I often babysit Cesar in the afternoons while Leila is exercising and taking care of Charlie, her other baby (her horse :) ). Cesar likes being outside and amongst the dogs the most, but when it is cold or rainy, we’ll look for things to do in his room. One of the activities he’s been more interested in recently is playing with blocs, like duplo blocks or blocks that have a hole of a particular shape in them that he ‘has to’ then hang around a little tower of a particular shape. One thing here is that it is fascinating how we take our motoric skills for granted. It seems so easy to just put two duplo blocks together and make them stick and then start building a house or a plane or a tower or just some random figure. We don’t remember that at some point in our lives, we didn’t have the skills to do that and that we walked a process of continuous trial and error that demanded a lot of concentration on our part to slowly start developing the muscles and flexibility to put two duplo blocks together and make them stick the way you want them to.

So, Cesar is now walking that process of developing these motoric skills with lots of trial and error. Now, I started noticing an interesting experience within myself when I would see Cesar struggle or ‘get it wrong’. I noticed it first on a physical level, like a contraction in my solar plexus area and I would ‘hold my breath’ ever so slightly. In looking at it more closely, I could see that fear of ‘getting it wrong’ and wanting to prevent Cesar from ‘getting it wrong’.

So – what does ‘getting it wrong’ even mean – there’s several scenarios I’m referring to with that, from where I will see his actions/attempts as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.

One is when he is for instance playing with the blocs that have holes of a particular shape in them, that he has to pull/drop over a tower of the matching shape. So, the block with the circular hole goes over the circular tower, the block with the rectangular hole goes over the rectangular tower etc. For me as an adult, I can see at first glance which shape he will be able to pull/drop over which tower and I also understand that this is the purpose of the game, that this is what it is designed for. As Cesar is picking up the shapes and turning them around, banging them together, tossing them across the room, he is just exploring these objects and what he can do with it. But with me understanding the ‘purpose’ of the game, I see it as the ‘wrong thing to do’ and I kind of become impatient, because I just really want him to ‘get’ that he can put these shapes over the towers! Because from my perspective, he hasn’t really ‘gotten the right answer’ until he realizes that the shapes are ‘supposed to’ go over the tower, lol.

So, here – I was projecting the idea that Cesar would feel proud of himself after having figured out that he could make the pieces fit over the towers. Here, actually, projecting my own experience when ‘getting something right’ and the belief that something is not worth doing and a waste of my time. I would have to resist the urge to show Cesar how to place the blocks over the tower, lol. But those ideas, beliefs and desires didn’t exist in Cesar – he was just exploring and here I was wanting to steer and limit his activity towards only one possible option of how to play with blocks.

I’ll continue in my next post.

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I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to, when and as I am watching television, to project myself into the shoes of the characters featuring on the screen, in the TV-show or in the movie and experience myself as if I were actually part of the storyline and as though what was being displayed on the screen was actually happening to me personally.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to, when and as I am watching something on television, detach myself from myself, my human physical body and my physical environment as it is here - and instead, entire a space within my mind where I lock myself into a character based on what I am being shown on the TV-screen - believing that I actually am that character, and believing that I am undergoing and experiencing what the characters on the TV-screen are showing and experiencing.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to every time when I see someone being hurt or dying on TV - go into fear and panic because I see and realise that if I had been in the position and situation of the character in the movie/show - that I would have ended up in the same fate - then, within this fear, I frantically scan through the event to see where the character could have done something different, that would have changed the course of the event - and once I've identified it, mentally project myself within the same situation/position, yet acting differently at a particular point in time and imagining how I would defeat the opponent or hide/escape/shield myself from the harm - then repeating it over and over within my mind as an attempt to 'imprint' the program so that, when I find myself in that situation, I'll know exactly what to do and my automated resonse will be what I have 'studied in' as my 'survival plan'.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to see/realise/understand that as I am entering fear as I react to some act of violence or harm that I see happening on the TV screen, in a movie or TV-show, that I am actually immediately entering into a survival-mode and that, within entering a survival frame of mind - I immediately relinquish my common sense and rely on survival-instincts to guide and direct me in order to 'make it out all right' - even though I am not actually physically experiencing that which I am witnessing by watching TV.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to embrace the fact that I will eventually die and that it is therefore useless to try and create an arsenal of survival plans as though I can infinitely cheat death - not realising that there is no point in trying to survive and whether I live or not will ultimately depend on who I am in the moment of the event - however it plays out/manifests.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to realise that in continuously trying to devise an action plan to prevent traumatic/harmful/deadly things from happening to me - I am buying into the belief that I can possibly live forever in this current body.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to realise that the desire to cheat death really just reflects my fear of death.

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

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to connect death to fear, and thus - I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear my own fear.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to trust survival instincts and, thus, implicitly, my mind - to help me cheat death - instead of realising that the mind is the very reason we cannot live forever, because the mind keeps on feeding off of and torturing the physical flesh, causing it to decay, deteriorate and eventually perish.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to see/realise/understand that the attempt at creating a mental 'databse' as an arsenal of collected self-created survival plans - I am not really intending of putting any of it into practice, but it is merely so that I can have a sense of control, where previously I experienced that I wouldn't have any control in such a situation.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear having no control while things in my environment are moving in a way that can end up hurting or killing me.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear the sense of having no control.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to realise that I am never really in control of my environment of how things play out - I can only direct myself and others to the best of my ability - but there is never a guarantee - and without guarantee - there is no control.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to realise that I was never really after real control - but only ever after the experience/perception/sensation of being in control - and thus, the only real goal was to attempt to effectively delude and brainwas myself into believing that I actually am/would be/was in control - as a ways of suppressing and not having to deal with fear of being hurt, fear of dying, fear of being vulnerable.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to attempt to suppress and not deal with fears of being hurt, dying and being vulnerable as they come up - instead of realising that if I stand and breathe - hurt, vulnerability and even death will not change who I am - I remain stable, here, unchanged.

Related articles

• Day 110: Fear as Quick Fix Parenting Technique
• Day 68: My Mind, My Saviour
• Day 64: Holding on to Myself
• Day 56: Doubting Myself after a Decision
• Day 91: Always Expect the Worst, Like that you won't get Disappointed

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