Saturday, July 21, 2012

Looking for My Buoyant Place

I have been trying to keep my head above water these last few weeks, things with my mom, things at work. It seems the only "me" time I get some weeks is when I close my eyes to sleep and the random Sunday morning writing time at the Dawg. I am trying to be patient and compassionate toward all the players, myself included. Succeeding more often than I fail, so counting that a success.

No part of either of these situations is within my control to change. Nor are they situations that I am able to distance myself from. So the best course of action seems acceptance and a sort of detachment from the angst bits. I know that is sometimes seen as the weaker choice by our Western culture the same way that love is seen as a sort of weaker stance, but I'm pretty sure that bit of conditioning is wrong.

It's much easier to explode your anger out onto someone, to misdirect your own crap, to blame, to hate. Much, much easier. It's so much harder to hold onto it for a moment, objectively examine it and determine how much of this is really just your shit showing.

"Umm. Excuse me. Your shit's showing"

Gawd knows I have certainly been that volatile angry person, just ask my little brother who was my favorite target growing up. But the thing is, that the exploding bouts of anger didn't make me feel any better. Instead they simply made me feel guilty or childish and kinda ashamed.

The shift from angry bitch to calmness began with my studies of energetic work, like Reiki. It's an ongoing process and I learn something new every day. There is always a deeper level and like a Galilean thermometer we each find our own place of buoyancy. I know my little glass bauble is still sinking as I haven't found my point yet. 

The best part is the more I try, the easier it gets. So what's the magic formula for this. Dunno exactly. Probably different for you than me. But the following things have certainly helped me:
It all starts with want to. You have to want things to be different. You have to put your energy into it. A big dose of patience never hurt either. The changes I am talking about have evolved over the last 12 years.

Reading about the very real and deleterious effects of stress (and what is anger really, but really amped up stress in a blender) and bad diet on the human body. Holeee fuck that's a hot mess of no-way-do-I-want-that. Stress, cortisol, weight gain, stress on the heart and brain. The more I read, the more determined I became to learn to leash the beast.

I began to look into a number of homeopathic types of healing. (Although healing here is clearly the wrong word for me.) First among these was Reiki, a Japanese type of energy work. One of the practices of this type of work is to say, to ponder and to try to emulate the Reiki Prinicples daily.  I said them even when I was pretty sure I would fail. I said them 3-4 times a day. The thing that made it easier to believe was that "Just for today" thought. I mean I can do anything for just one day. It's not like I'm saying I will do this forever. Just one stinkin day. I can do that.

The weird thing is that they began to stick like good affirmations always do (or bad ones). I began to recognize the stages of my body in anger or stress. And I began to intervene in the process before I reached DEFCON5 and blew someone's hair back. I learned to step away from the thing annoying or stressing me. Step out either physically or mentally. Distance is good. Take a half a dozen really deep breaths. I imagine letting the beast out with my breath instead of my tongue. (For a really spectacular and completely non-woowoo way to do this check out my friend Fabeku's Don't Lose Your Shit Kit. Bonus: It's funny as hell). I could go into the physiology of what this does to calm your body, but really??? who would be awake by the end of that.

Once I was a little calmer, science chica stepped in and began to analyze the situation. Since not all of you have one of these, I might encourage you to get one. We're certainly cheap enough, especially in the current economy. Science chica is objective. Objective as in unswayable by my whining and one-sided view point. She analyzes the data from every side without a shred of emotional attachment and constructs hypothesis based on these data. She doesn't sugar coat it. When I am wrong she tells me so. When I try to make one person responsible for the world's crap or my own ills, she steps in and say "Don't think so". I could mow her over and just proceed with my crap, but I have learned she is often right and that if I listen I feel better about how unpleasant situations play out. Once I gave her that latitude, it was all kinda easy after that. She now steps in and stops me as soon as I try to shift blame or circle up all the shit wagons into one big train. Don't tell her, but I seriously love her for doing that. I might get her a tie-dyed lab coat just for shits and giggles.

The latest piece came in with studying lots of alternative medicine and beginning to understand the place where these thoughts and quantum physics are starting to talk the same language. Realizing my life is lived on a StarTrek holodeck and I am the one with the key. If I focus on what's wrong, seems that's all I see - as if the holodeck has interpreted my thoughts for what I want. If I can turn my focus back toward something else, it often rewards me with it. This took a lot of practice. Much of our society is set up to reinforce negativity. I find this sad and ironic that we are good at making it someone else's fault, or wholly our own fault. We are terrible at objectively seeing which pieces of crap are ours and which are not.  I invite you to change that.  To find a buoyant density that is all your own.  

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