Here’s a summary of the unique online session held on 29th March 2023.
Ms. Shreya Kulkarni who is the founder of Myndful Mantra and has 9 years of experience in this field, was the psychologist who conducted the session.
She began the session on Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy with the first topic which was about rating oneself.
The parameters given were – looks, kindness, compassion, intelligence & hard-working ability, mental health, and physical health. Participants did not have to give individual marks but were supposed to count the consolidated number. They could rate themselves but not be judgemental about this. These parameters represented our human situational skills. Now the question arose and here is why we evaluate ourselves with lesser marks. Sometimes we are given fewer marks and sometimes more. This raises some questions about ourselves.
Let’s hear a story first of Albert Elis. He was a person with multiple illnesses. He had a phobia of talking to girls. He started one exercise of proposing to 100 girls in one month. Imagine how many of the girls said yes to him. Can you guess? 98 girls straightaway rejected this person. And 2 girls who said yes to him also didn’t turn up at the time while they were about to come for a date. After that, he went to his house. Now he wrote one sentence. The sentence was extremely practical. He never blamed himself for this situation. This person failed 8th time in the field of public speaking. But finally, at 9th time he gave such a great talk, after that, he didn’t have to look back. So as a human being, we are invaluable. We must give ourselves full marks at all times. As human beings, we must value ourselves to the most. Since in our day-to-day world, no one is perfect. So, we must ask ourselves where are we lacking? We must have a habit of writing down our problems. We should be able to understand our problems. The founder of the REBT technique has done a lot of research on this. Sometimes we have unreal expectations from the outside world. At times these expectations become a demand in our lives.
We need to understand the difference between expectations and demands from society. Sometimes our parents force us to be in an unhappy marriage. And due to the fear from society, we oblige to this also. Our parents need to understand that getting their son or daughter into forceful marriage is not their only goal. We need to respect the choices of individuals. We can suggest but we should never force others because we follow certain aspects.
No matter how bad the situation happens to anyone, there is always a chance to resurrect. Here in this world, we must accept the fact that we can never make everyone happy. We are not ice cream sellers. We need to make peace with our own choices. My happiness is my responsibility. No one can make us happy if we are not happy from the inside.
So, the take-home message from this session was – We must always give maximum marks to ourselves. And even if there is some failure, we must always try hard to be the best form of ourselves. We must not overthink and even if we are failing, we should never ever give and we need to understand that one failure is not a full stop, it’s just a comma, so be brave and try again. Look at the world, it’s really beautiful and we have come to this world for some reason, so make the most of it.
The session was quite empowering and all the participants truly enjoyed this session.
Report by Aniket
Co-ordination by Amol
Edited by Mahrukh