Emotional Inteligence

 

When I was a child, my teachers taught us that we should read books to the end. Now that I'm almost stepping into old age, I've come to realize that such rules are no longer relevant to me.

I don't know if I've matured enough to realize that what I was taught in school no longer applies to my life, or if I simply prefer to acquire only the knowledge I truly need. This means that if I only like a part of a book, I only read what interests me, leaving the rest behind. This may not apply to every book but it could be an option depending on the reading.   

After talking to some people about this, I've realized that we often experience a strong sense of guilt if we don't read a book in its entirety. Sometimes, the book sits on a shelf untouched for a long time, and that feeling of not having finished it becomes a constant reminder which brings shame to our energy.   

It seems that the book becomes a symbol of the guilt that was instilled in us in school when we were children. This guilt is not only reflected in the bookshelf but also in our minds.

I never learned how to free myself from that guilt, as soon as I started working on my shadows I saw that was a problem for me but it seems that we cannot move forward if we don't confront it.

What I did to rid myself of that guilt is to realize two important things that can be difficult to let go of. 

The first thing that I had to realize was that I am no longer in school, and I had to reconnect with what people call my inner child.  In some of the meditations I found that help you get in touch with your younger self, I found her sitting with an unfinished book, crying because she didn't want to memorize something she didn't like. I sympathized with her and gave her a book that I knew she would enjoy. She took the book and started reading without hesitation. I left her with the book, and when I returned a couple of days later, she was eager for more knowledge. I told her that she didn't have to read the rest of the book she didn't like and that from that day forward, she would decide what she wanted to know, and I would bring her the books she needed. If she found something in a book that she didn't like, that wouldn't be an impediment to blocking out what she wanted to read.

The second important thing is to apply compassion to this issue, compassion make things softer for us to start seeing things under a different light and easier to confront. The only reason my emotional growth was stagnant was because I didn't know that compassion existed.  In order to understand compassion I had to learn a lot of things first.   It seems to me like my life has been so hard that I didn't have a perception of what soft and caring was.   It has been the hardest thing I had to do so far, which is learn to slow down my mind enough to be able to feel very subtle things.    

Porque no leemos?

Cuando era una niña, mis maestros nos enseñaron que debíamos leer los libros hasta el final. Ahora que casi estoy en mi vejez, me he dado cuenta de que esas normas ya no son relevantes para mí.

No sé si he madurado lo suficiente para darme cuenta de que lo que me enseñaron en la escuela ya no se aplica a mi vida, o si simplemente prefiero adquirir solo el conocimiento que realmente necesito. Esto implica que si me gusta solo una parte de un libro, solo leo lo que me interesa, dejando el resto atrás.

Después de hablar con algunas personas sobre este tema, me he dado cuenta de que a menudo experimentamos un fuerte sentimiento de culpa si no leemos un libro por completo. A veces, el libro se queda en una estantería sin tocar durante mucho tiempo, y ese sentimiento de no haberlo terminado se convierte en un recordatorio constante.

Parece que el libro se convierte en un símbolo de la culpa que nos inculcaron en la escuela cuando éramos niños. Esta culpabilidad no solo se refleja en la estantería, sino también en nuestra mente.

Nunca aprendí a liberarme de esa culpa, pero parece que no podemos avanzar si no la enfrentamos.

Lo que hice para librarme de esa culpa es darme cuenta de dos cosas importantes que a veces es difícil dejar atrás. La primera es que ya no estoy en la escuela y que tuve que reconectar con lo que la gente llama mi niña interior. La encontré sentada con un libro sin terminar, llorando porque no quería memorizar algo que no le gustaba. Me compadecí de ella y le di un libro que sabía que le iba a gustar. Ella tomó el libro y comenzó a leer sin dudarlo. La dejé con el libro y cuando volví un par de días después, estaba ansiosa por más conocimiento. Le dije que no tenía que leer el resto del libro que no le gustaba y que a partir de ese día, ella decidiría lo que quería saber, y yo le traería los libros que necesitará. Si encontraba algo en algún libro que no le gustaba, eso no sería un impedimento para que bloqueara lo que quería leer.

La segunda cosa importante es aplicar la compasión a este problema, lo que facilita enfrentarlo. El único motivo por el que mi crecimiento emocional estaba estancado era porque no sabía que la compasión existía.