“I was wrong.”
As I did so, I felt my jaw unclench, and my shoulders drop. Suddenly, I felt lighter, as if I’d put down a heavy bag of groceries I didn’t know I was carrying.

The Protective Nervous System

One of my meditation teachers, Julianna Raye, the co-founder of Unified Mindfulness, often references the innate defensiveness of our nervous system in her teachings. It’s not a bug, but a feature of a system designed to protect us from physical, psychological, and social threats.

Being defensive – holding tightly to my opinions and beliefs to save face – is a normal reflex. It also feels good. Believing I’m right, even if I’m not, lulls me into a state of self-satisfaction.
And yet being defensive – continually feeling as if I’m holding up my fists in front of my face – or asserting I’m right is energetically costly. It also creates discord.

I mean, is there really only one way to load a dishwasher?

My husband certainly thinks so. Whenever we tussle about this, though, I can’t help but feel as if we’re two bald men fighting over a comb.

I know it doesn’t matter in the scheme of things, and still, it’s hard for me to admit that his dishwasher-loading methodology is more efficient – even more elegant – than mine. I also don’t like being wrong – as I’ve just learned – about the best way to harvest the lettuce in our garden bed. Apparently, you get more bang for your buck if you do so leaf by leaf instead of ripping out the whole head at once.

These are some of the reasons mindfulness is a practice (old habits of wanting to be right die hard) and why I keep at it.

I do so not just by meditating but also by relying on the attitudes that support mindfulness – one of which is openness, which I also think of as mental flexibility or having enough humility to see someone else’s point of view.

Humility as an act of self-forgetting

The Christian author C.S. Lewis suggested that true humility was an act of self-forgetting, rather than self-deprecation. It involved focusing on others instead of myopically on yourself, and presumably any need to be right.

For me, one way to embrace humility is to acknowledge when I’m wrong, or at the very least admit there might be other ways to do things – including loading the dishwasher and pulling lettuce from the planter bed.

Admitting I’m wrong isn’t about acquiescence or people pleasing; it’s about letting go of my attachment to being right.

What’s delightful is that when I’m able to do this, my body rewards me with a bone-deep stability – not with contraction or agitation, but with a grounded openness that welcomes possibility.

Where in your life are you too attached to being right, and what would it be like to acknowledge you could be wrong?

 

I‘ve just written quite a bit about something that Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, author, and mystic, says more succinctly than I have.

“Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.”