Day 115- Fully Committing to my Studies (pt 7)

          In my last blog I gave a little update-type of post, and within this blog I am continuing with the ‘getting out of the work’ character, for context visit:

Day 106- I Just Go Crazy

Day 107- Getting Out of the Work

Day 108- Just Doing the Damn Work

      

         This is a character I go into and have gone into since the beginning of my academic career. It is an actual manifestation of myself as one who will do anything to not do the work that is required of me. This character is triggered by all sorts of

thoughts/feelings/emotions/beliefs/memories etc… that emerge within me when there is a difficult task, in this case, schoolwork which I find hard, thus activating this entire character within and as me that I have to fight with in order to move myself to get down to just doing the damn work.

          It’s really not that complicated, yet I have made it so for myself over the years, decades now even, and so now here I am dealing with it. Untangling the web, tracing back each thread to its source so that I can take out the knots and kinks that bind me in order to re-create myself as a self that is capable of self-support.

Continuing herewith, the imagination dimension:

Yet another dimension of a character. When and as I am faced with schoolwork, what things seem to ‘pop’ into my head that can be classified as imaginings:

1) I imagine myself starting the work, and then effortlessly zipping right through it without the least bit of effort, and then getting on with my life.

          The consequence of this is that it is obviously not in any way aligned with reality, therefore when I actually do sit down to do the work, and I read about what is going to be required of me, as soon as I see that it’s not going to be easy and effortless I’ll have a reaction. So, what I am not considering is the amount of

time that will be involved in doing the work, and the multitude of steps, both forward and backward, that inevitably take place within my studies and getting through the work.

2) I imagine an assignment I have to do, then I think about another assignment I have for another class, and then I think about the exams, and eventually I have compressed time and I’m now looking at all the assignments I’m going to have to get through and it just seems like this insurmountable wall of work that I’m looking at.

           The consequence of this is that when I do sit down to do the work, it feels like I’m moving so increadibly slowly, and that I’m barely sratching the surface of what I’m going to have to get through in the next week/month/semester ad it’s like “how am I going to do this all?”

Self-Forgiveness

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to imagine my schoolwork as being super easy and seeing and visualizing myself ‘zipping’ through it in no time at all, wherein, when it comes time to actually sit down and do the work, I find myself feeling overly discouraged when and as I face a point that will require extra time and effort- more so than I had planned for within my unrealistic imagining of the event.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to create an unrealistic scenario in my head, wherein all my schoolwork seems extremely easy and quick, when I know in fact that this is not so, yet I would sabotage myself by imagining such a scenario within a judgment of the class being easy, or myself being smart and experienced and more advanced in my studies than this class is designed for.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to judge some classes as easy, when I know through having learned from experience that even introductory courses require learning concepts, memorizing information, reading lengthy texts and understanding and integrating new information, and can be just as difficult, or require just as much application as the more advanced classes I have taken.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to judge myself as more advanced because I have taken more difficult courses than the ones I am currently in, wherein I lead myself to imagine that these courses should be easier, when in fact I have seen that such a tendency to imagine the work being easy for me has only ever created the opposite effect, because I approached the work within the belief that I would not have to apply myself as much.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to approach any work within the belief that I will not have to apply myself as much, within the assumption that applying myself takes more effort, when in fact applying myself only requires me to be present while I am working, and not applying myself is simply me allowing myself to be lazy, to be preoccupied, to be distracted and to be 'up in my mind' fantasizing and day dreaming which is always avoiding real life and creating more work and more consequences for myself. Thus, I see, realize and understand that fully applying myself is a skill that becomes ‘easier’ as I practice it, while avoiding applying myself always creates more work for myself soon after.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to try/attempt to justify for myself reasons to be lazy and avoid applying myself, such as ‘I have already done the hard stuff’ and ‘this work will be easier,’ instead of seeing, realizing and understanding that within approaching work from a starting point of equality and oneness, all work is the same in terms of Who I Am within doing the work, as I will not accept Who I Am as lazy and as avoidance within anything I do, within this:

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not stand as Who I Am as equal and one with/as presence and awareness, diligence, patience and discipline within my starting point when and as I approach schoolwork.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to stand within a starting point of laziness and avoidance within doing my schoolwork/approaching doing work.

To be continued….

To learn these self-supportive writting tools visite DIP LITE

For the entire series

Day 106- I Just Go Crazy

Day 107- Getting Out of the Work

Day 108- Just Doing the Damn Work

Day 109- Fully Committing to Studies

Day 110- Fully Committing to My Studies (pt. 2)

Day 111- Fully Committing to my Studies (pt. 3)

Day 112- Fully Committing to my Studies (pt 4)

Day 113- Fully Committing to my Studies (pt 5)

Day 114- Fully Committing to my Studies (pt 6)

Day 107- Getting Out of the Work

I am using the tool of

self-forgiveness to work through the following experience:

“I’ve gotten to the point where I am able to move myself to go and actually set time for something and sit down to start it, but then, as I’m doing it, I “just start going crazy” within myself. I don’t know how many times I’ve said that. But I get super uncomfortable and distractible and preoccupied which I accept and allow to pull me away from the task at hand and prolong the time it takes to do it, instead of sitting down, focusing and working through it comfortably.”

In my previous blog I identified the tendency I have to make this an all-consuming experience, affecting many different dimensions of my beingness/awareness/ability to move myself. Thus it is a character I become, as ‘all of me’ is engaged in the experience. The character I identified in my previous blog was what I called the ‘underestimating character’, but upon further looking into it, I see that it’s more of a ‘getting out of work’ character, wherein, I will leave the assignment to last minute because I don’t ‘want’ to do the work.

Then, instead of having left myself enough time to do it, I will have to rush at the last minute and do it all at once. Eventually I ‘get into it’, but it takes a lot, and then I have to really skim and make it look like I had spent a lot of time doing it.

This was a ‘skill’ that got me through elementary and high school, but when I got into college, I could not get away with it, and I dropped out for this reason, among many others. Now, in university, it is impossible to pull this trick. This had made my university experience quite a reality check. Even when I got to the point of sitting down to do it, ,I would try to get out of it, manipulating myself and falling in the face of many resistances. It’s like, if I didn’t have that ‘last minute’ stress pushing me, I simply could not move myself to do the work. If I had two weeks to do it, I would complete it at the very end of that two weeks, if I had one day, I would get it done at the end of that day, and if I had six months, I wouldn’t look at it for five months.

Now I am doing my classes online, so I have to rely on myself completely to manage my time. I have done pretty well with writing about this and pushing myself, but I have still not gotten to the point of simply sitting down and moving myself, breath by breath, through the work. Trying to ‘get out’ of the work had become so ingrained in me as a survival technique throughout my entire academic career, that when it came to a time where I actually wanted to learn and do the work well, I simply did not have the tools such as discipline, focus, time-management and self-movement to do so. So here I am taking on the ‘getting out of the work’ character, because enough is enough, I can no longer accept nor allow this behavior to continue.

So, herein, I will be looking at all the dimensions of a ‘character’, which are the thought, fear, imagination, reaction and physical dimensions, beginning with thought:

Getting Out of Work; Thought Dimension:

1) A picture of me sitting at my desk in front of an assignment drawing a complete blank.

2) The thought that there’s a whole big action packed world ‘out there’ that I’m missing out on, and that the work I have to do is so slow and boring and pointless.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to create and manifest this thought of sitting in front of an assignment and drawing a blank, as a form of self-sabotage, based on past memories of being a student in elementary, high school and college, wherein I would daydream and doodle all day long in class, ‘enduring’ class, so that when I got homework and assignments to do at home, I literally had no idea what I was supposed to do, and would sit in front of it and feel as though it were an impossible task, and give up, or just do some bare minimum work and hope for the best, in which case I would get a bad grade. Within this:

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not see, realize and understand that I now DO pay attention in class, and I do know what’s going on, and instead of applying what I learned in class and have read in the material, I go into the ‘getting out of work’ character as a survival mechanism, within the assumption that I am incapable of doing the work, and going into the ‘getting out of the work’ character as a survival mode technique, creating and manifesting stress and anxiety within me, wherein I can’t focus and end up easily distracted and unable to absorb and synthesize all the information, thus creating the exact thing I’m trying to avoid, which is: sitting in front of my work, drawing a blank.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to validate and perpetuate the ‘getting out of the work’ character, by conjuring up thoughts that CONvince me that I’m only going to draw blanks, which I then believe and follow by participating in them through giving them my attention and energy, thus actually making it real in fact.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing the thought of ‘me sitting down at my desk in front of an assignment drawing a blank’ to exist within and as me.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to further sabotage my application of myself by thinking that there’s a whole big action packed world out there that I’m missing out on, and that the work I’m directing myself to do is so slow and boring and pointless, which triggers the ‘getting out of work’ character in which I will put it off and then try to do quickly all at once right before the deadline.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to try to read through material really quickly, looking for key words, and then only reading the parts that I think are relevant to the questions I have to answer or the part I need to research. I understand that there is a certain amount of skimming I have to do, but self-directed skimming where I am grasping concepts and strategically focusing more on some parts and not others is different from frantically trying to get through it as fast as possible and ‘find the answer’ immediately in an attempt to ‘get it over with’, which is NOT acceptable.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to read frantically through my texts in an attempt to get through it as fast as possible and ‘find the answer’ in an attempt to get it over with, instead of slowing myself down and reading with patience and focus, allowing myself to absorb the concepts the author is trying to convey, in order to integrate the information into my understanding in such a way that I can convey it in my own words.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to participating in the thought of there being ‘a whole action packed world out there’ filling me with an energetic pull or desire to go ‘out there’ and see it, while at the same time, participating in the thought that my work is so boring and slow and pointless, instead of stopping the thought as it comes by instead taking a breath and continuing to read.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to place judgments on the work at hand, such as work being ‘bad and boring’ and not working being ‘good and fun’, wherein I create all sorts of energies within me, instead of stopping my judgments and moving myself to do that which I decide I am going to do in a given moment, and simply moving myself to do it as the directive decision of what I am going to occupy my time with in that given moment. No judgment is necessary to do this, in fact, the judgments placed upon the work create unnecessary relationships that cause me to become frustrated and easily distracted within myself.

Self-commitment and self-corrective application statements to follow…