Clearly that is no way to speak to anyone, let alone yourself. And yet, I do.

As a child, every time I left the house my dad would say ‘Be nice, be sweet, be kind’. Not once did I ever consider directing those words inwards.

You’re old

You’re fat

You’re boring

Who would want to come to your class?

And repeat. On a loop. Sing it. Chant it. Everybody join in. One more time now.

It’s a miracle that I did my Yoga Teacher Training. Because that was the refrain sing-songing in my head in the run-up to it. I put myself back in the playground, at the relentless and merciless persecution from the school bully. Me, bullying myself.

In the spirit of honesty and openness I’ll give you another one. Another insight into the murk within. Please don’t judge me.

The context this time is a quiet yoga class. The voices start to whisper, then they start to spit. “Why would anyone come to your class? You think you’re so clever. No-one cares what ‘Ahimsa’ means in Sanskrit. Who are you kidding? Errr No-one. Look at you, setting yourself up as if you’re some kind of expert. What do you REALLY know? Why don’t you just go home and eat a vat of ice-cream?”

And so, it continues.

Rationally, I know this is nonsense. And yet I continue to bathe in my uselessness, my lack of talent, my inadequacies. All the ‘I’m-not-good-enoughs’.

And why am I exposing myself to you all so publicly in this way? Because I know that what I experience is not that unusual. We’re human, we all do this to a greater or lesser degree. In fact, we've been doing it so long most of us hardly realise we're doing it.

I used to take pride in telling myself ‘The truth’. I’d revel in my honesty, give space to my inner critic, the one who provides instant feedback on every performance, how I could improve it, and why almost anyone else could have done it better. I thought that I was ‘reflecting’ and that I was REALLY good at it.

The concept of self-compassion was a discovery that came with yoga. And it has helped me to become aware of the voice inside my head, what it says, and how it says it. I've also begun to question how helpful that incessant commentary is, whether the assertions made are true - and even if they are, do they have to be delivered with such vitriol!

The things other people say and do to us

It’s easy to internalise the negative things that other people say to us. We’re very quick to dismiss the positive and allow the negative to stick.

When I was 13, Steven Burden, a boy in my year at school, laughed at me when I was dancing and told me that I couldn’t dance. 40 years later, I still remember the details. I remember where we were, what I was wearing, how much it hurt and that I was so ashamed that I didn’t tell a single person. This one comment stopped me dancing for years!

The most damaging job I had was working in the office in a local school. One of my tasks was writing a set of letters for the school to send to the parents of children with poor attendance records. The School Business Manager looked at the letters and slashed them up with a red pen. I don’t know when I ever felt more of a failure. Worse than that, a failure at something I thought that I was good at. The self-delusion that I dared to think I was good enough to write these letters was as painful as the actual failure.

It didn’t occur to me that she was wrong, that it was merely that she had a different writing style. She favoured formal, alienating language along the lines of ‘further to my recent letter of ..” The type of writing that most of the parents would be intimidated by. She was old-school, and I am a bad fit in any school.

I choose the examples of dance and writing to illustrate how ready we are to believe the negative things that other people say to us, without us actually examining the evidence. I chose to embed deep within myself the negative feedback on my dancing and writing, despite knowing I had plenty of evidence to the contrary. A classic example of looking for the evidence that backs up the stories that we already believe.

The well-worn cliches about treating ourselves as we would a loved one are cliches for a reason. But to REALLY stop, you must first truly believe that negative self-talk is abusive and damaging.

What we say to ourselves matters. Our thoughts create our reality, and we all want our realities to be limitless, full of possibility. We need to move away from the world where we close the doors and glue the windows shut as we feed ourselves intravenously with a constant drip-drip-drip of negative judgment, self-criticism and verbal abuse.

The first step to changing the dialogue is becoming aware of it in the first place. And how do we do that? Well, that’s a big question! The answer includes meditation, journaling, breathing, and yoga...

Join me in my Facebook Group Jordanna Offers Yoga in the Community. This month we'll be talking about how to become more aware of the self-judgment we put on ourselves, and about how we can learn to be more self-compassionate.

Please feel free to share this with anyone you think that this may be helpful to or find it interesting.