Hello and happy Sunday from Bali. I’ve been meaning to blog for ahh while now. Part of my resistance to writing has been the realization that my understanding of the world is constantly changing, and so is yours.
What I believe today, I may not believe tomorrow. So, do I want to solidify those beliefs in writing? I decided that I would.
Each stage of our learning process is valid. And the learning never ends. I intend to share highlights and musings from the past week with a Sunday blog. Full disclosure: if you ask me about this blog two months from now, I may deny ever writing such nonsense.
This week in Bali was scorching. In fact, the heat and humidity were smothering. But it’s Bali. Bali still holds a special charm that makes enduring the discomfort worth it.
Highlights
- I learned a few self-defense techniques
- Checked into a new airbnb. Spent the entire evening awake on the couch fighting mosquitoes (my new self defense techniques didn’t work here) checked out the next day.
- Started reading Vibrational Medicine by Richard Gerber
- Did handstands in a swimming pool
- Rewatched My Best Friends Wedding
- Recorded a Duo episode of Noticing with Urvi
Musings
I had a new appreciation for My Best Friend’s wedding this time. It is a good movie, with fun scenes, good acting, etc. However, the piece that stuck out was the character development of Julia Roberts.
If you’ve missed the plot, her best male friend is getting married, and she’s not having it. She believes he was always in love with her and wants it to stay that way. She then does her best to sabotage the wedding and break up her “best friend” and his fiance. She even attempts to get her friend fired from his job and blames it on the fiance. She loses, though, and he chooses his fiance.
In our duo episode of Noticing, I told Urvi that everyone fears their darkness, which means we don’t want to own it when we mess up and act like trash. We have ideas of who we are, mainly that we’re nice. You may think: “No, I don’t think highly of myself. I doubt and criticize myself often.” Sure, but we like to believe we’re good and nice when it comes to how we affect others. When it is brought to our attention that our behavior has hurt another directly or indirectly, we have difficulty facing that.
But that just is. It just is.
We get jealous at times, want attention, and act accordingly. In the movie, Julia Roberts eventually recognizes and owns her behavior. She sees that she was acting jealously and apologizes.
When I was learning self-defense, the instructor said: “I won’t teach you how to fight. I will teach you how to neutralize.” Besides being a badass thing to say, I interpreted “neutralizing” as restoring balance. You are learning a new technique or tool that you could apply to a situation to remove a threat and restore balance. Without the tool, there’s fear and struggle.
In a nutshell, this is what all self help does. It offers tools to apply to any given situation so that you can manage and restore balance. It neutralizes the human experience.
Owning our darkness is a part of this process if not most of it. For most of My Best Friend’s Wedding, chaos ensued because Julia Roberts acted from her shadow. When she chose to face it, she was choosing self-acceptance. And balance was restored.
Food for thought.
Thank you for reading and be well!
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