Getting the Inside Right

"If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place." Wise words from The Power of Now.

Wise words that I keep forgetting. Especially in difficult times. But can I trust these words? Is resolving this financial and personal stress really as simple as staying relaxed inside?

It's experiment time.

For the rest of the month of February, I will stay focussed on my inner tension, breathing through it, allowing it to be a fuel for presence. How will my external cricumstances resolve?

I already saw a bit of this earlier this week. I went to see my mother in the hospital. She was so demoralized by days of diarhea and stories from friends about infections they'd caught in the hospital, and of course facing her mortality in such an irrefutable way. I stayed compassionate, but wry. I could see there was a part of her that was fueling her anxiety because she felt somehow that God would take pity on her. It's a superstitious habit she'd learned from her mother. One I intend to break. All I did was point it out gently to her. Anxiety is not going to protect you, I said, it's going to drain you. My mother felt immediately better. I could see her mood shifting. She told me that my presence just gave her so much more energy. The next day she called me, she felt so much better, she was eating, the diarhea stopped. The tests came back last night and there was no infection. We could all tell she was on the way to recovery.

I need to be that presence for myself now.

future as addiction

My brain is addicted to the future, whether it's in a state of worry or a state of excitement, I am almost always thinking about life as something that will become worse or better than it is now.

Why can't I get addicted to the present? Because the present is nourishment, not addiction. So why am I not finding nourishment in the present?

I pause to do that and so much stress evaporates instantly. Who cares if Mme Fauteux wins this court case? I'll find an apartment somehow. Odds are I'll negotiate an extension at least until 2013. There's really nothing to panic about, other than mystress over winning or losing, which is really just ego.

It's easy to try and make a project out of liberating myself from my ego, but that's really, paradoxiacally just ego. Just more future when everything will be okay without ego. It's all abstraction without the action of actually being in the present, in this present, with this identity that I have now.

Sometimes the present can feel like an addiction. Sometimes I feel the jouissance, a sort of joyful subversive feeling when I'm not doing anything. It's a radical rebellion to the programming of tending to past and future.