I had been struggling with this one thing that had been causing me suffering for over a year. I had tried everything to deal with it: I had embraced it, noticed my thoughts about it, tried to be present around it, to see it without judgment. And I actually did all these things, and they helped me to see my suffering, loosen up about it, and ease it a bit. But still, no matter what I did, I found myself repeating the same interaction over and over again.
Finally, I looked at my self in it, what I was doing, and where this "doing" had come from. What I saw was that I was replicating (in this interaction) the exact same interaction and habits that I had been doing for most of my life.
I freaked. "Oh s#!%! This one isn't about thoughts. This one is way bigger than that. It's not even external, it's not like I'm acknowledging thoughts that interrupt my way of being, it's my way of being. And I am in this way of being, I am being carried along in this stream of consciousness, this habit of mind. What I thought were thoughts... they were just little rocks that I was bumping up against. By noticing them, I learned to make peace with them or to navigate around them but in the grand scheme of things, I was still in the same stream, the same habit of mind."
I wasn't sure what to do. I guess it was nice to know that this was true about me. At least I finally saw this for what it was. I also was happy to understand why all the things I had been trying weren't really working- because they weren't really addressing the bigger issue, they weren't pulling me out of the stream.
So I guess now that what I need to do is start swimming toward the shore. But I have to say that I don't really know how to do this. How do you swim across that current? I know that it's dragging me down the river, I know that I don't like where it's taking me, but I don't know how to get out of it.
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