I am a work in progress...something good happened today when I went for my usual exercise and recalled some of the negative things I tell myself. First of all, I isolated the things...lined them up in list form. Then, taking them one at a time,I dismantled every one of them. It didn't take much time, and the way that I felt afterwards was worth it. For a long time I could not reconcile two opposing beliefs I put to myself. One, that I can be mistaken about my negative self talk and, two, that the reality I base my personal criticisms on are real and must be confronted. Now I understand that everything is an illusion from the perspective that whatever I confront as needing to work on,I accentuate. It doesn't mean that I am more left than right....neither is the issue. A table and chair are real enough. It is what I choose to focus on that propels my reality in whatever direction I feel most comfortable with. What this little exercise did for me today is literally stack my belief system from the past against what I am seeing now. In so doing, I saw how very long I was holding to a personal prison of my own making. To be fair to myself. this is happening to most of us on the planet. Who knew what good friends, practically family all that negativity became.It sounds trite, it sounds obvious...but it is also true....you really have to just literally say to yourself that you are not going to make negativity your default setting. Having feelings, thinking that something may be bad for you...all of that is fine....what isn't fine is the constant dialogue of nitpicking at yourself. That is not ok. In the past I even tried the....would you say the things you say to yourself to other people? That worked sometimes, but that can;t always work because I easily choose how to behave for the world at large. I am clearly not always being myself with others for a variety of reasons. Exhaustion has brought me here.I can't keep listening to myself pull myself down as much as I have. Now, as I stated before, when I start on my bad talking....I can listen to all of it and break it apart for what it is.