Labels: Daily OM

Labels: It Really Happened

Labels: It Really Happened

Labels: Humor, It Really Happened

Many people are taught from a young age to suppress feelings commonly regarded as negative, such as anger, resentment, fear, and sorrow. Those who cannot or will not express these emotions tend to engage in passive-aggressive behaviors that provide them with a means of redirecting their feelings. Passive aggression can take many forms: People who feel guilty saying “no” may continually break their promises because they couldn’t say no when they meant it. Others will substitute snide praise for a slur to distance themselves from the intense emotions they feel. More often than not, such behavior is a cry for help uttered by those in need of compassion and gentle guidance.

When we recognize passive-aggressive patterns in the behavior of others, we should never allow ourselves to be drawn into a struggle for power. Passive aggression is most often wielded by those who feel powerless in the face of what they perceive as negative emotions because they hope to avoid confronting their true feelings. They feel they are in control because they do not display overt emotion and often cannot understand how they have alienated their peers. If someone close to us shows signs of frustration or annoyance but claims nothing is amiss, we can point out that their tone of voice or gestures are communicating a different message and invite them to confide in us. When we feel slighted by a backhanded compliment, it is important that we calmly explain how the jibe made us feel and why. And when an individual continually breaks their promises, we can help them understand that they are free to say no if they are unwilling to be of service.

As you learn to detect passive aggression, you may be surprised to see a hint of it in yourself. Coping with the natural human tendency to veil intense emotions can be as simple as reminding yourself that expressing your true feelings is healthy. The emotions typically regarded as negative will frequently be those that inspire you to change yourself and your life for the better, whereas passive-aggressive behavior is a means of avoiding change. When you deal constructively with your feelings, you can put them behind you and move forward unencumbered by unexplored emotion.

Labels: Daily OM

Labels: It Really Happened, Screaming

You may have noticed that if you want to speak to someone in a noisy, crowded room, the best thing to do is lean close and whisper. Yelling in an attempt to be louder than the room’s noise generally only hurts your throat and adds to the chaos. Similarly, that still, small voice within each of us does not try to compete with the mental chatter on the surface of our minds, nor does it attempt to overpower the volume of the raucous world outside. If we want to hear it, no matter what is going on around us or even inside us, we can always tune in to that soft voice underneath the surrounding noise.

It is generally true that the more insistent voices in our heads delivering messages that make us feel panicky or afraid are of questionable authority. They may be voices we internalized from childhood or from the culture, and as such they possess only half-truths. Their urgency stems from their disconnectedness from the center of our being, and their urgency is what catches our attention. The other voice that whispers reassurances that everything is fundamentally okay simply delivers its message with quiet confidence. Once we hear it, we know it speaks the truth. Generally, once we have heard what it has to say, a powerful sense of calm settles over our entire being, and the other voices and sounds, once so dominant, fade into the background, suddenly seeming small and far away.

We may find that our own communications in the world begin to be influenced by the quiet certainty of this voice. We may be less inclined to indulge in idle chatter as we become more interested in maintaining our connection to the whisper of truth that broadcasts its message like the sound of the wind shaking the leaves of a tree. As we align ourselves more with this quiet confidence, we become an extension of the whisper, penetrating the noise of the world and creating more peace, trust, and confidence.

Labels: Daily OM

Our capacity to cope successfully with life's challenges far outstrips our capacity to feel nervousness. Yet in the weeks, days, and hours leading up to an event that we believe will test our limits, we can become nervous. While we may have previously regarded ourselves as equal to the trials that lie ahead, we reach a point at which they near and our anxiety begins to mount. We then become increasingly worked up, until the moment of truth arrives and we discover that our worry was all for nothing. We are almost always stronger and more capable than we believe ourselves to be. But anxiety is not rational in nature, which means that in most cases we cannot work through it using logic as our only tool. Reason can help us recognize the relative futility of unwarranted worry but, more often than not, we will find more comfort in patterns of thought and activity that redirect our attention to practical or engaging matters.

Most of us find it remarkably difficult to focus on two distinct thoughts or emotions at once, and we can use this natural human limitation to our advantage when trying to stay centered in the period leading up to a potentially tricky experience. When we concentrate on something unrelated to our worry, such as deep breathing, visualizations of success, pleasurable pursuits, or exercise, anxiety dissipates naturally. Meditation is also a useful coping mechanism as it provides us with a means to ground ourselves in the moment. Our guides can aid us by providing us with a focal point wholly outside of our own sphere.

The intense emotional flare-up you experience just before you are set to challenge yourself is often a mixture of both excitement and fear. When you take steps to eliminate the fear, you can more fully enjoy the excitement. Though you may find it difficult to avoid getting worked up, your awareness of the forces acting on your feelings will help you return to your center and accept that few hurdles you will face will be as high as they at first appear.

Labels: Calls for Response, Daily OM

Labels: Humor, It Really Happened

Labels: Ten Things This Tuesday

Can I say that someone came to my room and told me that he would "totally do me." Goodness knows, I want to be done, but come on. I would at least like to have my name pronounced correctly. Oh yeah, I would like to have him be around afterwards.

I want to say that I am flattered, but I'm not. I mean I may have a "it's been a while" sign on my forehead, but I do have standards. This guy, who happened to be on his way back to school that's far, far away--I'm in Mississippi and he's going to Harvard--approached me in an unsettling way. I realize that he is in his twenties, but even he should have known better.

Good grief.

We have all faced moments in our lives when the pressure mounts beyond what we feel we can handle, and we find ourselves thinking that we do not have the strength to carry on. Sometimes we have just gotten through a major obstacle or illness only to find another one waiting for us the moment we finally catch our breath. Sometimes we endure one loss after another, wondering when we will get a break from life’s travails. It does not seem fair or right that life should demand more of us when we feel we have given all we can, but sometimes this is the way life works.

When we look back on our lives, we see that we have survived many trials and surmounted many obstacles, often to our own amazement. In each of those instances, we had to break through our ideas about how much we can handle and go deeper into our hidden reserves. The thought that we do not have the strength to handle what is before us can be likened to the hard surface of a frozen lake. It appears to be an impenetrable fact, but when we break through it, we find that a deep well of energy and inspiration was trapped beneath that icy barrier the whole time. Sometimes we break through by cutting a hole into our resistance with our willpower, and sometimes we melt the ice with compassion for our predicament and ourselves. Either way, each time we break through, we reach a new understanding of the strength we store within ourselves.

When we find ourselves up against that frozen barrier of thinking we cannot handle our situation, we may find that the kindest choice is to love ourselves and our resistance too. We can simply accept that we are overwhelmed, exhausted, and stretched, and we can offer ourselves loving kindness and compassion. If we can extend to ourselves the unconditional warmth of a mother’s love, before we know it, the ice will begin to break.

Labels: Daily OM

Labels: Ten Things This Tuesday