e-volved living

Yesterday I found myself with low energy,  easily annoyed and frustrated, and feeling impatient.  I felt my tight mouth and serious eyes and knew how much better a smile, smiling eyes, and some laughter would feel.  I was able to step far enough outside of my reality to observe it, and that is a step in the right direction.  It is very easy to go through life not even getting that far.  As I read last night in Why Meditate?*, “It’s a rare fish that knows it swims in water.”  So I paused for a moment, to celebrate that progress.  Then I asked, “Why am I feeling this way and what can I do to improve?”

As usual, brisk walking, fresh air, sunshine, and someone cool and smart, like Jeph, to bounce ideas off of, is my best method for improving mood, increasing energy, and figuring life out.  Sometimes the reasons for negativity are obvious and tangible, stuff like: health/hormones, an interview or speech, workload, communicating,  finances, etc…I’ve been actively learning how to identify such stressors and developing techniques to redirect that energy.  And that’s going pretty good!  But this scenario was slightly different because the reasons were not obvious.  The process I’ve been developing is: 1) recognize when I’m not feeling great/not enjoying life, 2) determine the sources of the negativity, and 3) take action to redirect.  So the question became, “If I realize I’m not feeling great, but I’m not sure why, how can I move on?”

When life is subtle, our method of  must be subtle, too.  I should be pretty good at that by now because there has been way more nuance than concreteness in my life lately.  Subtlety is about putting one foot in front of the other, at a steady pace, which in this case meant listing the possible reasons form my less than stellar mood.  Having Jeph listen and add to the list was most helpful, but this could also be done with a good old-fashioned pen and paper.  The point is to let your mind loose and see what bubbles to the surface, like forming multiple hypotheses for the science experiment of your life.  It was a fruitful activity for me and generated several possible reasons: 1) I am impatient to be out of the temporary apartment/Boston but anxious about the still unknowns, 2) I am concerned about the energy needed to pack and load our stuff again, and 3) visiting my mom brings up old patterns of negativity including anger that I didn’t/don’t have strong parental life guidance, and fear that I could become pessimistic and unengaged in life like her.  So, with three possibilities in hand, the next question was, “Should I treat the hypothetical as actual and act accordingly?”

J and I tossed that around for a bit.  My gut guidance was that when you probe for reasons, the issues which come into consciousness are having an impact.  Even though the connection between these patterns of negativity and my current state were not obvious, they were still real.  Connecting the dots in this way requires trust in your internal compass – it’s like feeling your way through a dark tunnel and as you make the decision to make the connections, some light starts filtering in from up ahead.  Because, once you know the sources pulling your energy down, you can face them, head on.  You’re at step 3: redirect. So how do you redirect the negatives?

The method is the same as when you are activating the positive or sustaining its momentum:

1. identify what you have control over (this is your game plan, your action items, and how you react to what comes your way)
2. identify what is beyond your control (this is the thoughts and actions of other people, as well as all that comes your way each day)
3. accept and make peace with what is beyond your control and trust  in the universe and its rhythms; then shift the focus to cultivating gratitude for all the good stuff (make a list)
4. start playing the game, following your plan, moving through your action list (crossing off, adding to, adjusting as you go), and reacting to the unplanned (spontaneity is inevitable, and good!), all with confidence in yourself

I intend to practice this method with consistency, so that it becomes instinctual and creates an environment (internal) that isn’t conducive to stress.

*Developing this method of living consciously then reading the excerpt from Voluntary Simplicity later that night was definitely synchronicity at work.   A passage:

The crucial importance of penetrating behind our continuous stream of thought (as largely unconscious and lightning-fast flows of inner fantasy-dialogue) is stressed by every major consciousness tradition in the world: Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Sufi, Zen, and so on.  Western cultures, however, have fostered the understanding that a state of continual mental distraction is in the natural order of things.  Consequently, by virtue of a largely unconscious social agreement about the nature of our inner thought processes, we live individually and collectively almost totally embedded within our mentally constructed reality.  We are so busy creating ever more appealing images or social facades for others to see, and so distracted from the simplicity of our spontaneously arising self, that we do not truly encounter either ourselves or one another.  In the process we lose a large measure of our innate capacity for voluntary, deliberate, intentional action.