Day Two Hundred and Thirty Two!!!!!!

Self-Reflection


Do you practice self-reflection? 


The practice of self-reflection is about engaging with the experience of gazing within. It increases self-knowledge, making you more aware of your way of being in the world, increases understanding of how others perceive you, and gives you the opportunity to use this increased self-knowledge more effectively for yourself and with others. The practice of self-reflection helps you by making meaning of past, present and future, by questioning and observing yourself in order to learn and grow. It also increases your understanding of your own insights and feelings in order to better determine future direction.


Self-reflection requires commitment and ritual practice. 


Journaling is one way to self reflect and there is a process to journaling, it’s not just vomiting everything out of you onto the page or onto someone else, although it can be that! It can be done by emailing yourself, and reviewing your email and responding to yourself as if you are your best friend, giving helpful advice, or even using your phone to record yourself, and then playing it back, while asking yourself questions. It also helps to have someone listen and provide feedback, so that you have the opportunity to gain further insight. 


Psychotherapy can provide a means of self-reflection and it provides a means of ongoing evaluation of your progress, provides feedback, and an ongoing reflective process of insight for the opportunity for change. This way you have the opportunity to not only access your experiences, but to gain an understanding and learn through your lived-experiences, in order to take action towards developing increasing effectiveness. 


So, it’s an integration that takes place between what it is that you have experienced and the insights gained through the self-reflective process, in order to make the necessary changes to move towards who it is you really would like to be.


So, it is good to have a list of questions in order to help you reflect so that you can look objectively at your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. For example, experiences are just that, what is really important is to be able to take the learning from the experience. So once it is that you write out whatever your experience was then you have the opportunity to take a step back by writing it down it is now away from you so therefore you can see it differently. So the first question is, what is the learning? It is good to realize that we gain in wisdom by bouncing off the walls, not by going in a straight line. Having difficulty in relationships with yourself, with your weight, with your daily routine is an opportunity to gain in wisdom. If you never had those difficulties then you wouldn’t have the opportunity to learn from them.


By concentrating on the learning this provides the opportunity to change the negative energy of your experience into positive creativity and growth. Do not get stuck in the negative muck. The goal is to make your world a better place and you a better person so that you can concentrate on your good qualities and to have the opportunity to self reflect on your own preconceived impression of yourself and the feedback obtained from others.