Clearly I need to get out more.
Here I am, living in the Big Smoke of Vancouver and all I’ve done each night is watched more Pema Chodron from last weekend’s webinar. If it wasn’t such good stuff, I’d start to get a little scared for me.
Why bother living in the city if I just sit around with my laptop and watch Pema?
I could watch her in a cave…well, certainly a WiFi-equipped cave.
However. I am not afraid. It is what I want to do.
And I’m getting pretty good at realizing what I want to do. And then. Doing exactly that.
I didn’t take in too much last night but what I enjoyed was her repeated instruction to, ‘drop the story line’.
To paraphrase, she says we have a propensity (love that word) to be triggered or set off by certain people and/or situations. We find ourselves angry, irritated, depressed, despairing or impatient (to name just a few of those crowd-pleasin’ emotions) and immediately react.
Well, says Miz Pema, what if we just dropped our story line?
You know the one that runs in our head when we meet someone with which we have a certain history. It goes like this, “She’s such a selfish and unreasonable woman!” and then we trigger into our usual reactions to this person, because after all, she deserves that our reaction or we deserve, and are used to, feeling guilty or depressed or whatever in response to her.
But. If we drop the story line and are simply present with who, and what, is happening right this very second? Voila. Less propensity towards the above-named emotional reactions.
It’s got a freshness about it. Maybe it’s what could be considered the upside of some aspects of Alzheimer’s?
Everything new. Everyone fresh. No story lines.
After working with special needs adults and children, after helping homeless, low income (some alcohol & drug dependent) individuals I like to tell myself this, “everyone was once a tiny baby, with no hurts, habits, blemishes, our feet hadn’t even been used yet!
We were all held in someone’s arms and all we wanted was to be loved”. What happens to us along the way? Perhaps with some people we will never know. The outcome, no matter how annoying, irritating, selfish and hurtful people can be, we ALL still want to be loved. If we could visualize each other as tiny little babies we might be able to cope better and let those certain behaviors and comments go.
p.s. After raising two daughters through teenage years and a son just entering the double digits, I read somewhere “that being a teenager is like having a mental illness”, Wow did that ever help me with the drama.
Thank you Colleen for making me think, AGAIN!
Karen
Hey Karen. I would totally agree on ‘being a teenager is like having a mental illness’. That would go a long way to explaining some of my teen behaviours! Yikes. I love the idea of picturing everyone as a baby or very small child. I often do that, particularly with street people. I wonder what happened along the way. It is likely a pretty sad story…Thanks for your take on things Karen. I love your comments!
Good stuff, really good stuff!!
You have to know what to own and what not to.
I think it is human nature to love drama,
look how much attention it gets? good or bad,
the key is wanting to be noticed and heard.
I like the idea of just taking a moment before
reacting, as we have no control of others.
I will practise it too!
Hey Laurie, wouldn’t it be amazing if we were all practicing that plan. John Lennon would be happy with all of us giving peace a chance 🙂
Having difficulty applying it towards teenagers! I would say dealing with teenagers means having the memory of a salmon (bonk-hurts… I forgot…. feel good, bonk, hurts) but as the bonking is happening with metronome-like frequency nicht so gut. Or another way of saying it is what if each moment is exactly like the one that just drifted away on the river? Love my girl, so is it hey this is me being reactionary, or is the offense real? Oh, I don’t feel karmically in the groove on this one, sister, wanna get there, I do, but if only she wouldn’t say those things in that way!
As I said to someone last night: I want to be childlike, not child-ISH. If wishes were horses, I’d have a herd running over me right now.
Ah Grasshopper. I guess I forgot a key part of her message. We are supposed to welcome the irritation and notice it and then (because we meditate and are learning to notice this stuff) we can decide whether our reaction will intensify the nastiness or calm it. And then, we breathe, notice and don’t hook into the drama (okay, that last part is me paraphrasing again).
Don’t worry. I’m going to test this in the next week or so in a situation that guarantees to always flip me into a tizzy. We shall see whether I can breathe my way out. Proof’s in the puddin’, as they say!