Help, I feel bad

Sometimes the universe speaks. Sometimes it’s in scattered fragments, but when I listen and try to piece it all together, something beautiful happens. I’m going to jump around in this post and it might seem kind of disjointed, but trust me. I’m just showing you all the pieces. I think the title of my blog might be taken as a request that others listen to who I am. When I first settled on the title though, it was all about ME listening to who I am. Blocking out voices from different camps or people or institutions or cultures and really listening to who I am instead of listening to what I perceive that others think I should be.

Yesterday I began to blog about something I’ve been feeling the past few days or so but couldn’t figure out how I wanted to approach it, so I abandoned it and posted about spam email instead. I’ve been feeling a little bit disconnected. I can trace it to things that are going on in life for me right now and that have happened this week. For the most part nothing serious, but it’s left me feeling a little out of sorts the past few days. The title of this post is actually the subject line of a spam email I got today. Even spam can sense that things are slightly off.

I don’t want to blog about the specific things that have thrown me off because I don’t think those specifics really matter for what I’m trying to accomplish, particularly with this post. I have a fantastic counselor and in one session we were talking a little bit about her approach to counseling. She said that it’s never really about the content of our lives or what happens to us. It’s more about how we process the content or what happens to us.

I’ve had a conversation or two recently with a couple friends about going to the Dharma Rain Zen Center for a little meditation. The conversations reminded me of when I went the first time about a year and a half ago, which reminded me of the journal entry I made about that experience:

There’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It’s been simmering inside me for the last 4 or 5 months. It’s been a running theme all that time that resurfaces again and again. It keeps getting presented to me through different experiences and people and therefore is becoming fairly deeply ingrained. I had one such experience last Thursday. I went to the Dharma Center in Southeast Portland with a friend to give the practice of formal meditation a try. They had a beginning class that had six of us including the teacher. We gathered in a circle on our mats and cushions and the teacher gave us some background and taught us some basic principles of meditation and posture, etc. She told us the basic idea of meditation is to be completely present with what is occurring at that moment. To shut out the past and the future and just focus on right now and how your body feels. And very specific sensations like your breath moving in and out of your nose. The idea is to sit absolutely still and be in touch with what you are feeling now. Someone asked what if you have an itch? The teacher said sometimes she can’t resist and just has to scratch that itch, but that the idea is that you just let it be, you let it happen and that eventually you will notice that it just passes. Eventually it subsides. All that reminded me of what I’ve been thinking about lately about allowing ourselves to experience difficult things/emotions. Often times we want to avoid the feelings, run the other way, or lose ourselves in other things that help us not to feel the difficult emotions…we lose ourselves in work or school or toys or friends or to-do lists or the internet. The idea though is to be still and let those negative emotions wash over us, allow ourselves to experience them and allow them to do what they are meant to do, having faith that just like the itch, eventually they will also subside. That’s not all though. At President Hinckley’s funeral, his daughter spoke. She talked about some of the difficult things that President Hinckley had gone through. She talked about when Sister Hinckley died and how lonely and painful that experience was for Pres. Hinckley. She said that he allowed himself to feel it, to experience it, then he took it to the Lord so that He could use that experience to carve out a greater portion of his heart for compassion. If we allow that whole process to take place, we open ourselves up to be molded and shaped by our Creator, who knows and loves us perfectly and completely, to reach our full potential. But if we allow the process to be hijacked by self medication, we take ourselves further away from who we really are and feel even more detached from our emotions, who we really are, what our potential is, what it is we really want vs. need and in some ways the most dangerous of all, we become detached from the desire to be true to ourselves and the desire to do what we know we should.

So that’s where I’m at. Sometimes we find ourselves in a funk and sometimes we understand where it's coming from and sometimes we don't. The important thing is to let it do what it’s supposed to do. In the meantime, I’m watching Glee tonight and the premiere of 30 Rock and I will be wearing my snuggie while I watch.