Several weeks ago I passed a homeless man in a sleeping bag, looking pathetic and whimpering ‘help me’ as he poked his paper cup out at passers by outside Waterloo station.

Inside my head in that moment the words ‘make a fucking effort you helpless bum’ lurched out like a angry dog out of my control. Luckily I did not say it out loud but I still thought it.

It caught me off guard and attacked mercilessly. It seemed in that moment a terrible thing to think, never mind extremely ignorant and heartless.

I intellectually know this is wrong, so I attempt to lie to myself that I think it.

I try and push it under the carpet and not acknowledge it. To blame being tired or deceive myself that what I thought was actually right about this individual or the old cliche that I have to go to a job I don’t like, so why don’t you!?

But this is what we all do to some extent and why we never change.

I want to believe I’m a good person and don’t want to believe the thought I’d just had.

It’s not who I tell myself I am. Its not who I want to believe I am!

But the truth is, it is who I am……and at the same time it isn’t.

So which is it?

The only way to find out who you are is to enquire about the thought. To own it. To admit it and be with it rather than deny ever having said it or thought it.

Asking yourself what’s it really about, rather than resisting it because it reveals something none of us like to admit about ourselves or that we have these ‘terrible thoughts’.

However this was not my main insight on this day.

The echo coming back from my internal tirade at this unfortunate person, was that he was simply a manifestation of me.

A trigger thought said ‘that’s a projection of me,’ – of my inner frustrations in that moment with the stuff I was dealing with on this particular weekend.

I was the whimpering mess!

I needed to get up and take action!

‘Make a fucking effort you sub servient, permission seeking asshole! Stop skipping around the issue you approval seeking, acceptance begging cxxt!’ I screamed to myself.

Harsh?

No, not in this instance. Not to me.

Its what I needed to hear. Its what I needed to know.

It felt refreshing and liberating to hear the truth rather than deny the lies I had originally thought. Lies which without investigation, we spend our time reliving over and over or taking no responsibility for. Had I not enquired it would have been all an external problem such as the homeless man that was causing me pain. That’s where we live most of the time. Its never about us.

Its all to easy in our PC society to tread gently, gently with one an other in case we get offended.

All to often self development panders to the idea of being kind to ourselves and treating our inner child with love and tender care.

And this has its place, but at times we need a shake up.

We need someone to say ‘you need to get off the tit Jonny!’ as my old boss once said to me a few years back, which was the very advice and the catalyst I needed to make some significant changes at that time.

Someone who is willing to be honest with us for the right reasons.

If we can’t be honest with ourselves how can we ever be honest with anyone else, or hope that we are open enough to hear the truth when those that care about us offer us some home truths.

Sometimes we need to stop defending ourselves over the things we don’t like and be willing to really enquire into what’s actually being said, either in our own heads or by others and take a good hard look at the part we play in creating it.

Marshal Rosenberg, creator of Non Violent Communication (NVC) advocates that we must first check that what we want to say is in harmony with what we want communicate, then speak it. He goes on to say –

‘the more we try preventing people freaking out when we speak, the more we become nice, dead people’.

‘when you think the other persons reaction might be a problem, you are putting your security in their hands’.

‘Its our reaction to their reaction we have to fear. It’s not their response but how we receive it.’

Many times, (this blog included), I fear that I will be jumped on by thinking such thoughts, of being thought of as a nasty piece of work or simply wrong. Even my language at times can be base. But its how I think! So why wouldn’t I tell it how it is in my world….and from what I know working with lots of people, your worlds also.

When I set out to write my posts it wasn’t to make friends or get pats on the back or to sell out to an industry I find talks a lot of bullshit.

The sole purpose was to show that how we all think is not wrong, even when it doesn’t relate to how we have been sold we should be thinking.

When people start to talk about this stuff and how they think and feel it becomes apparent that we all have ways of thinking that we chastise ourselves over because they are somehow politically incorrect or apart from the perceived norm.

The irony is that its the other way round.

How we think is normal and what we are sold regarding ‘how we should think’ is actually wrong in most cases.

The missing link is often showing us how to be able to accept those thoughts and how to enquire into the reason for their existence in that moment.

We often feel guilty because of what we have thought or said because we are under an illusion of how we are supposed to think and feel.

I remember a friend telling me many years ago how just being noticed and spoken to like a human being makes a huge difference to a homeless person and I endeavour to do that. I buy tea on a cold day or share a sandwich on my way back from work with people on the street because I believe its the right thing to do as a human being.

And thus its what makes my thought at the start if this story so hard for me to swallow.

At times I am the man who does what he thinks is the right and kind thing to do.

But I’m also the man who is often frustrated and irrationally lashes out.

If I am to deny any of those identities or try to push one to the back of my mind, I am doing myself and everyone else, including the homeless man who instigated this story, a disservice because this incident will continue to happen if I simply block it out.

By enquiring into our thoughts we can understand ‘who’ we really are rather than ‘who our thoughts often make us believe we are’.

By doing so we spend our time becoming the person we wish to be, rather than the person we are pretending to be.