Being vs. Reacting

¡Hola! Everybody...
So the fuck what Daschle fucked up on some taxes! Dissing Daschle, someone I saw as an ineffective leader when he was running the Dems, is a loss for the nation because it makes the goal of universal health care that much harder to realize. In any case, it’s refreshing to see an intelligent and articulate individual admit -- without qualification! -- to a mistake. It’s even richer when that individual is the President of the USA.

Finally, all this blah blah blah about the stimulus package and, as that black guy in the Oval Office stated yesterday, less than 1% of that package is considered waste. Get a fucking grip you fuckin morons!

And yes, I just said that...

If you read today’s entry, you then have to go out and write about the same subject... You been tagged ma’fuccas, now get to expressing gratitude!

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-=[ Gratitude ]=-

“Don’t say such changes cannot happen. A vast freedom could live inside you. A loaf of bread wrapped in a cloth for the table is just an object, but inside the human body, it becomes gladness for being alive!”

-- Rumi

I guess that if you wanted to get somewhere, an accurate map is a place to start – it can make the difference between arriving at your destination with ease, and getting hopelessly lost. Imagine, for a moment, if a friend raves about a restaurant or club and when you ask your friend where the restaurant is, she says, “Just visualize the restaurant clearly. Post a sign on your refrigerator door that says, ‘I can easily and joyfully find any restaurant I want!’ That’s all I need to do.”

I’m sure most people would think such a statement silly – and they would be correct. But what if my destination is “self-acceptance”? What if all I wanted was to reach a state of inner wholeness that I have never experienced before? As in the directions to the restaurant in the above example, I may have heard wonderful things about it, but I had never been there and don’t know how to get there. Perhaps many of us can relate having been told to, “Just do it. Just accept yourself.” That’s a lot like being told to “Just go to the restaurant,” without being given any directions.

Today, I am grateful for having that direction in my life, for the luxury of experiencing self-acceptance.

Better yet, what if you ask how to get to a restaurant and you’re told that before you can even begin to find this restaurant you need to spend several months, or even years, thinking about how bad your own cooking is. You need to explore the reasons why you aren’t happy with your own cooking and why you have this need to go to the restaurant. In addition, you also have to understand how you became such a bad cook. I would say this is sillier than the previous example.

A common belief is that if we understand a problem well enough, it will simply disappear. Yet in my life I could’ve, at any given moment, articulated the intricate psycho-dynamics of , let’s say, a $300-a-day heroin habit and still not change.

Today I am grateful for the freedom from the tyranny of thinking and the over analyzing that was the prison of my life – literally and figuratively -- before I became free.

My life is not about affirmations or positive thinking. Shit, I have tried many times to overcome my limitations by sheer will power – trying to act or feel different, telling myself repeatedly that I would be different. But I discovered that is approaching the issue from the outside in -- it’s trying to rearrange the same furniture in order to create something new. It’s a lot like taking pain medication for a broken bone: you might feel better for a little while, but the core issue hasn’t been addressed.

Today I am grateful for the many people who have helped me do the “inside job” of creating a lasting transformation.

Most of all, I am grateful for having an underlying sense of wholeness and well-being whether or not things are going well in my life in the moment. Even when things seem to be falling apart, I feel resourceful. I have had this experience numerous times and, little by little, it has become my default way of being. I am grateful for developing and maintaining an inner sense of self, well-being, and wholeness and perhaps a connection with something beyond myself, that sustains me in difficulty as well as in good times. I am grateful for the awareness that this inner sense of fullness and integrity, and a strong resourceful self is available to each of us, and is our own birthright.

I ain’t all that well, and have times of sadness, frustration, and anger and irritability – that’s part of being human. But I am equally grateful that even in those times I can still have an underlying sense of joy as my ground of being. I have an inner knowing that I have the resources to weather the storms, an unbeatable sense of pragmatic optimism that I will come out on the other side of my difficulties not only intact, but also wiser and stronger.

What more could I ask of my life?

All of us have personal limitations we have struggled to overcome. With some of them, it seems that no matter what we do, they won’t go away. Most of us turn away from those parts of ourselves we don’t like. We try to repress feelings we don’t want to have. We try to “think positively” and push away negative thoughts. These approaches will never work -- they never seem to create natural, lasting change. Besides, at least half of life ain’t all that pretty and how can you expect good results if you’re busy denying a good chunk of reality?

I am here to say today that I am most grateful to be able to carry the message that the way to happiness is through our limitations!

Love,

Eddie