Have A Light Touch With Yourself

I have spent many years fighting with "my demons," that on-going conversation within my mind that was able to convince me of my own ineptness, my own guilt, my own weaknesses, my own undeserving-of-anything-good nature. It seemed like other people's on-going inner conversation was convincing them of just the opposite: their worthiness, their ability, their strengths. And so, I got into comparing. Comparing myself against an impossible standard that I had constructed within my own mind, and also against what others seemed to be able to accomplish in their lives, while I struggled to even get off the ground. Some people refer to this on-going conversation as "monkey-mind," or "the committee."

Sound familiar?

Well, I have come to understand some things that have really helped me. Here is one:

I have come to understand that I am responsible for my experience of life. At first this can be a hard one to swallow, but once swallowed and assimilated, it leads to tremendous relief and awakening. One of the hurdles I had with this concept is the word "responsibility." There is a lot of "baggage" that comes with that word. I finally understood that responsibility in this statement does not mean "burden" or "blame," (unless we make it so). Responsibility here means that we choose the experience. We choose the experience by placing meaning or value upon the circumstances we perceive. I discovered that if I am able to witness my circumstances in a way that allowed me to question how I was perceiving them, I could make a different choice. And once a different choice is made, the thoughts that correspond to that choice make sense.

As an example, I used to have a "bad temper." So much so that it got in the way of relationships with my children, work and friends. I even used to fly off the handle at circumstances that didn't go the way I wanted them to, like my car breaking down, a stop light being red, or an appliance not working properly. Slowly, I began to bring some quality of "witness" to these time of anger. Before bashing the toaster with my fist, I began to see that  the toaster was just a toaster. It didn't have an agenda of malice towards me. I saw that whatever I was thinking about the toaster, was creating this experience of rage toward it.

One of the keys to this process is having a light touch with yourself. I found it easy to fall into the thought that I am such a dope for thinking this way. That is a vicious circle of thought that is just another aspect of the on-going chatter of "the committee." So having a light touch with the toaster meant for me that I found the humor in wanting to beat up the f&#%@+g toaster for not cooperating. Not laughing at myself, but laughing with myself for what I had just made up about this situation. I just didn't take it so seriously. Instead of identifying with my anger, I was able to step out of it, and find a lightness and humor in my creation of this experience, through my thoughts about it. The seriousness and the identification began to evaporate with practice. I discovered that it was this great seriousness with in the mind that held these triggers of rage in place. Once I could dis-identify myself from the anger, it left. Having anger is not the problem. The problem was identifying with it. If I am not identified with my anger, I can make a different choice, I can see things differently, I can think differently, and therefore have a different experience.

I've had my toaster for several years now, too.

"All my experience is the effect of where I choose to focus the attention of my consciousness." - The Way of Mastery