Accepting my mistakes

When we make a mistake, we should acknowledge it, accept it and learn from it. Philosophy says that we need to accept ourselves as we are, live with the mistakes we make. It’s ok to feel bad about mistakes but they need to be acknowledged and accepted. Where do I get this idea from? See below.

I always had problems with accepting myself. I even had a greater problem with accepting my past self. I made many mistakes I regretted and I keep recalling these events frequently. You don’t need to think about major and life-changing mistakes here, only small ones such as not saying something to someone until it was too late, saying something when I should have said something else, or going left when I knew the better way was to the right. Small things that come back and then I bury my face into my hands and say „how could I be so stupid?!”

Not too long ago, I recognised that this was not right. It’s just self-destruction because I kept saying I couldn’t be a good or successfull (or happy, for that matter) person because I kept doing these silly mistakes. The recognition came from discussions with friends and through a DVD recommended by one of them, The Secret (note that now I’m completely disgusted with the people who made the video and book, but I don’t want to tell why because the ideas they communicate in The Secret might be very useful and eye-opening to many people). So what I learned was that we should focus on what and who we want to be, live in the present and accept who we are, and learn from the past and mistakes made in the past (I think I have written something about this already in and old post).

A recent improvement in accepting myself was through a book, Nonviolent Communication – A Language of Life. I needed improvement because, unfortunately, accepting myself is not like a sudden enlightment but a timely process. The book says, and I agree with it, that if you want to accept your old mistakes (and you are a person thinking too much about how ’it could/should have been done better’) you need to analyse them. This one I hadn’t done. Imagining what the proper way would have been just made my negative image of myself even stronger. Now I’m analysing these mistakes and I see that I didn’t do them because I was a bad person but because I wanted something good for myself but that action resulted in a situation that, at the end, wasn’t really good for me. For example, I didn’t want to work on my thesis because I felt it was worthless, I was worthless. I rather stayed at home, did anything to avoid working on it, I slept at least 9-10 hours a day. Recently I have realised that it wasn’t because I was worthless but because I needed more security. I wanted something good for myself, I wanted to feel secure desperately, but the result of this was, unfortunately, delay in work whose finish would have provided an opportunity to feel more secure (by securing a good job that pays for the accomodation which is comfortable and feels good being there).

Since starting to analyse and understand my past mistakes, I don’t feel so bad about them. I don’t feel so much angry with myself. It took some 14 years to understand some of the mistakes of the past but at least I’m improving now.

I used to remember a lot of my mistakes in aikido trainings, too. I still would like to bang my head into a wall when I don’t move the way I imagined or the ways sensei tells us. It takes time to realise what I’m doing, to analyse why I’m doing it and to calm down and learn that only relaxation (and a lot of practice) will make me a better aikidoka, so being tense because of mistakes is not the way forward. I’m at the beginning of learning this understanding and empathy and I hope many things are yet to come to become a better person.

The book by Marshall B. Rosenberg mostly focuses on nonviolent communication with other people, but he also mentions that if you want to be in harmony with others, first you should be in harmony with yourself. The funny thing is that I still haven’t finished the book as I’ve started practicing this self-anger management and it takes a lot of my thinking time and I want to get somewhere with this initial stage before reading on and going to the next step.

The whole mistake thing comes from translating one of the ’how NOT to do it’ common mistake analysis texts for this site. At the end of the text, we are encouraging readers to post their mistake experiences even in the format of videos and I was wondering whether I would post such a video or write a story about an aikido mistake I made/make myself. I think I should, to prove that I can live with my mistakes.

Here’s a memorable aikido mistake I had been making for a long time before I was corrected:

When being at about 6th or 5th kyu, we used to enjoy that we were ’experienced’ and we ’could fall’ (obviously, it was true compared to complete beginners but nothing compared to any other people with hakama), so we speeded up some techniques. This happened with iriminage (indirect/tenkan/long/whatever-you-call-it version). We could do it quickly, but at that level it was naturally far from applying all the principles properly. I knew I was supposed to ’run around’ the defender and sooner or later he would raise his arm and my legs would run away while my head would not (-> bang-boom). Running around the refender in a training camp in front of a (then) 4th dan master was not a good idea. When he stopped the class and started explaining how to do iriminage and why uke runs around, I felt so embarassed and stupid because I knew I was supposed to know why uke goes like that but I just wasn’t conscious about it. Noone knew why the training was stopped that time but it was enough for me to remember this mistake for a very long time.
Now I laugh about having done iriminage like that and I tell the story to people who start ’running around’. We all have a good laugh and now noone runs around with no reason (which is not so much my own effect but I hope to be a part of it). Instead, we try to follow the defender (tori) and focus on coming forward constantly. If tori is not experienced enough to keep control, I try to correct them by saying two words (’neck control’) or slightly positioning their hand to hold my neck properly. As uke (attacker), I still try to avoid stopping tori because I remember how bad it feels to be stopped in the middle of the technique and because we are training to achieve harmony (about other views, I’ll write another post later) not to stop it and hold a quick lecture. Lecturing should be left to sensei in case he wishes to do so and because the class (me included) needs it.

ps. this post has been written a couple of months ago but now that I found it I thought it would be useful to post. I have read the book since :).