I got off the phone this morning with a close friend who shared her pain. She didn’t want to recall the painful details and just in how to work towards clearing it away and letting it go. You came to the right place I told her, as I too was experiencing some pain of my own.
Let me put this pain in perspective. I had spent the day before working from home and took a working break riding my bike to the beach and took photos for my website that I was working on. It was a glorious fall day and over and over I affirmed all the gratitude for all I had: the beauty of the town I live in, the luxury of working from home, my children, husband, ect. I got to the beach and meditated and the bliss continued. Ok I’ll stop here before someone slaps me.
And that is where it stopped. On the bike ride home it was shocking to hear the symphony of negative mind chatter and replay of a minor dispute that happened a few days ago. The details of the dispute aren’t important as I’m not sure a witness to the event would even notice it or classify it as a dispute. I was so surprised that all that glory couldn’t even last the bike ride home. I just kept riding as the battles in my mind between my ego, the martyr inside me, the victim inside me and somewhere in the middle the actual me getting pulled in all directions. I once heard someone reference a board meeting where everyone is shouting I wanted to throw them all out and end the meeting. If it was that easy, believe me I would thrown them all out right there and then. However, the internal nature of shouting preventing from doing anything except to keep fucking going. So I kept going, I followed my own advice I had written about over and over to not run from the pain and just sit there with it. Ekart Tolle once advised to be in the present moment requires awareness and acceptance. I was aware of the pain of all this conflict in my head and the associated madness. Instead of panicking, running and resisting at the internal insanity that no one around me even knew was happening I worked on just accepting it.
That bought some peace and I chose to ignore the disappointment that it was happening at all, especially on such a beautiful day for dam sake! I continued with my day, picked up kids from school, took them to soccer, ect. I went to bed and this morning this call reaching out to me was exactly what I needed. We both felt better and went on with our days. I went back to work and had a small victory of fixing a marin on a webpage that had been haunting me. When I resolved it the bliss was back as I danced in victory around my kitchen. The plate of bliss and pain had been cleared from my table and I was served a lovely plate of contentment and ease and it tastes heavenly.
