Day Fifty-Four: Can I Change What I Don't Like About Myself?

Like most people, I think, there are a lot of things about myself I am unhappy with. For most people, it's either skin, or weight, or any other myriad of parts: legs, butt, belly, feet, and hair, to name a few. On a more abstract level, it can be temper, aversion to change, lack of motivation, or stubbornness, and that's only a small sampling. I don't know if it's a characteristic of our culture as a country, or as a social society, but it seems that not many people are really happy about themselves. And like most people, I'm the same way. For me, though, I'm most unhappy with my inability to handle stress and my constant inner tension.

Unlike a physical flaw or a difficult behavior, how do you change a true inner characteristic? How can I control how I handle stress when I'm in the middle of thinking about a gamut of stressful (or even non-stressful) predicaments? Sure, I can stop and tell myself to calm down as many times as I want. I can make myself stop and take a deep breath, move more slowly, and think more clearly. But as soon as I start thinking about the actual situation at hand, all that nice, slow, even breathing and clearing of the mind goes completely to waste. I can't change it with behavior change, really -- I have to make a complete change in my thought process and in how I think. This much, I'm aware of. But how exactly am I supposed to do that?

I could be completely full of it, but I think it can't be much unlike changing little things about yourself everyday. As a concrete example, not too long ago I was told to naturally correct my posture for health reasons. I knew I had awful posture, but I couldn't exactly consciously think about standing up straight all the time -- I simply didn't have the time or energy, and it was frankly a little uncomfortable. But what I learned was to correct my posture in segments from the ground up and to just change little things. I'd change the way I balanced on my feet, the way I held my shoulders, and with a nod of my head, the way it balanced on my neck. While it was a slightly painstaking to stop and quickly correct my posture everytime I remembered, it wasn't even really enough change for me to notice. And after a month or so, I had perfect posture, and I never even noticed.

So what little elements of myself can I change to be a more calm? How can I change the proverbial posture of my serenity? I feel like to answer this question, I need some sort of life coach, or an in-house Buddhist monk. Maybe it wouldn't hurt to start meditating again everyday, as I did for a very brief stint in college. The scary part was, it worked quite well. I guess it's worth a shot to keep myself alive for a little longer.