#479 – How do anger and worry solve your problems?

If anger and worry solved any problems, life would be a rose garden––we all know that. So why do we keep at it?

It was 5:08 a.m. when I admitted, against my desire, that I was fully awake. Noises during the night had startled me more than once: the AC turning on, the cat meowing. In sum, not the best night’s sleep.

At least I could use the extra time to meditate and do my morning pages before my 6 a.m. run.

During the meditation (full of inside noise), I remembered David Lynch saying that Transcendental Meditation made him happy––and I saw Agent Cooper, cross-legged, in his Twin Peaks hotel room.

Then, the first thing that came up in the morning pages was my anger. Because I couldn’t sleep well. And my worry: was my son going to be okay?––he’d been the source of some of those night noises.

If meditation can make me happy, I thought, why am I still angry and worried?

The answer was obvious: because I have preferences. I want a good night’s sleep and a perfectly healthy son. When I don’t get them, I feel betrayed by life, by the universe, and I want tight-fisted revenge.

That’s when I realized I’d been approaching all my practices wrong. I’d fantasized that meditation, morning pages, running, yoga, and “golden keying” issues would fix my life.

But it’s not that. You find happiness in meditation (and in the other practices) because your mind stops––no worry, no anger. Once you experience that emptiness, you realize it’s okay to live with a mind that doesn’t loop infinitely because life is giving you lemons when you wanted oranges. It’s okay to not want things to be different, even when they aren’t what you expected.

Does that mean you’re ungenerous if you don’t prefer your son to be healthier?

No. It means you accept life as it is. That if he has “issues” or you have “issues,” they’re there because you need them in order to evolve.

What’s generous is allowing life to unfold for each of us, as it comes—because that’s what makes us all greater.

What preferences will you drop to quit making yourself miserable for not getting them?

Love,

Carolina