Wednesday, June 9, 2021
I am distressed by a conflict I'm having with a dear friend. Her response to a difference in understanding was to say that something must be wrong with me. "It concerns me when you ask about something this serious, that we have already settled." I hear that she thinks something's wrong with my mind because I remember something differently than she does. That is a serious accusation to make against an 80-year-old woman. I can think of several reasons why we see this situation differently. This person is not open to reconciling differences in perception. I have to keep my distance. Sad.
Distance is one solution, but there is the inner turmoil her comment caused in me. Then I had another minor misunderstanding with someone else. People always say or don't say things that they think should be clear to others when they're not. People also frequently misunderstand what has been said. I'm okay when I'm with someone who understands the vulnerability of human communication. Mike taught me: that it's a problem to be solved. Unfortunately, he also had problems with this glitch in human communication. He would jump on me if I referred to something without giving a clear antecedent. You know, you have a clear image of someone in your mind, and you say "she" instead of the person's name. The fix for this is just asking someone to clarify. Mike thought no one should make this error. He was as hard on himself as he was on me. At least he wasn't a hypocrite.
The conflicts are causing me agita. I thought of Mike, of me coming home to Mike. He was always a safe harbor for me, whatever problems we may have had. If I felt battered, I curled up in his arms for a few minutes and felt better. Now I have to figure out how to do this on my own. Dismissing the other person as being totally in the wrong is not an avenue I'm prepared to take. I believe it is immoral- not to mention delusional -to assume that I'm the only one who has right on my side.
Why am I so distressed if I believe that communication errors are normal? I have to meditate more. I panic when dealing with someone who insists that I'm not merely wrong, but something is wrong with me when someone jumps on me if I don't see it their way. What is that panic about? When I meditated, I got in touch with hatred. That brought calm, which for me means truth; I realized the hatred was for myself, not the other person. I had heard somewhere that all arguments are with ourselves. That's what helped me look at that possibility
I think self-hatred is a normal response to differences. The difference comes in the degree of self-hatred or hatred of the other. It's hatred in either case; the question is which way that hose of bile is directed. But, again, I don't know if my reaction is greater than others.
I learned through Buddhism that there are two wings to a peaceful mind, freeing a loving heart: awareness and equanimity. Most people lean one way or the other; we all need to work for balance. Unfortunately, I erred on the side of awareness. I was trained to be self-aware without being taught equanimity.
Those who err on the side of equanimity, or what they think is equanimity, overdo denial. They define detachment as ignoring their own feelings or the feelings of others. The term spiritual bypassing has come into the discourse. I always thought this was a problem. As someone who is psychic, I was aware of buried, ignored feelings in others. It was an unpleasant position to be in.
Equanimity, as I understand Buddhism defines it, means being aware of your negative feelings, maintaining your focus on them, AND remaining calm, even loving, but definitely accepting. We are not practicing equanimity when we dump our anger or hatred on others.
Detachment does not mean cutting bad feelings loose to float in the universe at large; it means not investing large quantities of emotion in a situation. The theory is that emotion blocks compassion. Emotion, as it is being defined here, focuses on our wounding and survival. Are we really in danger?
I had a session with adolescent D. I started working with him with word families, a cluster of letters with a vowel, and the letters which follow immediately. We started with -ap family, bap, cap, dap, etc. He struggled to blend those. He has trouble holding on to sounds. He will mispronounce /a-p/, even though it is being used in each word, just changing the initial letter/sound:
We accomplished a little more with the spelling today. D. continued to have trouble remembering how a word looks. His underlying problem may be his memory rather than either visual or auditory perception.
Noticing that he had problems distinguishing her from here, I composed sentences using those words. The exercise gave him repeated exposure while the sentence's meaning supported his word recognition. You can't read her for here or vice-versa and have the sentence make sense. He even had trouble with this. While he can infer the meaning of more complex words, he is unbothered by the nonsense of what he is saying when he misreads these high-frequency words.
I just heard that 90% of the people in the world don't have clean air to breathe. I just checked the air quality here in Hawaii. It is green with a rating of 4. That's almost perfect.
Judy watched my video on my reading method. She said she liked it, but she found a few errors. I found two; I want to leave them in. How can I mask mine if I expect others to be brave and risk making mistakes? I have to fix the ones that cause confusion. I think I have to add a comment acknowledging errors, maybe even naming them, and clarifying why I left them in.
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