Not So Personal
Thursday, 2. September 2010 23:33 | Author:d.bella
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all the bally-hoo’d recent astrological drama – mind you, “the stars impel, they don’t compel” as someone once said – it’s that there’s no more room for senseless anger. “Senseless” in the meaning of, say, that free-floating rage I can get on the freeway, as if every driver out there is looking to piss me off personally. Or of unconsciously picking up media messages saying that I’m “less than” if I don’t use their product. Or incorporating the Calvinist notion that if I’m not busy-busy-busy, I must be slacking, and slacking of any sort means I’m lazy, and lazy equates to bad or evil. Or how about this: getting caught up in “us” versus “them”, and how can “those” thoughts/beliefs/people be so ignorant, willfully rude, or lack such common sense?
Can’t you feel your shoulders starting to tighten just thinking about these things?
I’ve known intellectually, for quite awhile, that this sort of anger is senseless, it doesn’t serve me, it’s a waste of energy. Still, it wasn’t until recently that I really started to “get it”. It IS a waste of time. Really. There’s been two recent comments (on the non-stop cocktail party that is Facebook) by Pema Chödrön which have summed up these recent lessons:
“And I quote this so much, this Poem of Rick Fields, where he said:
Behind the hardness there is fear
And if you touch the heart of the fear
You find sadness (it sort of gets more and more tender)
And if you touch the sadness
You find the vast blue sky”
and
“The path of liberation depends on not taking everything so personally.”
Truly. One would think I’d have been smacked around by the Magic Mirror of seeing myself doing the same damn things that others do/say/think – which were annoying of course – enough times that the message should have sunk in many years ago. I once whined to Deity “Why must these lessons be so hard?” “The lessons are so hard because you have such a thick skull!” was the reply. So there you go.
What others say, think or do usually has very little to do with me, personally. Many are running away from their own hurts and dramas, and projecting them outward. And all that anger? Usually hiding my own grief or fear. Of course, a realization does not a sea change make, and I’ll be working with these knee-jerk reactions for awhile yet. Not being so hooked into that anger, however, will be priceless.
[photo © Michael Jastremski for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike]
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