I don’t have to take LSD, as hippies did in the 60s, to go mind tripping. I took a mind trip this morning, unaided by external substances. I allowed myself to get upset at how I interpreted someone behaved toward me. It was within a group situation and I started thinking of ways to respond. It was all passive-aggressive. And then, I ordered myself to meditate. It was early morning and I hadn’t meditated yet.
I mind tripped. Clarity came instantly. Back, back in time I went.* Early elementary years. A family scenario. Middle school. High school. College. All were instances where I felt alienated, rejected. Ahhh. I’d gotten triggered by this current day supposed behavior. And, as I wrote last week—anger really does live beneath hurt.
I was hurt—I was perceiving I was slighted—and my mind went into reaction. What could I say back to “the offender,” I plotted. But, beneath it all, I could see in my meditation, were years of “offenses” that compacted into the soil in my emotional basement. Tilled, they were creeping up into my house as anger.
I then began to examine another relationship. What were the triggers there? I’m still not sure. And then I went into oblivion until my alarm rang. Meditation had taken me down into the basement of my emotion and sprayed a steady shower of water to clear it away. I have no illusions I won’t get triggered again. That’s life. We keep tilling. We keep cleaning. And sometimes we reach total clarity. Maybe. In the process, we get clearer and clearer.
In the meantime, I’ve learned a little trick. Today, once I meditated and cleared away my hurt masking as anger, I pulled out a hypothesis—my little trick….How many times a day do we perceive slights to us? The woman who seemed rude at the check out counter. The man who cut us off in traffic. The comment by a co-worker. In reality, much of the time we don’t really know what’s going on in other people’s lives. Maybe these things were as they seemed or maybe they were not. I’ve learned to shush the drama by the trick of hypothesizing another theory than the one that first emotionally jerks me.
I chose to hypothesize that the person If felt slighted by did not realize the context of my question-offer. They were in a hurry and didn’t notice. The story I had told myself early was that she was ignoring me. (Oh my, how grade-school silly is this sounding!) But this. Is. Grace. We don’t really know. Lots of times we want to cling to our story because it feeds us—I wrote about reaction here. But what if we acknowledged that often we really don’t know, and cut some slack. What if it were xyz reality instead? Or abc? I can unplug quickly when I realize it may not be what I perceive and conceive another possible alternative for someone’s behavior.
*There’s lot of misconceptions about meditation, such as you have to make your mind completely silent. Over time we can learn to do this. But the point is to learn just how our minds are messing with us. Be an observer. We can learn our thought patterns that way and see our erroneous thinking like I did this morning the minute I went quiet. And, at times like today, there wasn’t silence, but the work of puzzling out a map. Through meditation, I got quiet and was able to see my faulty thinking and from where and just how deep it stemmed. It’s akin to what journaling can also do. Just do it. Just write, and the answers come. Meditation takes a little practice. We need to lose the mysticism we’ve placed around it. Also I don’t subscribe to any one methodology or amount of time to meditate. It’s like exercise, find the type that works for you.
Three handy-dandy demystifying meditation resources: this book and these two apps here and here. Full disclosure, I get a *few* pennies if you order the book via my Amazon link here.
Photo: iPhone 6, Spider Lake, MI, 2014
