Letting go takes a lot of courage, but once you let go, happiness comes very quickly.
-Thick Nhat Hanh
I’m still big into quotes. Nothing new here. The topics just change and shift as the seasons of life change.
The big issues I’m dealing with now have to do with rage, anger, expectations, release, self-care, disconnection.
I’m finding truths around the idea of letting go of my own expectations as well as the opinions of people about me. Yesterday a relative sent out an email questioning my loyalty to what we’re all trying to do for our parents, questioning my motives, if I had an agenda, if I was honoring our parents correctly.
I found great freedom in chatting with my two other friends who ended up also with brainwashed, fundamentalist parents. One mentioned that she’s found one of her best strategies is she just doesn’t reply to all the questions her parents pose to her. Amazing! You can do that??
So that’s what I did. I completely ignored her pontificating challenge to me and my brother. I bypassed and sidestepped it completely, like it was the hot, steaming pile of shit that it was. I actually sent back a reply with a completely different but slightly related topic. It felt truly amazing and freeing.
I can’t believe I’ve waited this long to be in control of what I let into my life. Part of is has had to do with what I’m also willing to let go of.
THIS IS IMPORTANT.
In the past, I’ve been part of the problem. I’ve wanted to win at everything, to put people in their place with my well-crafted retorts and aggression, my dominating approach when I felt injustice was at hand. And I can truly dominate.
I never considered walking away as an option.
This fits much better with the wisdom teachers I follow and all that psychology and physiology tells us, that stress and anger kills.
For too long, I’ve tried to save myself with anger. I’ve tried to stay protected and defended at every turn, spotting threats when there often weren’t any.
Now that I have legitimate threats and issues to deal with, I still need a different approach. I am going to have to pick my battles. Everything isn’t going to work out in this case. I did some note-taking and diagramming yesterday to help me get my thoughts straight. We are all people, we all care, but some of us have done some interior work and some claim their Christian faith and prayer is all they need.
As a result, that hides and protects all their ways of being disrespectful and protective. It’s cloaked in this cover, like no one can see how disgusting and selfish they’re being, until you’re downwind of it all.
The danger of allowing this stuff in is you obsess over it. It takes over your mind, pushing out your own self-awareness and growth pathways, taking over your own thoughts and dreams you’re working on. It’s a truly sick replacement: death and ruminating on toxic things and people vs. moving ahead in life and being in life and beauty.
What a shitty exchange.
Another huge danger of obsessing over injustices from others or outside yourself? It takes the focus on whatever it is you’re in the processing of learning and growing into. And there is stuff that needs attention. No one escapes this. No one is so all that that they can ignore their own work by focusing on the issues of others, even ones that are threats. It’s too dangerous, to put all that energy into analyzing someone else. It is essentially a 1:1 tradeoff for obsessing on someone else vs. thinking about and working on changing yourself and developing greater self-awareness of the habits and flaws that need loving attention. I can’t risk that, because often the things that drive you the most crazy are the things you’re doing yourself. That means while you’re spouting about someone else’s issues, you could be doing some version of the exact same thing.
Insidious much??
I’ve seen this truth in myself and others many, many dozens and hundreds of times. Our computer brain’s model what was presented to it during childhood and other events and keeps repeating those same patterns unless disrupted consistently over time w/ a new program.
The result of all this? It’s up to me alone to shift my way of being in this situation, either obsessed or healthy.
Healthy requires additional significant disconnection. It requires much more allowing people to live their own lives and have the consequences. It means not caring what people think. It means feeling satisfaction and somehow celebrating my hard work, maybe even throwing a party with the people who understand and care. Yeah, a caring and unacknowledgement party, just for me. And Jay too, who has helped me see how this has been destroying my health.
I’ve experienced significant chunks of time where I’m no longer obsessed, where I feel free and have released everyone in the situation as well as my desired outcomes. It’s my goal, to continue to fulfill my obligations as an adult child and the executor of my mother’s estate but nothing much more than that. No sense of feeling appreciated, no trust or connection with people that will be stabilizing. It’s just not going to happen.
The latest meditations on Letting go of Stress have talked about feeling empathy for others and realizing you’re not the only one suffering.
I find it pretty amazing that they realize how isolating stress and trauma can be. You close into yourself because you feel alone and damaged. Something that can really open you up is to think about and try to connect and embrace all the people who are suffering. It’s hard to do that and remain only focused on your own pain. Feeling the pain of others can free yourself.
I’ve been practicing this and it really does make a difference. I actually do not have it as worse as it could be. There was a woman in the airport that talked about her mother and the son that cut them all out of her mom’s will without telling anyone. I am not there, yet. I think we won’t have anyone try to do that at this point. There is that story and many other horrible stories of someone in the family, often a sibling, hoarding money and the relative with the income.
The world is beautiful, I have a rich, chosen family and I can focus on that as well, embrace gratefulness.
See the beauty, focus on the beauty, obsess on being grateful and be freed of the destruction that’s around me, waiting to capture my imagination.
So much creativity in the beauty and the potential of life.
That’s what I want.
It’s up to me to create that reality for myself.