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It would seem that I have anger issues. What that means is that there are times when the stresses coming out of me are larger than my capacity to remind myself they are stresses coming out of me, and I make the mistake of thinking 'this is who I am.'
The good news is, I teach meditation, so continually I am reminding people that they will have stresses coming out, and when that is happening, they must "mind their manners." So, more often than not, I am able to do this myself. I am able to back up and let the lady through the narrow aisle at the grocery store, rather than play chicken with her. I am able to let the aggressive driver be too close to my bumper without hitting the brakes to teach him a lesson. But please notice the "more often than not," and forgive me when:
I visit my secret healer, Dr. Tony, and he uses his latest voodoo techniques to release some big chunk of stress evidently I've been holding in my ankles and hips, and it comes up through my system and I go to a workout and box for an hour, beating on this and that, which, rather than getting the stresses out of my system, seems instead to ramp them up even a bit more, so that my whole being now is running a few hundred rpm over normal and when I stop for lunch and run into this person who some time ago hurt my feelings and with whom I never experienced rapprochement and he comes toward me with a hand out to shake, as if we still were buddies, and even though, as a meditation teacher and a mature member of my community and someone who would like nothing more than to be loving and kind and forgiving in all my affairs, being also this man from the small Western town I am, raised around cowboys and rednecks and ranchers and small town football, I am unable in the moment to recognize the stress release as stress release and think instead that in fact I am angry and let's say that I am somewhat less than gracious in my dealings with this person... as I said at the beginning of this sentence, please forgive me and know that I have learned something from the interplay with this person and even in the moment, even by the end of the exchange with him, something had shifted and I was able to shake his hand and wish him well and that next time maybe I'll be able to do it at the beginning of the whole thing, rather than having to walk through 15 minutes of back and forth in my clumsy, too big for the room fashion.
All this by way of saying that life is life and it continues to happen and our spiritual work some days is simply about being better at it today than we were yesterday. Taking responsibility for where we fall short, but abstaining from self-punishment. And remembering, yes, that we all are brothers and sisters, regardless of the occasional hurty-poo moment that we find the way to blame on someone else.
Today I will enjoy the company of those around me, and if someone offends, I will try to see them as a younger brother or sister who is clumsy, as perhaps I was once myself, and let them off the hook.
Grand Canyon
All material copyright Jeff Kober
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