Being kind to yourself!

A few years ago I conducted an experiment – not a scientific one, or in a completely “controlled environment”. But, nevertheless, it was an experiment to see how being nice and nasty has an affect on you.

I wrote a blog post about it on a couple of websites, one of them no longer exists and the other one, well, the post is buried under years of other blog posts, so it’s got lost in the ether of the world wide web.

Having observed the Fuelled By Fun page and the posts people put on - the way people ‘self talk’ and the number of times I read posts that said “I’ve only done…5km/1mile…” Or “It’s just a 10k/5k/400m…” – it occurred to me that this experiment I did, needs to be brought back out of the ether.

The reason this experiment even came to fruition was when I read an article on the Danielle LaPorte website and noticed quite a lot of negative comments on Facebook about her experiment. So, being a bit of a ‘Doubting Thomas’, and wanting to see things for myself – I thought I’d try my own experiment – with some left over rice that we had. Yes, my husband thought I had lost the plot!

I weighed the rice and bagged it up in two separate cling film bags, using two food bag clips to ensure air didn’t get into the bag. The ONLY difference between these two bags of rice is that one of them I ‘spoke’ nicely to and the other one I used words that we tend to use to ourselves a lot (our ‘self-talk’), like “you’re so rubbish” “you just haven’t a clue” etc – you know, that self ‘banter’ that we give ourselves.

First, I had to get past the idea that I was talking to rice – I know, it’s only rice!!! But once I had, I could be quite mean to the rice (sometimes REALLY mean – poor rice!)

Because I wasn’t convinced it would work I didn’t ever take a photo of the rice in it’s younger more positive days – I did sort of think it was me just being a bit random and possibly having a mid-life melt down.

But this is a picture of the bags of rice after a week…

Rice: Week 1

Still not convinced, I figured if one was going mouldy then the other would follow suit quite quickly, but I persevered being nice to one bag and horrible to the other.

After 10 days this is what they looked like…

Rice: 10 Days

And finally 2 weeks later (just before they finally got binned)…

Rice: Week 2

I realise we’re some what more advanced than rice – but at the end of the day, we’re all susceptible to negativity and negative vibrations. We’re all made of atoms – even the rice!!

So please PLEASE be nice to yourself – and to others.

Yes, I realise there are plenty of negative people out there saying that this is a ridiculous experiment, it’s not a scientific experiment blah blah blah all that kind of nonsense. So if you don’t believe it, why don’t you try it for yourself, just as I did. It’s not that difficult to bag up some rice and be nice to one bag and mean to another… or maybe for some of you it is?!

Science is about challenging what we know, or what we think we know. While this isn’t a controlled scientific experiment, it’s an experiment non the less. Everything that we see, touch, hear and feel is related to ‘matter’ – it’s energy, it’s atoms. Just because you can’t see what’s happening to that ‘matter’ doesn’t mean nothing is happening. Just like using derogative comments and being mean to yourself and others may not seem like anything is being affected.

If you think this is all poppy-cock and hokey that’s fine – I don’t care – carry on being mean to yourself and to others, just try not to drag those others down to your mouldy bad rice level please!