I am not feeling very peaceful today. My mind is finding fault with everything again: house, people, my body. I started a new Qigong routine that is supposed to help my parkinson’s symptoms and it is bringing up all sorts of crap. Guilt, anger, resentment, low-self-worth, major resistance.
I am tired of feeling this way. I could feel guilty and bad about myself because of my physical limitations, because of the fact that I haven’t figured out how to fix it. That could be considered justified. Although these emotions are so unpleasant they can motivate me into action, I have found that ultimately the action is rarely fruitful.
Action from bad feelings does not produce Positive results.
I have to change the way I am feeling first before I take action. Furthermore, feeling bad is rarely productive if prolonged, It just makes me act in unpleasant ways.
It’s actually NOT my circumstances that are dictating the way that I feel, but my perceptions, beliefs, and habitual thoughts.
This finding fault thing and this feeling bad about myself thing is a habit of my mind that I have transferred from big things like environmental problems to my body, to my home, to people. My mind’s set-point is: “Something is wrong. I have to fix it. I don’t feel capable.” So my experience has been finding things that are wrong that I can’t fix from my body to the overflowing toys and books in my house.
This finding fault thing and feeling bad about myself is a habit of my mind.
The neural network in my brain for feeling bad about myself and looking for something to fix is stronger, wider, deeper. It’s a well worn trail because it gets so much traffic.
I am determined to blaze a new trail.
For now, I am practicing sitting with what is. Defying my mind nagging me to start cleaning up until it shuts up. You know like when I was a kid and my brother was bugging me and my mom would say: “Just ignore him and he will stop”.
There is more to re-training the brain, but I think this is a good start: to recognize that the hard-wired program in my brain wants to find something “wrong” and ignore that tendency long enough to create a new way of being.
A new way of being creates new actions which creates new results.
How to be at peace with what is:
Catch your mind complaining about something or begging for a familiar emotion.
Say “stop, stop, stop”. (probably not out loud)
Choose to be peaceful until it quiets a little.
And/or distract yourself by focusing on your senses, walk, or practice an elevated emotion like gratitude
If nothing else, just be aware of the emotions/ or mind’s habits and let it be.
LOVE AND PEACE
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I have been living with chronic illness and exploring the healing journey for over 20 years. I offer what I have learned from that journey to you in the form of aslowerkindoflife.com.
