Is it time to practice, contemplate, and learn even more in the School of Your Life?
Two spots left for Mini Retreat in northeast Seattle at Goldilocks Cottage this coming Saturday 1:30-5:30 pm. Earn 4 CEUs for mental health professionals.
Click here to register and join us!
An online version of this retreat is in the works (thank you all who have written to request this). Stay tuned.
And speaking of taking time to sit and do The Work….
….someone asked me the other day about doing The Work when her anxiety is very high, when the situation is frightening, when she feels panic.
It all depends.
Every situation is unique, and sometimes, there are moments where movement and action appears to be the most natural or obvious activity, not necessarily stopping to take out a pen and paper.
It seems there is a natural place self-inquiry; observing, contemplating, and slowing down, feels loving and gentle and full of insight.
Right in the middle of a huge car accident is not necessarily the time to rush to the middle of the street and ask a person with a broken or hurt body “can you absolutely know this is true?”
When someone is full of shock, or grief, or fear….the feelings coursing through their body may seem to have a life of their own, a movement of nature.
Eckhart Tolle describes in his book The Power of Now a moment where he watched two ducks sail towards each other on a still pond, ready to attack and defend their own territories.
A skirmish ensued, biting, snapping.
Then, the fight was over. As Eckhart watched, he noticed the ducks both moving in opposite directions, flapping their wings, as if shaking off excess energy.
He goes on to describe his reflections on this surge of energy, this apparently intense experience, and how the human mind often grabs something that creates intense feeling, and begins to obsess, think, and/or ruminate on what happened.
“If the duck had a human mind, it would keep the fight alive by thinking, by story-making. This would probably be the duck’s story: ‘I don’t believe what he just did. He came to within 5 inches of me. He thinks he owns this pond. He has no consideration for my private space. I’ll never trust him again. Next time he’ll try something else just to annoy me. I’m sure he’s plotting something already. But I’m not going to stand for this. I’ll teach him a lesson he won’t forget.’ And on and on the mind spins its tales, still thinking and talking about it days, months, or years later.” ~ Eckhart Tolle
The thought of inquiry and using the mind to investigate what is true, is of course absurd for animals in nature….but I love that the human mind has this possibility for deep understanding.
So, a situation occurs that produces stress of some kind. Fear, sadness, anger, rage, upset, worry.
There is a surge of energy. The feelings course through the body.
You will know when that wave of feeling would naturally be over……when you have entered a place where you are keeping the memory alive, replaying it, recreating it, talking about it yet again.
That is the perfect time for The Work.
The perfect time to have great compassion for yourself, instead of telling yourself you SHOULD be over it by now.
That situation happened. There is no changing it, no matter how much you wish you could alter the past.
And yet, as you question your very painful beliefs about that fight that happened, the fear, the person you encountered, that uncomfortable conversation, the difficult incident, that accident, the emergency you lived through….
….you can come to peace with reality. You can see that what happened is now truly over.
If you’d like to dive in and take a look at your relationship to someone from the past, to a troubling memory, to your career or money….anything that creates stress when you think about it….
…then set aside some time to sit quietly and go through the process of inquiring into your own mind.
Love, Grace