Introspection is the analysis of one’s own emotional and mental thought process. It is necessary for personal growth. When we do not realize, acknowledge, understand, monitor, change or outgrow our thoughts and feelings, there is no room for growth. The worst scenario would be having lived an entire lifetime and staying the same person all through life.
Monitoring our thought patterns, habits, emotions, feelings, the way one reacts to a particular thought, or situation, repetitive thoughts, negative feelings, anxiety, fear etc., has a reason for surfacing in the first place. We label them, push, ponder and never deal with them.
Just take a moment and sit with your thoughts and emotions. Say, you are anxious and fearful- it means something is important. Ponder over it, try to understand why it is necessary and replace the anxiety with thoughts of hope and faith. Thoughts are like radio waves- when you want to change, you should focus on the thought patterns rather than the outcome. Simply put, one cannot keep on thinking negative thoughts and expect positive results, and vice versa, when one keeps thinking positive thoughts, as per the law of attraction one gets positive results in life.
Introspection is crucial. We are not under obligation to be the same person as who we were yesterday, or even a second ago. We make mistakes, sometimes we get ourselves stuck in a loop of negative behaviours, childhood trauma messes with our lives, and we are lost forever. But all it takes is to observe and monitor one’s ownself from a third-person perspective.
Our mind is so over everything - it prevents us from realizing our own mistakes. Change itself is not an unpleasant thing. Change is necessary for growth. When you accept the flaws and the faulty thought pattern you kept repeating, you change.
It takes a tremendous amount of willpower, and self-esteem to even begin introspection. The thing I most fear is being the same person I was years ago. I want to learn, adapt, change, evolve positively. I want to learn from the experiences and apply the lessons I have learned along the way into my future. I want to help people if they are going through the same challenge that I was going through. I want to tell people that it is possible to break a toxic relationship, you can survive childhood trauma, and you can come out of the survival mode and start living your life. It is possible. The pain we endured, what we went through, instead of it being a terrible past, let it be a strong foundation for our better future. We are who we are because of our experience, pain, lessons, mistakes, good and bad, everything that shaped us. Let the pain we endured be something worthwhile. Allow something good to come from all the pain.
The philosopher Plato asked, Why should we not calmly and patiently review our thoughts, and thoroughly examine and see what these appearances in us are?
