Boy howdy, I think I’M TOO TIRED!
Is it really true? Well, my eyes feel sandy, my mind is wandering, I like the idea of lying down in the sun and taking a snooze, I didn’t sleep well between 2 am and 6 am, or at least it seemed like I was tossing and turning and thinking, kind of like a twilight zone.
Too tired for what? It turns out I’m NOT too tired to sit here and type. I’m NOT too tired to be awake all day.
Once at a weekend workshop with Byron Katie on Relationships, I had a terrible time sleeping. In fact, after my first School for The Work, which was possibly the most profound workshop I had ever participated in in my life, I woke up every night at 3:00 am for almost a year.
My mind was so full of thoughts breaking apart that I had always believed as Absolutely True, that I was in a state of heightened awareness. It seemed my mind let itself rest for just a bit and then turned itself on again to start sorting things out, at 3:00 am when it was very quiet.
One thing that helped me was Katie’s words to sleepless participants “How do you know you’re supposed to be awake? You are.”
What could I do when I was awake? The Work. I could ask myself “what am I awake for?” and find out the answers, without getting frustrated that it would be better to be asleep.
Today in Our Wonderful Sexuality teleclass a participant brought to Inquiry a concept that seemed just an expression of a fact; “she can’t do that”.
Like the way a person with no arms can’t play tennis or row a boat. The way my father is no longer alive in a body. The way I am not a teenager now, or the way when I jump off a diving board, I fall into the water. These are simply true it seems.
These can be really fascinating to question all on their own…there are such interesting exceptions. But one place I love to go with questioning this kind of concept that seems true, but still stressful, is to look at the feeling I have behind it.
So the way the stressful belief goes on paper is “she can’t do that, and that is BAD”.
- my father died and it is terrible
- I got cancer, and it was horrifying
- a dear friend of mine is in the hospital, and it’s depressing
- all my money was gone, and it was excruciating
- I fell and injured my knee, and it was painful
- Everyone gets older, and it’s awful
- My husband left me, and it was torture
Who would you be without the thought that any of these are really BAD?
I love asking myself, what is actually bad about this thing I’m calling bad? I mean, what is really bad about getting cancer, my father dying, getting divorced, hurting my knee, getting older, losing all my money, or knowing my friend is in the hospital?
We think that this thing is bad because with it (or without it) we will suffer, we will be unhappy. And we learned somewhere along the way that it’s bad, too.
If I don’t sleep now, I will be very unhappy later, I will suffer. No question, I’m positive, I don’t even think about finding what’s funny, good, entertaining, interesting about this sleepless state.
What if we turn it around? What if the very thing we think is bad is actually a good thing? How about entertaining that possibility? What could be an example?
I am not too tired, I got cancer and it was so good how many people helped me, I lost all my money and it was fabulous to realize I didn’t need it, I injured my knee and it was fascinating to see modern technology at work in the operating room, my husband left me and now I am the most independent, empowered woman I’ve ever been, my father died and I realize he is so in my heart I can still talk with him every day….
“The absolute truth is simple. There is no such thing as unhappiness. People have believed there was. You have been one of those people.”~Bruce Di Marsico
All those things I thought were the worst, they weren’t. Life keeps getting better and better, past, present and future.
With love, Grace