Re: ...Starting with the person in the mirror...

savanni [no longer around] said Feb 13, 2007, 9:31 PM:
 

This excercise makes one aspect of Buddhist Vipassana meditation.  All of it focuses on insight, and on noting what the mind is doing.  I view the sit-down meditation time as practice for actually doing this all the time.

I find it very difficult, though.  It is so easy for my watcher to go to sleep.  But when the watcher is awake, I find that it is able to watch me, and watch emself at the same time!  That is the point at which I become aware of how I am reacting to things, what persona I am trying to depict, and how my body is feeling the world around me.

The results excite me a lot.  They are difficult to achieve, and when the stress piles up I can easily forget all of this, but otherwise… wow.  Actually knowing what I am doing and why I am doing it, or that there is something I need to dig for to find more!

One of the communities I am involved with emphasises this for, I think , for similar reasons to what you are talking about.  We call it “I am my own primary partner”, almost as a mantra, but the idea is that, above all of my other relationships, I must have a strong, healthy relationship with myself.  Once I can do that, and once I can like or love myself with all of my flaws and with all of my shadows, I can really be far more concious with any of my other relationships.

As you said, if I already know a flaw is there, and I have accepted it and maybe I am even trying to change it, somebody else pointing it out to me becomes less threatening.  Maybe it is because it is just one of those things that I can look back and say “yeah, I know”.  It is not something that I must deny.