Exploring Ourselves with Jackie McInley,
December 21, 2024

Exploring Ourselves
Online dialogue with Jackie McInley
December 21, 2024

For our last session of 2024, one of the group asked a question that was immediately adopted as this dialogue’s theme : “Why is it I take things so personally and often feel hurt ?” The group agreed on the very habitual reaction of being offended and how inevitable this feels. Despite this apparent unavoidable reaction, it was also felt that somehow there must be another way. Soon it became clear that we often have a hidden motive when we ask how to be free of hurt; we wish to find a solution to our problem and our deeper intention is to get rid of the hurt not to understand it more deeply.

We wondered as a group what the personal actually was? We also wondered if hurt was a movement of conditioning or whether this disturbance is part of human nature. It was pointed out that we are in conflict with this hurt and that it is seen as separate from us. We see being hurt as something that befalls us, rather than part of our conditioned make up that is being triggered. The hurt, we discovered together, seems to highlight the “me” since it is the sense of self that is affected directly.

Finally we asked, what is the relationship between personal hurt and self image. Do we need a self image in order to be hurt? Is the self image itself inevitably at the root of all psychological wounding and the sustained memory of it? This is a question for each one of us to discover carefully for ourselves.

Jackie McInley