Stop. Breathe. Note that practice paid off.

Life has been a little more quiet the last week or two especially because the great unwinding process quieted for a while and I’ve been sleeping.  Quiet has meant some time for reflection.  As I glance ahead at the glimmers of that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel I’ve been thinking about this long slow process of healing.  I tend to be hard on myself (I know I’m not alone in that!) and to push myself –those who’ve been around me in recent years might find that odd since I live a very quiet and withdrawn life these days but inwardly I push and berate….   But reflecting on these 10 years of muscles twirling and pulling and yanking in my face–pulling my eyes and mouth along with them, I started feeling good.

I know this is pretty big hubris but I truly believe that a significant percentage of people if faced with the years and years of yanking and jerking in their face would have either wound up on a mental ward or have shot themselves in the head to make it stop.  (My personal fantasy has been to twist my head off and throw it as far away from me as possible…).  It’s been hard and trying and frustrating and generally obnoxious but I have somehow managed to roll with it.  Sometimes I’ve been whiny and some days I’ve not known how I managed to cope through it, but cope I did.  The protruding bones causing the roof of my mouth to be convex have just about flattened now and my vision is improving almost day by day.

I think that many years of yoga and meditation practices along with learning how to stop emotional reactions from taking over have all helped me to navigate these trying years.  I know a lot of people believe and teach that you don’t have to learn or practice anything because you’re already there, etc.  I’m sure there are people who find that to be true but for myself I’ve found that I hid the essential me deeply within and surrounded it with beliefs and reactions that denied my God nature so thoroughly that I had no access to that space.  It has been learning and practicing and perceiving the belief system I used to hold that has helped me to handle all this.

Another incident recently tweaked my awareness of these changing abilities to handle life.  A friend revealed that he’d been upset with me about an incident the year before.  Now, I remembered the incident when he mentioned it because his behavior was fairly odd — disrupted a class I was teaching and basically told the class I wasn’t teaching it properly–but what I found interesting was that I had never thought about it again from that day until the day he mentioned it.  At one time I would have seen only my side of it and I’d have suffered over it and relived it and raged inwardly — possibly months or years later.  But in this case I got what he felt and although I found it odd that he chose to disrupt class instead of talking to me after I shrugged it off as one of those things and let it go.  I didn’t even have to think about it or consciously start doing some practice to launch the letting  go — I just did.  That’s years of practice that made that the natural response–and don’t get me wrong, I still don’t always automatically react that well.

If you’re one of the lucky ones who just drops with ease into a space of connection with the divine or awareness in the moment, you don’t need this advice.  But for everyone else, I advise practice, practice, practice.  Become mindful.  Doesn’t really matter what practices you choose in my opinion as long as you choose practices that make sense to you and then actually do them.

See also:

Mindfulness: The Key Factor

Mindfulness:  How Do You Get It?