I generally enjoy my experience of life so much these days. Contentment is a prominent feature of my emotional landscape, sustainable, real, authentic, and fairly easily supported with a number of basic good self-care practices (emotional and physical). It’s not fancy, but it’s a long way from misery, chronic frustration, and anger – and more than that; it is enough. More often than not, these days, my experience is both ‘about’ sufficiency and enjoyed on the basis of sufficiency, as well as ‘wholeness’ – which isn’t quite ‘wellness’ – and basic worthiness.
The journey isn’t over, and I hope it continues for a long while to come. I’m still very human. There are still verbs involved. I still experience emotional weather – although the climate has improved greatly. 🙂 My results vary.
Be love.
Last night I had a bad bit, and even now I am not certain why. I’d gotten home from an afternoon appointment with a new physician. It had gone well, and I didn’t have to travel very far at all, so I arrived home quite near to the usual time of evening. I was relaxing after a bite of dinner when a state of extreme irritation, almost anger, swept over me quite unexpectedly, and without any obvious cause at all. Unpleasant, sure, and potentially very problematic if I were living in a shared household; that’s the kind of stray emotional bullshit that quickly escalates among human primates, becoming a nasty evening of arguing, or unpleasant confrontational tension, with all the associated blame-laying and accusatory dialogue imaginable. Go ahead, imagine it if you want to; haven’t most of us been there at least once or twice? I did imagine it, in the moment, and gave myself a chance to feel the relief of living alone, and literally having no one to start shit with.
A helpful reminder; I apply it equally to how I speak to myself these days.
I gently alerted my traveling partner I was having some challenges with emotional balance and logged off for the night to manage my needs, medicate, meditate, and call it a night. Few things ease unexpected emotional volatility like meditation. Medical cannabis is a another exceptional tool in my toolkit, particularly if there is any chance that my issues are symptomatic of my PTSD, or when fatigue causes my injury to weigh in more heavily on the outcome. Getting adequate rest [for this particular human being that I am myself] is critical – and I’m not always aware of the impact of small changes in my sleep. (Even something small like having a stuffy head interrupting my sleep periodically over days can eventually become a bigger deal.) It’s hard to overstate how valuable it has been to learn to more skillfully take care of this fragile vessel.
I sat quietly for a long while, letting emotions ebb and flow without interference, interpretation, root cause analysis, or criticism. No tears – this one was mostly emotions of anger, quite specifically, and just not associated with anything particular. I could so easily have made it ‘something’… Instead, I let stillness fill my senses. I took deep calming breaths and let the emotions come and go, feeling them fearlessly and letting them pass. And again. Over about an hour, the landscape of my thoughts began to shift toward pleasant observations, contentment, calm, and I found myself wrapped in a gentler experience as the evening ended. I slept well and deeply.
Would it make you nuts to feel angry and not know ‘why’? Would you feel an urgent need to explain or justify it? To make sense out of it? To identify the cause and bring the wrong-doer to justice? Does there have to be a wrong-doer in the first place? Our emotions have a chemical component – and some of our most basic physical sensations are shared with emotional experiences, too. How often have I taken some physical experience and ascribed causes to it, nudged it into an emotional context, and turned it into drama – instead of taking some time for myself to just breathe through it, recognize that feelings are… feelings (and may not be anything more than the sensations of experience), without further requirement to take action on them, at all?
Sometimes finding a happy place is surprisingly close to home.
This morning begins gently, and I have a busy work day ahead that doesn’t occupy my thoughts needlessly early. I have evening plans with my traveling partner. In all respects a promising day unfolding ahead of me. It’s enough.
