Yesterday my road trip continued. The highway stretching out, breathing in scent of pines, passing a recent accident with firetrucks flashing lights.
A big huge mountain was suddenly there in front of me rising up, with the peak covered in clouds and warm rain pattering on my windshield. Mount Shasta.
One of my teachers, Steven Bodian, once said he had many awakening moments in a silent car, lightbulb going off.
You’re traveling through space, thoughts free-floating and free-falling. Then you remember something.
Winding down the pass…I think of a family camping trip to California. I am twelve.
We are on the road for several weeks, maybe three. My dad is on summer quarter school break, my mom takes a vacation from work. My grandma is with us.
One night we are in a gorgeous campground with the Pacific Ocean stretching out below us. Tents have been set up, my grandma is in her camping chair.
My sister who is eleven and I get into some argument about where we’re sleeping…I can’t remember what it was about. But I was so angry, I take her personal suitcase full of her clothes and belongings, and dump it all over the ground and the fling the empty suitcase as far as I can.
She looks at me in shock and fury.
I run to a nearby tree and climb it, up, up, up and sit there and peek down below at the destruction.
She’s telling my parents what I did and beckoning them to come see.
Now…here’s the part that still has a tiny edgy memory of shame.
My dad starts looking for me, but I say nothing and don’t come down the tree. I feel sick.
The seriousness of this guilt was so intense, I still remember it to this day, even though I don’t remember the actual fighting part with my sister.
I can do The Work from here, from what was then the future, the Now looking at the past. I came through here today to clean this up.
I was terrible.
Find the place where you have sometime felt this to be true.
See if it was.
Can you absolutely be sure that you were terrible, guilty, bad, and should be ashamed of yourself?
Even if you say yes, keep going with contemplating this belief.
How do you react when you believe it’s your fault, you did it, and it turned out like shit?
Self-condemnation sets in. Vows to never to it again. Hiding, embarrassment, feeling mortified. “Working” on yourself to fix this problem.
But who would you be without the belief that you were terrible?
Notice the whole entire situation without the self-criticism. Look at everyone in the scene. Notice what your thoughts were about everyone you were interacting with, not just you.
Oh yeah!
Begin to identify more clearly why you were hurt. Who else might have thought you were terrible? Why? What did you really want from people at that time, in that situation?
If you don’t just stop at the I-Hate-Myself platform…what else was going on?
You get to find out when you relive that moment and investigate.
I noticed I was most worried about what my dad thought of me having a fit. I felt rage, and then terrified he wouldn’t love me because I expressed rage.
Lightbulb.
I was copying my dad. He got angry sometimes, exploded, and then appeared to feel terrible and unloved.
Same same.
Without that thought, I notice it’s just humans, expressing themselves.
“The feeling that something is wrong…that’s not a personal problem of yours, it is a universal, human condition to carry inside the feeling that something is wrong. Then the mind looks for what it can do about it…where is the thing that’s wrong? And it misinterprets situations.” ~ Eckhart Tolle
Nothing was wrong, nothing was terrible.
There was passion, energy, love, fear all swirling together. Things more things happened next. The scene moved on and became a memory. The bigness of the feelings relaxed, my sister and I were friends again, I always knew my dad loved me and I loved him.
“When you sit quiet and watch yourself, all kinds of things may come to the surface. Do nothing about them, don’t react to them; as they have come so will they go, by themselves.” ~ Nisargadatta
Love, Grace