It sometimes seems like there's this unwritten rule underpinning the domain of self-awareness, or ‘awakening’ to how things are (i.e. the direction we look with the Daily Reminders).
And it's that we should remain calm. Unruffled by anything that comes along.
😎
And that's a load of crap.
Let's re-examine, once more, the quote from Sydney Banks, that appears at the bottom of every Daily Reminder:
“If the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world.”
~ Sydney Banks
Now, tell me, where in that quote does it say you should ‘remain calm’?
🧐
Losing it
At the end of a post I wrote the other day—on recovering from traumatic events—I said that the key to moving on from these things is to see this:
“Experiences come, are felt fully and then they pass. All is welcomed, nothing is resisted.”
This, of course, must include ‘bad’ feelings. For it is only by resisting feelings, or even nominally categorising some as ‘bad’, that we find ourselves struggling with them.
Case in point: I lost my rag the other day. Big time. Rage like I haven't experiencing in years. I was spitting chips.
🤬🤬🤬🤬
In brief: a third party made a decision that ‘I’ (the Giles Ego Construct 📦) considered to be very poor indeed (understatement). I'm a dad and a husband and the actions taken by this third party looked like they would affect the family, detrimentally.
OMG, was I cross. 🫢
My wife had phoned me to let me know the sequence of events, and I took the call on a street corner, which, if you were to revisit today, you'd see the burn marks on, because I was incandescent.
I ranted, I raged and I yelled. I just couldn't believe somebody could be so stupid!!
Nope. Doesn't work like that.
- Appreciation that this other person was doing what made sense to them? – Absolutely. But what they did was still inexcusable (to a Giles Ego Construct 📦 in that moment)
- Compassion for others? – Sure. But my tribe comes first. This is Daddy Bear you're dealing with now
- Mindful of separate realities? – Whatever. Put them in front of me right now and I'll frickin’ throttle the reality right out of them!!!
😂
Not bovvered
But here's the thing. Right there, in the middle of that fury – I didn't really mind.
Look again at the Syd Banks quote:
“If the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world.”
Somebody had done something a bit daft, without thinking it through, and the experience that was upon me was pure wrath.
And it was fine.
In fact, it's so long since I've been angry like that, it was almost enjoyable. (Boy, am I angry?! I was thinking, as I practically foamed at the mouth.)
There on the street corner, still on the phone to my wife, I channeled my temper into a plan that I outlined to her: I'd eviscerate this person by email; put them straight. I'd outline all the ways in which they were wrong, in the most scathing of terms. I'd chastise, berate and belittle them and I'd warn them that doing anything as numbskulled as that again, would have serious consequences!!
🤬 ✍🏻 📨 🔥 😤
Trouble is, from the outside, nobody really knows where you're coming from. I'm the only one who gets to experience what it's like to be inside a moment like this – where I'm coming from; how I see it; what it means.
So although inwardly I'm welcoming the anger fully, resisting nothing, knowing it's all just a passing light show that will look completely different in a while… to anyone else, it's not unreasonable to worry that I might be about to embark on a rage-fuelled killing spree. (Or a harmful written-rant, at least.)
My wife, understandably, asks,
“You will show me the email you write, won't you? You're not going to send it tonight, are you?”
And of course, wearing my incandescently furious goggles, there's really only one response she was ever going to get, there in that moment. A somewhat incredulous:
“OF COURSE I'M NOT GOING TO SEND A F%@&ING EMAIL IN THIS STATE OF MIND!!! DO YOU THINK I'M BLOODY STUPID?!?!”
😂 🤣 😂 🤣
A proportional response
We're human. We're not cyborgs. Stuff's going to happen and it's going to get our egos all shook up. We're going to have huge emotional responses—both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’—to all sorts of things.
And that's not a problem.
It was entirely appropriate for me to be mad in that moment - it was a ‘proportional response’, if you like. The fact it was just me on a deserted street corner and my wife (who was as pissed off as me) on the other end of a phone, meant that this was how it all manifested.
Put me in a crowded place, or in front of the child however, and it would have manifested differently.
No problems anywhere to be seen.
This is what I love about the Innate Health understanding:
- We don't have to strive to achieve some sort of never-upset nirvana (it's a fiction – you can drop it)
- We can stand on street corners, foaming at the mouth with rage (and it's not a problem)
- And we can not send an email that's going to make things way worse – not because we're ‘biting our tongue’ but because we know it's all a temporary, thought-created perceptual reality that's going to look completely different in the morning.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You get to have the best of all worlds: the full-fat human experience… and no harm done.
💟
Giles
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Giles P Croft