I went to bed early last night and woke up late. It still wasn't warm at 7 am. I wore my sweatshirt without suffering, and this is the tropics. I called Dorothy while on my walk. She reported a beautiful August day in New Jersey. They suffered through June and July. She spoke briefly about the hurricane heading up the east coast. So far, it is only threatening the southern states. We'll see. She has the solar lanterns now and still has a freezer full of ice she bought during the last blackout. She is prepared.
I worked on sorting out the old fans. I think Habitat for Humanity can use the blades and the lampshades. One of the fan motors was already separated from the rest of the mechanism and might be functional. I threw the rest into the trash barrel for pick up today. I will take the remains to Habitat to see if they can use the parts and take the Styrofoam packing to UPS.
Damon prepared this wonderful 'flyer' for me. Very decorative and well-formatted. Only one problem. I can't download it onto any of the advertising sites.
At 10 am, I had my therapy/ life coaching lesson. I would say I do reasonably well dealing with life between the life lessons I have learned and meditation. I would say I'm spoiled being in good shape. When I'm off my pins, I suffer in contrast. I find talking to Shelly incredibly helpful. I'll write about this session under musings.
I had my first session with D. since the end of school. We started on the multiplication facts. He got one digit or the other correct in the answers but not the whole product. It was better than nothing. When I asked if his mother had posted the facts on the walls, he said she had but without the answers attached. I had told her to post the facts we were working on with and without the answers. D. needs to see the problems with the answer a lot before he remembers them. Posting the problems without the answers will do nothing for him. It has done nothing for him.
His reading, however, was much better. He still made some mistakes, but he caught them much, much more frequently. He stopped and used the strategies I taught him for figuring out words he didn't know. He made some words up, but most of them made sense in the story, and I didn't stop him. Also, he read the material at a more rapid rate than he had before.
I headed out to town to get a postal order for $25 before heading to the Police Station to get my fingerprints. I can understand the police station not accepting checks, but why won't they accept cash either. Are they afraid of having cash on hand in case they're robbed? While I was at the post office, I stopped at the bank in the same strip mall to cash two checks. Before coming home, I went to Costco to pick up more vinegar, assuming a new shipment had come in and a frozen eggplant lasagna on sale.
Elise texted me to say that she wouldn't be able to stay late after driveway yoga tomorrow. Could she come over this afternoon to set up a video with slides explaining the audio file for phonemic analysis?
When she did come, we figured out how to set up and use the whiteboard on Zoom.
________ ______ _______
Musings:
I have been agitated for the last several days. I spent my whole childhood 'agitated." I felt like I was jumping out of my skin most of the time. I hated the feeling. I have worked hard to achieve 'calm.' I don't mean a calm demeanor; I mean a calm state of mind. Maybe my standard for calm isn't very high, considering what it used to be.
I have had a series of one-two punches: two friends with breast cancer, one receiving chemotherapy and now radiation, one who just had a lumpectomy; one friend who was laid off, along with 200 people at this place of work; one friend who had to be rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night; a domestic violence incident at a neighbor's that I got involved in in the middle of the night; the virus causing death and economic destruction, and, of course, the political situation. I feel I can endure anything except that state of rage and hatred I had to live within myself when I was young.
Mike, God bless him, had a high tolerance for unconditional love, commonly found in young children and pets.
Shelly asked me what I wanted to work on. That would be the fear I'm feeling. This fear is not just what will happen to me physically, death by starvation because of the total unavailability of food; my anxiety is triggered by my bad feelings toward others.
As I read about some of the tribal attitudes springing up hither and yon, dictating hatred for anyone and everyone who disagrees with the opinions and lifestyle they embrace, I am scared. I see that rejection and hatred, and it scares me more than anything else.
I sat with the fear and realized that I hated that fear. I don't think anyone loves being scared. I released anything negative about my hatred for my fear, kept anything positive or anything I still needed. That invocation is standard in the therapy I developed. Something shifted immediately. I became more relaxed.
I developed these words for release out of Buddhist teachings. It teaches that our reaction to our pain compounds it and what makes it unbearable.
Next, I did the standard companion invocation: "I released anything negative about the love of my fear and keep anything positive or anything I still need." Wow, Peace spread through me. I felt the deepest love for my fear.
Fear, like pain, is an unpleasant sensation, but both keep us alive. There are those born without a capacity for physical pain. They don't do well. They have no idea when their bodies need attention. Likewise, fear is an important emotion. It informs us when we are in danger. However, both fear and pain can be dysfunctional emotions.
Pain is dysfunctional when it is chronic. The purpose of pain is to let us know there is a problem and getting us to attend to it. But chronic pain can't be fixed. The pain alarm system serves no positive function. I say to it, "Okay, you can shut off now. There is nothing I can do to fix the problem."
Likewise, with fear. It is great emotion when facing lions and tigers in our walk through the woods on a hunting expedition, but not much good when it comes to financial or physical threats that we can do nothing about.
Hating that fear makes me hate myself. Well, that's no good. I think for most people, hate is fear converted to self-hatred for having the fear, and then, well, since I don't want to live with the yucky feeling about myself, let's convert it to hatred toward the people who scared me in the first place.
Feeling that hatred is the worst. Whatever happens, I want to go down feeling nothing but love. Is this possible? Well, the saints managed it, supposedly. Victor Frankel wrote about maintaining it amidst the brutality of the concentration camp. If he could do it, it's possible.
I don't want to work to feel love even in the face of persecution to die a 'good' person. I don't want it so I can feel I have good credentials for entry into heaven. I want it because love is just a wonderful feeling, and hatred and anger are the worst. There is nothing unselfish about my goal. I just don't want to feel hatred, and I do want to feel love.
As with all things, the ability to do so at a reasonable, consistent rate means acknowledging when I don't feel love and coming to terms with it. Those who constantly deny ever having negative emotions are just living a lie; the lie is that they have transcended the human condition. As long as we live in these bodies, we will feel fear. Some embrace that fear and convert it into hatred. I hope it gives them some comfort. It's not for me. Not that I don't feel it; it's just that I don't like it when I do. For me, there is no justification for that hatred.
No comments:
Post a Comment