Resisting the Myth of 'Progress'

Instructions for "Resisting the Myth of Progress'":

• Set your intention this week to pay attention to the stories you are telling yourself in your mind.
• When you find yourself judging where you are on your journey toward a goal, be it work life, personal life, fitness, or to do with your mental health, stop, and take a belly-breath.
• Replace the judging with self-compassion and kindness. 
• Ask yourself what you can learn about where you are—if you've had what you perceive as a setback, what learning can you take from it?
• Resolve to carry this learning with you, as you reset your course and carry on toward your goal.

Measuring progress on a journey to good mental health is a tricky business. We want to feel like we are doing better, then, when we have a setback, or the recurrence of a 'symptom', it can be devastating. It feels like an incredible failure, like we have been thrust right back to square 1. 
In truth, we never go back to square 1—the idea that life's journey follows a straight line is a myth, more often we move in zig-zags, swirls, and sometimes even circles. But we are always moving, we are never still. Going backwards is impossible, even if we find ourselves in the same place, the self perceiving the place has changed.
Try to be like your sat nav—when you take a wrong turn, your sat nav simply corrects the course. It doesn't call you an asshole or a failure, so why should you?

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"I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy." - Marie Curie

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