Posting With Positivity

This seems to be the moment for a positive blog.  I find these becoming something that I do from time to time which is a change from when this blog started.  That's a step in the right direction.  That means that I am letting go of some of the shit blocking up my mind.  As long as it is sitting there, anything that gets added piles in on top of it creating a muddied bowl of stinky, putrid water.  In  many ways this blog is the plunger.  Yes, that is gross, but it fits and it makes me laugh a little.

I hold on.  It's what I do.  I hold with a desperation that is rivaled by the greatest rock climbers, though what I hold on to is not always what helps me stay alive.  I seem to like hanging on to the things that make my life harder, the things that bring me suffering.  Although this is normal, it sucks.  I watched a TED Talks about memory and happiness and learned that people tend to remember and experience by what occurred last.  If you are on a vacation and have a wonderful time, but then you lose your wallet, that vacation experience is ruined by that loss.
I embody this.  Boy do I ever.
But, not only do I remember the bad things the most clearly, I tend to let those things taint further experience.  I wear them like glasses.  Instead of correcting my vision, they blur and distort.  Sometimes I remember to take them off, or perhaps forget to put them on.  When I do, I can see that life is full.  I feel worth something.  I love clearly and see clearly and feel clearly.  Those tainted glasses are shit.  I don't know why I put them on.  I suppose it is the opposite of the time in my life when I first realized I needed actual glasses.
I remember walking home from school and looking up at the leaves and realizing that they were blurry.  The greens mixed together and formed a shape, but I couldn't see the individual leaves very well.  After I got glasses I looked up at the trees and could make out each part clearly.  I have replaced those glasses with these new ones and once again, I can't see the leaves for the tree.
Thankfully, today I am not wearing them.  It is free and light and full of sunshine even amidst stressful things going on all around me.  Perhaps it is a glimpse of what is to come if I continue doing what I am doing.  I would love that, but have to be careful to not hold on to that thought to closely.  No expectations, right?  But, in this moment things are wonderful.  I am overflowing with emotion for life and this moment. 

I think that often we hold on the moments that we last remember.  They color everything we do and see for as long as we hold them.  This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what we are holding on to.  I eat McDonalds once every six months or so because I will be hungry and can't stop somewhere or I will only have a dollar or two to eat, or whatever.  Every time I do, the memory of why I don't eat there is solidified.  In this case, it is a good thing otherwise I would keep eating food that, now, makes me physically ill.  But when we keep remembering the bad stuff, like a relationship of the past where we were miserable, then any other relationship we come to will be colored for the worse. 
Let that stuff go.  Put it down.  Set it ablaze.  Walk away. 
Thanks to days like today, I set more of it down and light it up.  It's a process.

So, in writing this, I am letting this moment go.  For even as it is full of joy, it is just as fleeting as moments of sadness.  The next moment will come and go as well and it will be full of whatever I pour in to it.  When I feel like this it is easy to see this.  I know that when there is depression it is so much more difficult, but hopefully I will retain some of this.  Hopefully, this will be as strong a learning experience to take with me.  As long as it is, I will keep getting stronger and life will be filled with more moments of happiness. 

That makes all the shit that piles up smell a little bit more like roses. (Gross, I know.)

“Suffering is not holding you. You are holding suffering. When you become good at the art of letting sufferings go, then you’ll come to realize how unnecessary it was to drag those burdens along with you. You’ll see that no one other than you was responsible. The truth is that existence wants your life to become a festival.”

—

Osho

Riding the Bull

It is strange when I am able to keep my anxiety under control, or as under control as a bull rider keeps a pissed off bull.  This whole deep breathing thing works.  The idea of staying in the moment works.  The thought that nothing is permanent helps.  It also helps knowing that I have been through worse and survived.  Obviously, I am talking about a woman.  That is all I seem to take to heart.  The thoughts and emotions that come with being with someone are my main source of suffering.  One of these days I am going to stop and I am going to stay away from them.  Every time I touch the fire, I get burned.  It is also possible that I am the source of the fire.  I am the cause of the burn.  This duality is insufferable sometimes.  

I think that one of my struggles lies in my need for connection.  It is a drug to me, making me high and happy.  When there is a threat to that connection, I begin to suffer the effects of the withdrawal immediately.  I grasp on too tightly.  I hold on to things I can't control and then I get upset when they go their own way.  To compound this, when things are going well I will latch on to any negative thing that comes up and hold on to that instead of seeing the things that are good and enjoying those.  In some ways, this is good.  I don't want to live a deluded life colored by rose-colored glasses.  I also don't want to wear my pessimism all the time.  It is a difficult balance to maintain.  When I lose control of it, I break my own heart.

The interesting thing about today is that, although the anxiety is under a modicum of control, it is this permeating sadness that is sitting behind my eyes and heart ever so quietly.  It is a kind of acceptance of things that have not even happened yet.  Is it better to live in cynicism to be pleasantly surprised, or to live in optimism and be disappointed?  I guess the answer is neither.  It is better to just live and take the events as they happen.  But this is hard to do.
It is hard to keep the movie in my head from taking over real life, from replacing the now with whatever it is that my delusional heart wants me to see.

Am I just trying to see something that isn't there, or am I trying to rationalize and delude myself into believing that it isn't there when it is?
 Trust is really difficult.

I guess the positive here is that I am riding the bull, not allowing it to trample me.  That is a good thing.

"Why did anxiety, stress, or negativity arise? Because you turned away from the present moment. And why did you do that? You thought something else was more important. You forgot your main purpose. One small error, one misperception, creates a world of suffering."

— Eckhart Tolle

Waking Up Again

I don't know what time this thing will say I posted, but it is 5 in the morning.
I woke up this morning from a dream where She was trying to get back into my life.  I said no over and over again, but in the dream, she kept coming back and was hauled away by security in whatever apartment my dream had me in.  So, now I am awake because it is hard to go back to sleep when you wake up sobbing.  I know that I have touched on a lot of this with attempts at poetic language, but I think I just need to say a lot of things.
She hurt me more than I can express.  Just writing it stirs up a lot of emotion.  I used to blame myself for the pain, I used to say that I was doing my share of hurting her.  I was not perfect, that is true.  I also chose to accept what was happening to me and not get away from it sooner.  I was going through the hardest time of my life because I wanted to be with the person that I thought she was.  But that was not enough.
I am not going to go into what happened between us, though, this paragraph is part of a rather massive edit.  But the result of my relationship and the things that took place was that I was on the brink of suicide drinking one to two bottles of wine while taking whatever pills I had.  The combination of the guilt brought on by her and the pain of my divorce was too much.  I had let everyone down.  I was constantly letting the woman I loved down and didn't know how to stop. Now, I struggle trusting any woman.  I expect to be hurt.  I expect to be lied to.  I expect to hear the things I want to hear absent sincerity.  Red was right.  I am broken.  But I don't want to be broken anymore.  I am so tired of feeling sad and being unable to connect and trust without fighting these demons that plague me.  My heart hurts.
I am not as healed as I thought I was.
I received a text from Her last week.  I ignored it, or more accurately, tried to ignore it after a simple response.  You see, I went against what everyone tells me and I replied because I want to believe that I have forgiven and moved past the anger and the pain.  I want to be okay with it all.  That one text turned into four or five over the course of the past few days.  I have done my best to ignore it and not let it bother me.  My dream tells me that it does bother me.  A lot.
I am not fine.  I may never be fine again.  Seeing those texts and having that dream made me realize that I am not.  I can't hold it in any longer.
I do not believe that she will see this.  Her last text was to tell me that she was sorry for the pain and that she is done reading my blog and texting me.  I don't know that I want her to see this.  I am not bashing her.  She has a lot of her own past and baggage to deal with and that causes people to act in ways they might not mean to.  But I can not have dreams like that any more.  I can't feel like this any more.  I am so sick of being sad and of looking at the past couple of years of my life as a big black hole.  What is done is done, I know that.  I am trying to live in the moment and find happiness.
That is why I wrote this.
I am done feeling sad all the time for things that were not my fault.  I am done allowing that big black hole to continue to fuck with my life.
I am done having dreams that wake me up in tears.  


I saw this and it fits well, even a week after I wrote this.

“You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even months over-analyzing a situation; trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could’ve, would’ve happened… or you can just leave the pieces on the floor and move on.”

Tupac Shakur

Expecting a Disaster

I realized something that I have known, but not really seen. 
I am expecting to get hurt.  I am almost actively looking for it as a knee jerk reaction to really liking someone.  It stems from my refusal to let go of past experiences, and I know this but I struggle to change it.  My relationships end badly.  They always do.  Sometimes, I am the one in control of it when it ends and with others, it is out of my control.  Such is the way with people and love. 
I think the enormity of the pain I have recently experienced still resides within me.  I am holding on to it, though I am not sure why or how.  The tremors from the quake that rocked my life are still a threat, or at least that is what I have built up defenses against.  I can't help but wait for another earthquake.  I am like LA, minus the massive eating disorder, money, and endless supply of silicone.  I am full of insecurity, a desire to act, and preparation for disaster.  It is in this preparation that I am feeding my anxiety and fear which spills over into every other part of my life. 
It is kind of irritating and largely annoying, I am sure, for the people in my life that have to hear about it. 

I have been on about not having expectations, and that is true, but I think that the motivation behind that thought was positive expectations.  Don't hold on to the expectation for good things.  Also, don't hold on to expectations for bad things.  Don't have any expectations.  They lead us away from the moment we are in.  If something doesn't go the way we want, we get upset.  If we expect bad things, we get upset.  Expectations lead to suffering. 

So, I have decided that I need to work on not being an idiot and expecting that I am going to get hurt.  I know this chick likes me, or at least the rational part of me does.  The irrational part thinks that she is lying to me, telling me what I want to hear, and holding on to a bevvy of men on the side with whom she flirts and texts and occasionally will "accidentally" let me see what they say.  But she is not like that.  She is cool and I have a hard time really accepting that fact.  It is irrationally difficult for me to believe that she might actually be what she says she is and that it is not all an act. 
I have gone paranoid and crazy.  I am jumping at shadows. 

So, now that I see it I have to move on.  I have to stop.  If I don't, I will never have another healthy relationship.  I would like her to be my healthy relationship.

Childish Brain Antics

I found this interesting based on yesterday's post.

“One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.”

—

Eckhart Tolle This idea is of critical importance in maintaining serenity.  You will never truly experience peace of mind until you have through practice, using directed mindfulness mediation. learned to rein in the wild horses of your conscious mind. We see quotes with this exact bit of wisdom from Lao Tzu, the Buddha, the Zen Masters, Ram Dass, Alan Watts, the Dalai Lama and many others. All saying the same thing: Learn mindfulness, quiet the chatter in your mind by taking control of your inner dialog and you will experience true joy, you will see the world in a new and fresh light and you will never be the same again. When ever a bit of wisdom is found in several different times and places in a variety of spiritual traditions chances are it is universal in scope and a very valuable bit of knowledge. Samsaran. (via samsaranmusing)

The Anxiety Whisperer

I have a plan.

Dealing with my anxiety is a bit overwhelming.  I can feel a tightening on my heart and a lump in my throat.  I recognize it every time.  This anxiety is like a stray dog, a pit bull, I have decided.  It is not intrinsically cruel.  It is just a puppy and whether or not it attacks you is based on how you treat it.  Like all dogs, Anxiety (the pit bull, you see) needs a pack leader.  It will take over, if you let it, and will tear up your house, shit on your carpets, attack your friends, eat all your food, and sleep in your bed.  I often allow this kind of behavior, as we all well know.  However, if you take a calm and commanding stand, the dog will submit, roll over on its back, and be your bitch. 

My hope, or theory, is that by approaching the anxiety or the fear this way I will be able to gain a modicum of control.  It runs my life sometimes and gets in the way of me having a good time.  It’s like a dog that I have to clean up after once a week.  I would love to take it to the pound, but like a pet it has become a part of me. 

So, here is the plan. 

When Anxiety starts acting up, I breathe deeply and slowly and return to the moment.  I calmly look at it and avoid anger or frustration because that little bastard feeds off that shit.  Then I try to master it by looking at it.  I don’t know how to carry this part into my creatively awesome metaphor, but I will look at its root cause.  What is it that is pissing Anxiety off?  Why do I feel that way about what I am seeing?  Do I need to feel that way?  And I breathe the whole time.  Sometimes I can make that shhht sound that the Dog Whisperer makes and things calm down.  Other times I need to take him for a walk and burn off the extra energy.  

I believe that this method is my meditation.  It makes the anxiety and the fear a cute little puppy, and we all love cute puppies.  It also forces me to take breaths and act in the way that I keep reading about.  Take a step back.  Look at it, but don’t let it take control. 

Maybe I am being over optimistic or too simplistic.  I don’t know.  I have to do something, though. 

Relationship With Fear

This anxiety tears me up and I don't know where exactly it is coming from.  I can't point at it and say, "there it is.  Fuck off anxiety.  Fuck off fear."  It is more like a direction that I can see, but can't get to.  I don't trust like I used to and this is driving me up a wall, or into one depending on how bad it is.  My gut instinct is to trust first, question later.  Now there is a duality to my trust.  Part of me is open, the other is closed.  It is like a battle going on in my head all the time.
Obviously, this has to do with a woman because that is the part of my life that is always having problems.  God, I hate that.  It's kind of sad.

I spent a weekend away from her.  My mind goes to town.  I begin to create situations.  The situations become bigger and bigger.  There are pretend arguments and discussions and me telling her off for the things she did in my pretend situations.  How fucked up is this?  I make myself crazy!!  Maybe I am.  I don't know.  What I do know is that I am not handling this very well.  I just don't know what to do.  I feel very lost at the moment. 
I don't want to be a person who is controlling and jealous and codependent.  I don't want to feel like I have to see her to know what she is doing.  I don't want to make this stuff up in my head.  I don't want to see her and have to stuff all of these thoughts down so she can't see them.  I also don't want to talk about them so that she sees how fucked up I am.
I want to be a man.  I want to be strong.  I want to be able to be in a relationship with someone and feel secure.  I don't feel secure.  I have thought that maybe I should end it with her, but what does that solve.  I am still here.  I am the source of all of this shit.  Leaving her still leaves me with me.  Frustration is a mild word for this.

So, what do I do?

I have to talk to her.  I don't know what the other choice is.  To not talk would be to give in to fear and to avoid conflict.  That solves nothing.  I need to face the fear and the anxiety and make friends with it.  I need to give it a nice dinner, a good night out and then send it on its way.  I need to break up with it.  My relationship with it is over.
This is going to be a hard break up.  If I were to guess, I would say it will be one of those relationships where we get back together and break up again and again.
I need to live right now.  No expectations.  I need to stop expecting bad things, especially.  I also need to stop wanting and just start doing.

This sucks, but hopefully I will actually learn something from it.

“Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry—all forms of fear— are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.”

—	Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

White Knuckled Expectation

The fear is creeping in again.

My girlfriend and I are spending a weekend apart, the first such weekend since we started seeing each other.  I know it all sounds sweet and mushy.  I will miss her and she says she will miss me and we hugged and kissed and spent one last night together before we are apart for two days.  That’s right, 48 hours.  I laugh about it because it is sappy and that sentiment feels good.  I shake my head, too, because I am a guy and guys don’t feel stuff, right?  There is also the anxiety, the reminder that I don’t completely trust her, the fear. 

All of this stems from my attachment to her and her actions.  I have tied my happiness to the actions of this woman and that is a dangerous and self-destructive thing to do.  When we place our peace of mind in the control of something outside of ourselves, it is like trusting a child with a stranger.  Most people are good and they will take care of it.  But there are some who won’t. 

Reading that, I see where my fear is coming from and I hate it.  It is the same old story of my insecurities and this ridiculous issue with trust being thrust into the open again.  I have to remind myself that she is who she is.  She is not something or someone else and has not hurt me.  We place the ghosts of our pasts onto the people of our present.  I am scared of something that has not happened.  It is not real.  I am jumping at the thought of shadows.  When I step back and look at it, I am ashamed. 

Instead of enjoying the fact that I will have a weekend with other friends and a chance to catch up with them, I am focused on the absence of someone.  I am focused on what they might do.  I have gotten lost in the abscess of my fears.  It is irritating.  The truth is, I really like this woman and in liking her I have transferred fears and baggage on to her.  She has not done anything to break my trust and has repeatedly reassured me of her feelings.  There are moments when I can’t read her and it is in these moments that I focus.  These spaces in between the light are going to ruin me.  She might do something to break my trust, yes.  Then again, she might not.  Knowing her, there is more of a chance that she won’t do anything and I will have been sitting here fretting and biting my nails for no reason.  

What I like is that I caught it before it got too big.  If nothing else, I know that I am learning and growing and gaining some sense of sanity.  I read what I have written and see old patterns reasserting themselves; the attachment, the fear, the jealousy, all coming up and rearing their stupid heads.  The difference is that I see them for what they are.  

So, how do I deal with them? 

By stepping back and looking at these situations with honest eyes, with the mindset of being open with ourselves, we can see what the feelings actually are and where they live.  I get the impression that this stuff comes up from the deep wells of our own psyche and is rarely, if ever, manifested from others.  The jealousy, the fear, the anxiety all lie within our minds and are the cause and often the results of a white knuckled grip on what we believe should be instead of what is.  With expectations in place, we set ourselves up for suffering.  With a firm attachment to those expectations, we are set up for more suffering.  By letting go of that (there is that whole letting go theme coming back) stuff, there is a chance for some peace of mind. 

What happens is what happens.  How we react is what we can control. 

So, I won’t hold on to what I believe will happen or should happen.  I will focus on what is happening.  This weekend will be what it is and I will focus on the moment.  I look forward to Sunday, though.  I will see her on Sunday and that thought, right now, makes me smile.

Depending on Memory

Often, when you read about Buddhism, you read about letting go.  I have written about this before and will again, I am sure.  I tend to struggle quite a bit with this.  I found a quote about letting go:

If you let go a little you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot you will have a lot of peace.
— Ajahn Cha  (http://we-are-meant-to-thrive.tumblr.com/)

And it sparked that thought again.  How do we let go?  In the case above, it is not just about letting go of the past, but about letting go of the present even as it passes us by.  When we hold on to anything, we are bringing about suffering.  I think that is part of it.  It also comes back to the idea of being water.  Water does not hold on to anything.  When it is there is embraces it fully, but when it goes the water lets it go.  This helps bring peace of mind because peace comes from living in the moment.  

Think about a time that was wonderful.  For me, I often think about the house I grew up in and playing in the yard and running in the field behind the house with friends.  That memory is amazing and powerful and happy and full of joy for me.  Now hold on to your memory with all you have.  Do not let it go and relive it over and over again.  When things are going badly, relive it.  When things are good, relive it.
I used to do this and it was bad news.  I used to think back to good times more often than I would look at the good times I was having.  In this way, positive memories became a crutch and in turn a drug.  That drug held me back from enjoying what I was living in.  I was dependent on memories to define where I was.  I relied on the past for a clue about the present.  It's confusing just reading it.  
It is the same with negative memories.  We hold on to them and they too become a crutch.  They become a crutch of comfort in sadness.  Too often we allow ourselves to become lost in the familiarity of being miserable that it seems like that way of living is good.  We become so accustomed to feeling pain that a lack of pain feels like we are missing something.  And we are. 
I lived this way for a long time, I think.  I still do, in some ways.  It is a difficult thing to move past, but once you see that you are doing it you can begin to change the way you think.  You can stop and say, “dude, knock it off.”  That little thing is a huge help down a road to letting stuff go.  

I don’t believe that there is benefit to forgetting or ignoring the past or memories.  They have made us what we are, but to hold on to them and to relive them is not good.  I feel like a lot of this blog was very assured and matter of fact, but this belies where I really am with this stream of thought.  I am still working my mind around this.  I am still trying to figure out how to just let go.  I don’t hold on to it for too long, however.  I look at it, investigate and ponder and when it is time to move on, I do.  I like that.  It comes back when there is something new to see or think about, but it doesn’t stick around too long.