How to be less grumpy

I am not un-smart, quite sensitive, a bit thoughtful, reasonably emotionally fluent, as it were,  and yet I’m still ridiculously.. touchy.

At times.

Here are the major things that have been going around and around for me about being a bit less grumpy.

Obligatory meta-blogging

I’m putting several things in one post, and am going to attempt to just do a few lines about each. We’ll see.

Inner Expert: Make this separate, granular postings. Make each one detailed. Space it out. You don’t want to run out of material, do you?

Inner Yoda: Meh. Are you opening or closing as you write?

‘Me’: Putting everything in the same post – opening. Separate posts? Closing.

Inner Yoda: <raises eyebrow but says nothing>.

UPDATE: As I read through this post, I realised that sometimes it’s in everyone else’s interest if I put separate ideas in separate posts. (See this post where I tell the Blog Police to, er, suck it.)

So there’s a separate one here about the separating-fantasy-from-reality thing.

And one about the peripheral-focus thing.

It’s the straining that causes the pain

I’ve been listening on my walks with Pema Chödrön this week about the Buddhist practice of Tonglen.

Tonglen (in my very very shallow understanding of it) goes like this

1. Flash on the open space of compassion.
2. Breathe in emotional heat/dark/stuckness, breathe out cool/light/space.
3. Find a situation that is bothering you – breathe in the emotion/the hard, breathe out what’s needed/space.
4. Connect with all the people in the world who are in the same situation, breathe for them (including yourself).

Emotions are like kittens

One of the initial benefits/lessons from my very superficial practice of Tonglen is how moving towards the emotion helps.

You know how if you pull away from a cat whilst it’s biting you, it just holds on more, but if you push towards it, towards  the claws and the teeth, it lets go?

Tonglen has been making me move towards the emotion, just a tiny bit, and somehow it makes loosen its grip. It’s the pulling away that makes the harm.

Connecting with the human condition, er, makes me cry
So, I’ve been doing this practice as I’ve been walking. There I am in my woolly hat, scarf, thermal long johns, and when I hit the universality of what I’m feeling, I cry my heart out.

And that soft spot is where it’s at, really.

The wheel keeps spinning

Something Pema talks about is how, emotionally, things don’t come to a sudden halt.

~ You make the intention to change a habit, a way of reacting, and you have to keep making the decision again and again.
~ Even when you think you’ve dealt with something, the reaction doesn’t necessarily get that memo.
~ When you’ve started reacting to situations differently, the people around you don’t notice.

It’s like we’ve been spinning the wheel of emotional reaction faster and faster, and then we stop actively spinning it, but it keeps on spinning.

Sometimes for quite a while.

Bastard wheel.

Sometimes I’m on the wheel

And I spin and spin and spin. And I don’t even notice I’m spinning, it looks like the world is doing the spinning. This is when I shout, and close, and cry and provoke but blame.

Sometimes I can be wider than the wheel

And I can see the wheel spinning, but hold a tiny layer of stillness around it. Like having a bike upside down, having the wheel spinning, but being able to hold your cheek just far enough away to not be affected.

Not a totally calm experience, but also not a totally disorientating one either.

It’s the Silent Fight that gets you

I was talking to a Person I Care About, and we were talking about the Silent Fight.

The Silent Fight is the one that happens in your head, but not in the world.

For example, I was meditating this morning, and realised that I was convinced everyone was impatiently waiting for me to finish so we could go for a walk, and I was fighting back, and… then finished meditating and it was all in my head.

Same with doing some hoovering the other day, and fighting with People I Care About about them criticising me for not doing it well enough.
In my head.

And when they arrived home and weren’t over the moon I blew up at them because they were bringing it up again.

Fantasy and reality

Sometimes it’s difficult to remember what is really happening (like, in sensory reality, right now) and what is the echo chamber of the mind.

I’m finding (slowly, slowly, very fucking slowly) that the more I can focus on what’s really happening, the more I can feel my hands and my feet, the less suffering there is.

There is conflict, there are reasons to feel stuff, but so much of the time there aren’t.

Almost all conflict in my life happens either in my head, or as a result of crazy things I’m doing in my head.

A couple of possible slogans

We  were talking about slogans the other day – phrases that might bring a little bit of consciousness in the midst of arrrgggh.

How about:

~ Go peripheral, move towards

~ What am I seeing and hearing right now?

My challenge experiment this week:

Jeez, I don’t know. It’s not so clear cut. And I’m finding that my life isn’t fitting into neat categories that mean I can cycle through the four keys/secrets/factors/habits/things every four weeks.

But I am finding it useful to have some focus.

So… Hmmm – ok, how about implementing those two slogans?

This week, when I’m experiencing the spinning wheel, I will think:

~ Go wide, move towards

~ What can I see and hear?

And… you can join in too, of course. In the comments, or just in a lurk-y kind of way.

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Updates and noticings on Friday.

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