Overcoming fear and self-criticism with curiosity
A nonjudgmental mind is a curious mind. Rather than fearful or critical, a curious mind finds joy in experiencing and exploring what’s occurring.
Mental illness often makes people afraid of their minds. You might be afraid you’ll think something that means something bad about you. You might be afraid that you’ll think something that will give you sensations that are aversive and painful to you. You might feel something that is uncomfortable regardless of what you think. Your memories might cause you pain. Your thoughts might cause you to fear.
If not fearful, many people are critical of their internal experience. You might have expectations about what you should think and feel under certain circumstances. You might intellectually understand the path to experience less suffering and feel critical of yourself when the thoughts and feelings that cause you suffering occur anyway. You might believe that you have to be critical with yourself in order to live up to your own expectations and standards.
A curious mind manages fear with compassion and criticism with skepticism.
Compassion is gentle and kind. It holds your painful thoughts, feelings, and memories with openness and tenderness. Your experience is bigger than any particular painful thought, feeling, or memory. If you get curious about your pain, you may find that it peaks and passes and it has edges. It isn’t bigger than you and it isn’t forever. Compassion reminds you that you are part of the human community. Everything you feel has been felt by other people and you are not alone in what you feel.
Skepticism wonders if there might be another way. Is it true that you have to beat yourself up in order to become who you think you should become? If it were not true, could you become your ideal self by getting in touch with your values and becoming curious about the ways in which you stray from your values. You, like other humans, probably have difficulty living by your values in areas of your life that you have painful or aversive thoughts and feelings. Overcoming avoidance requires that you face your avoidance, not be more critical of yourself. Facing avoidance takes skill, practice, motivation, and courage. Criticism zaps your courage when you most need it. With curiosity, you can get skeptical of your strategy of criticism and consider courage and values-driven behavior instead.
In the present moment, your mind can focus on what’s happening now, rather than what has been painful for you in the past or what you fear happening in the future. If you were in an emergency situation, your mind would know it and you’d be actively problem solving. At times when you are not actively problem solving, your mind wanders to memories of the past and ruminates on past thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and the consequences that those experiences have had on your life course. Your mind wanders to the future, fearing or excitedly anticipating what may happen and how it will impact the course of your life. Whether this experience is painful or not, it’s pulling you away from the freshness of the current moment, which is the place where you actually live.