'Tudes

‘Tudes

I pulled the trust card this morning. What a good reminder of a bunch of different things, mostly about attitude.

And isn’t that what it’s all about.

One of the biggest secrets in the world of how to live a good life is right in front of our faces all the time.  Attitude is the lion’s share of how our days go.

When I come to my morning with an attitude of cheerful, peaceful, and present, I have a nicer day than when I come to my morning with an attitude of pissy, entitled, and grim.

Attitude is a complex set of thoughts and feelings that set our filters, that is, what we are looking and listen for out in the world.

Simply put, when I have a good attitude, I find good stuff, when I have a bad attitude, I find bad stuff.

In the olden days, I sorted for bad stuff all the time, from who was doin’ me wrong to how awful the world was. For some reason, then, I seemed to have trust issues.

Back then, I would say with great gloom and certainty, “I know how this is going to play out,” and often that was exactly how it went. I knew that so-and-so would hurt me, that thus-and-such would bomb, and that, while things most likely wouldn’t turn out the worst way, because I had a very good imagination, they certainly wouldn’t turn out the best way.

Little by little, my teacher nudged me to a different attitude. We would imagine things getting better. How they would look, how I might feel. Not great, mind you, just better. A little better. Then a little more.

I imagined that everything was hard. She helped me imagine how things might be if they were easier. She helped me get out of myself enough to start seeing beauty in unlikely places, tiny kindnesses that strangers did for strangers, and solutions to problems. It took me eleven years to trust that she wouldn’t try to hurt me. We celebrated that day.

I expected that the closer I was to you, the worse you were going to get me, when you got around to it, which would be any time now. I was an expert in both anxiety and depression.

Why do I choose to feel safe? How do I feel protected? What makes me choose?

I changed a lot of things with those baby steps. I changed a lot of relationships by changing me. I left a lot of relationships that I couldn’t change. I changed my attitude a bit and a bit and a bit. I found trustworthy people and practiced trusting them. I started to feel safe. I learned how to feel protected.

Attitude will change a lot of things when it comes from our core. If I am pretending things are fine, that’s a horse of a different color. I was stuck in that for years. Pretending things are fine is a coverup. Forcing a good mood can feel awful, but softening into an attitude change can make all the difference.

How have I changed from faking a good attitude to really meaning it?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 03132014

Please remember to share or +. Thanks. 

Meh

Meh.

Whatever.

I don’t care.

Except that I do.

It seemed like the more I meh-ed, the more I hurt way deep down, and the awful-er I felt. I pushed myself to volunteer because I was supposed to, I was kind because I was supposed to be, I tried to be there for everyone because that’s what good people do, and I felt beat and beaten, and wondered what was wrong with me.

The thing is that I was in so much denial, I was in so much avoidance, I was pretending so hard that everything was okay that I hardly had any juice left over for anything else.

It’s challenging to care when I feel exhausted, when everything is effortful, when it seems like some horrible thing is happening every time I turn around. So I stop turning, and then I get stagnant, and then my life really starts to stink.

It was my choice. It’s also your choice.

Ow ow ow! Stop throwing stuff at me!

It’s also our choice. Sometimes I have to hit bottom before I choose to stop acting like I’m living a life, and really start living. Sometimes, it has to get so bad that, looking back, I can hardly believe it. Why do I choose to live?

When I choose denial, avoidance, and pretending, I make my life harder. I have to remember on some level that I’m lying about how I feel, so I don’t mess up, but I also have to forget, and forget I forgot. I often choose denial because I am scared that my life will fall apart if I look at how stuff really is, or really was.

I gotta say that, once the dust settled, my life falling apart was truly a wonderful thing.

When I gave up denial and avoidance and pretending, my fake life did crumble, but it was replaced with a real life. This real life, my real life. I have so much more energy to spend on having fun, addressing stuff as it happens, enjoying all sorts of stuff I couldn’t even notice in the before time because I had to remember to smile, I had to remember to say cheerful things, I had to remember to act positive. . Why am I happy from my core?

When I began to choose to live my real life, I found lovely people to help me. And I found that I cared again, for real,  from my core. I didn’t feel like I was just going through the motions, I wanted to help. Being kind became automatic, and I no longer felt like I had to be there for everyone.

Now, my smile shows up spontaneously, I say how I feel without pretense, I am cheery from deep in my core most of the time, and I don’t have to act positive any more because I feel light. Stuff is mostly effortless. Stuff is mostly easy.I feel free most of the time.

How have I changed from pretending to care to knowing I make a difference?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 10162013

Pain-body Playdates

Pain-body Playdates

Back in the dark ages, I was a phoney. I hate to say it, but it’s true. I was passing myself off as a normal person when I was actually running around in my pain-body. Ok, so what am I talking about?

Pain-body is a concept Eckhart Tolle came up with.

Here’s the way I understand it:

I have a bad thing happen that I don’t fully complete, that is, I choose to deny that it happened, or had any impact on me, or I stuff the emotions away, or lie to myself about it; I have lots of ways to keep from completing whatever the trauma might be. That incompleteness creates a loop of thought and emotion, which creates a feeling. The more of those incomplete experiences I collect, the more dense the feelings become, and the more of those nasty loops I’m creating.

Pretty soon, I’m living in a place that is almost purely negative thought, negative emotions, negative feeling, negative filters, negative life. Yuckers.

And then I have to start pretending. I have to pretend I don’t feel like I’m falling apart. I have to pretend that I can stand living my life. I have to pretend that interacting with you isn’t exhausting. I have to pretend that I’m a normal person. And all that pretending just makes everything worse and worse and worse. So now I’m getting sick because the stress of my pretending eats up my immune system, and I start getting chronic pain, and sick and oh, god, I kind of wish I were dead, but that’s not okay, so it just goes into the pot of feeling bad.

So I’m all full up with pain-body, and it’s looking for other pain-bodies to compare notes, and before long, my life is full of misery buddies, and isn’t the world a horrible place to live.

Ick ick ickety ick ick.

Here’s the thing. This isn’t old emotion. It’s old trauma. We aren’t feeling feelings from the past, we are feeling brand new, fresh feelings about crap we’ve put in our emo basement and pretended to forget about. Over and over again.

Here’s the other thing. It isn’t Truth, it’s just old trauma we’ve already lived through. Yes, sometimes it is beyond horrible. But not addressing it means that it wins, the pain-body wins, and we just suffer, in the present, for junk that happened in the past. It’s like that ugly old tschotshka in my house that I have to tend by keeping it, by cleaning it, moving it. It takes up space that I forget was space. It requires care I could be giving somewhere else. And every time I see it, I feel kind of bad because the person who gave it to me was such a jerk.

Pain-bodies love those tschotshkes, the ones that make us feel bad, or guilty, or ashamed.

There are so many ways to clean up that old crap in your subconscious. Each time you get rid of some you have more room for feeling good. Each time you notice you are in your pain-body, and choose to come back into the light you weaken its hold on you.

I got rid of all the gifts that people gave me I didn’t like, either the gift or the person. I got rid of the old love letters that left me feeling melancholy. The photographs of relationships that don’t make me happy to think of.

Now I have room to just be me.

How have I changed from pretending to be okay to being okay?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 09232013