Last night I was a guest on the LifeHer podcast. I received a question that surprised me: Does it both you that white women get called Karen? The question reminded me of a conversation I had had with one of my mentors, just last week. Her take was that most controversies are a distraction from us looking at ourselves.
Pointing fingers is so, so easy, and our media does it continuously encouraging us to place our attention out there instead of in here. Often times we do self-development work for all the wrong reasons. Most of my self-development work I did because I thought I was broken and not good enough. I wanted to fix myself before anyone else would notice how broken I was. I lived in the constant fear that people who find out, leave me, stop loving me, or fire me, and that my life would fall apart.
As a white woman, I was embodying the way most white women walk in the world–we attempt to control most aspects of our life, less it fall apart. We live in the illusion that letting our lives fall apart is the worse that could happen to us. Sometimes, letting a life fall apart is the biggest gift that can happen to anyone.
When my life was a piecemeal of relationships that I thought I had to keep together, I spent most of my days scared of being caught and scared of what I should or shouldn’t say, what I did or didn’t say. Most of my brainpower was spent analyzing the past: the worst-case scenarios about the future. I didn’t trust anyone’s love not even my parents’ love. So self-development was looking myself in the mirror but the intention was fear. I was criticizing myself to death in excruciating detail–looking for the next weakness to fix, improve, remove.
When I see this in my Reiki students, I always invite them to enter self-development as an act of self-love. Becoming aware of a part of ourselves we don’t like, is not a popularity contest: it’s the truthful face-to-face of what doesn’t serve us. If a behavior, thought or action I take doesn’t serve the life I want to live, then it will create suffering for me. the act of self-love is to be willing to face myself and improve as an act of LOVE for myself. I decide to improve so I can suffer less. So I can live a more joyful life.
When we criticize others and hop on to the latest controversy….sorta like “should they be calling white women Karen?” we invest previous life energy in how others behave–avoiding the mirror on ourselves. My answer to the question is a simply don’t care.
Here’s what I do care about. Was I loving towards myself today? Did I support or sabotage what is important to me? My physical health? My mental health? My joy? My Goals? Did I surround myself with people who uplift me? Or did I connect with those who I knew I’d feel worse around, and then, I did? Why did I make those choices? Why is it easier for me to have acts of love for others, than myself? What act of self-love can I take tomorrow?