mad hippy after writing this.

Hhhhh.
Let’s move on from the universe stuff, I’m doing my head in.

While I had my shower, I thought this:
To accept your appearance a bit more, I think you might need to look at two things:
1) Love
2) Blame 
Evidently, it was quite a short shower.
Tell you what though, that was a lot of words wasn’t it? Christ. Thanks for staying for this bit. Now come on, let’s skip to the end.

Here’s my reply to my friend:

“I think you need to remember that everyone is deserving of kindness and love and respect – including you. Especially you. You won’t have a very Nice Time on Earth if you don’t receive kindness and love and respect. And, I’m sorry to break it to you, but because you’re responsible for your feelings, you’re going to have to give yourself some kindness and love and respect too. Great, you can get some of it from other people but you won’t believe it until you give it to you.
I have proof: You’re not finding it easy to accept your appearance, when others are. 
And because I’ve typed 3000 words now, we can say this a different way: you’re not finding it easy to consciously accept your physical appearance. 

So the conscious part of you that is sensing a feeling of disappointment in your physical appearance, and which is turning that feeling into a thought, has an opposite: the physical part that likes eating stuff. You really should love both of those parts of you. They’re not going away until both of you goes away so it seems important that they’re friends. One of them is a beautiful nugget of pure consciousness – trying its best to prosper for as long as it can in the physical realm – which only has your best interests at heart. The other part of you likes eating stuff. And who wouldn’t?! All the delicious things!
Eating is one of the best things about physically existing. You won’t be able to do that after you leave, which, among countless other things, will be a fucking disaster for so many of us who love you and respect you and try, despite all our messes, to be kind to you.

But don’t be cross with either of those parts – don’t blame them for anything. We already know that blame is a pointless retreat from love and kindness and respect. Yeah, don’t blame them. Offer them some kindness and love and respect instead. Allow your tongue to taste stuff but also allow your YOU to take charge every once in a while. Like it already has – it’s told you to have a diet time. That’s really cool; it means your conscious YOU has offered your physical YOU some kindness and love and respect. 
JUST LIKE when your physical YOU gave your conscious YOU a treat by letting you eat all that fucking lovely food. Do you remember? It was so delicious! It was one of the greatest things about being alive. 
So be grateful for the gift – your physical YOU gave YOU that, as a way to show love and kindness and respect for your conscious experience. It knew you were having a lockdown time and it gave you a really yummy treat to keep things cheerful. It was banging. Don’t berate your physical YOU for that – love it and be kind to it and respect it instead, by keeping it healthy for a while. Then you can have a biscuit. 

What else? 
Yeah, so… You might even forget to look at yourself ever at all if you just focus on being kind and loving and respectful to everyone and everything – including yourself – all the time. Even the things and people and bits of you that you don’t necessarily like.
You might catch your reflection once in a while and you might say, “Hey! It’s you!” which might be quite pleasant for you.
And if you do that, you might forget that you exist physically at all, and if that happened, you might find yourself floating effortlessly through every moment, experiencing perfect synchronicity as you lock into the miraculous connection between your conscious and physical experiences.
That’s what Life is really isn’t it? A miraculous connection between your physical and your conscious selves.
That perfect synchronicity is what it feels like to be here right now.
That’s how it feels when you feel a feeling and act on it, with a respectful and loving and kind attitude.
That’s how it feels to have a Nice Time.
And THAT, whenever you measure the quality of your experience of your unique universe, is all that will matter. It’s the only thing that matters. Golly, it really is all about love and respect and kindness. 

So go and do those things to you. That’s what I think anyway.

Fuck me I sound like a proper hippy. 

Love you X”

 

I listened to three songs on repeat while writing this. Here they are, via Spotify, if you fancy a listen:
Jane Bordeaux: Waltz for Plant Protection
Super Furry Animals: Run! Christian, Run!
Nev Cottee: If I Could Tell You

 

*won’t