Sunday, April 30, 2017

What Will I Try?

JeepParked1


I forget what started the whole thing. I even forget who it was. I caught myself grinding away mentally at someone while driving to Alliston for groceries. It was probably the local councillor. Sometimes just driving past his house reminds me of the day he stood in my living room and called me a liar. Seeing something juicy to latch onto, my mind kicked in. "How dare he!"

Mind examined the insult from all angles. 'Poor me' to 'I'lll never vote for him' to 'I wonder if this is about unfinished business?' I didn't realize how tense my shoulders were getting until I stopped for the traffic light at Mansfield.

All that analysis may seem like it's productive, but it's not really. It's just a way for mind to perpetuate the mental activity. Mind loves to hear itself think. And it rarely takes the rest of me into consideration. Mind didn't care about my tight shoulders. It didn't care how this thinking led to frustration, helplessness, anger.

I took a breath and relaxed my shoulders as I waited for the light to change. I didn't want to think about this guy. It just riled me up. So how could I put all this mental activity to good use? What will I try?

I could do tonglen. Maybe, but I only go to it when I really feel overwhelmed. This isn't that serious. Maybe a lovingkindness meditation? It's true I wish the guy well. But I still don't want to think about him.

I could feel all that mental energy hanging around nearby, just waiting for me to pay attention to it. I took another deep breath.

Right. The breath.

It helps to have a single simple thing I can do, something I can rely on when things are just a little bit crazy or when things are downright awful. One simple thing I can do any time, anywhere.

For me, it's my breath. No matter where I am, I have my breath. I notice my belly rise and fall with each breath. Even just a couple of breaths can bring me back into the moment.

Oh yeah, that's right. I'm on my way for groceries, driving my dear old Jeep.

Now that I've used my breath to quiet that mental activity and bring me back into the moment, I can turn to a lovingkindness meditation or an empowering breath meditation, or whatever suits me at the time. Today it's a gratitude meditation. The sky is blue. I look at the new fenders on the Jeep and see what a great job the boys did. I think I'll cook supper on the barbeque tonight.

Life is good.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Doing Laps


If I say, "I have only 5 more laps to go," then I am thinking too much about the ease of it being finished.
If I say, "I can't do this many laps," then I am thinking too much about my shortcomings (as compared to some idealized expectation).
If I say, "I hate this," then it will never get easier.
If I say, "I love this," but really hate it, then it will never get easier.
If I say, "How does this feel?" and pay attention to what is actually going on in my physical body, then I can assess constantly and make any changes needed.

Doing laps isn't about buying in to what's going on in my head or emotions, it's about how it is today, or on this specific lap, and taking joy from the doing -- like being a kid and exploring with a sense of curiosity and joy.



First published May 2017 in my free monthly email newsletter, Starry Night. Sign up here.

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Drop It


The other day when I was upset about something I caught myself holding my energy up. I got a sense that there was a bunch of heavy pebbles, massed together in my energy a few inches above my left shoulder, towards the front. They weren’t really pebbles, they just seemed that way – a mass composed of the complex stuff of the upset: blame, hurt, anger, resolve, my thoughts about it all. It was complex and heavy and disorganized.

I noticed that I was holding it up through sheer willpower. I seemed to be trying to keep the energy up by my head so I could figure it out or fix it or problem-solve or organize it (mental activities).

And it took a lot of energy to hold it there.

It was an old habit I recognized from when I was a kid. I was raised to be rational in a culture and environment where mentally solving problems was encouraged, and expressing pain or negative emotion was discouraged. It seemed natural for me to hold bad feelings and emotions up around my head where they could be attended to in a rational manner. The school of thought at the time was that life is a mechanical construct. If something seems broken, you fix it. If you feel a knot of mixed emotions, feeling and pain, then you hold it up so it could be attended to.

Yet life is much more fluid and mysterious than that.

It took me a half a lifetime to learn that negative emotions don’t have to be solved or fixed. They only need to be felt, and then they naturally pass out of our experience. By holding them up near my head, I was blocking that natural process, encouraging the type of “This is Awful” thinking that can make it all linger and intensify. By trying to escape the pain, I was making it worse.

So as I noticed this heavy mass of pebbles, I released the effort of holding it all up and watched to see what would happen next. I wondered if it might solidify into the coldness of fear in my belly, or the heat of anger in my shoulders, or the weight of sadness in my chest.

Turns out it didn’t do any of that. It just went away. Poof!

And the phrase “Drop it!” took on a whole new meaning.


First published in December 2009 in my free monthly email newsletter, Starry Night. Sign up here.