I find lately that if I have anything to say, it's so ridiculously difficult to put into words that I seem to lose the desire to say anything at all! I wanted to say "redonkulously" because redonkulous seems to capture the essence a bit more accurately.
If I could say one thing to everyone out there reading, it is this: There is nothing wrong with you. There actually cannot be anything wrong with you.
A friend told me the other day that her daughter took a self-defense course in which the teacher said that one great way to disarm an attacker is to say something completely unexpected. So instead of screaming, "No! Please don't hurt me!" or "Help!", you scream ARE YOU HERE TO WATER THE PLANTS!?
The incongruity breaks the spell, or might, and gives you a moment to break away. What is being broken is the mindless story the attacker is telling himself about what is happening and what he wants to happen. He is mesmerized by the dream of his own story, and the illogical thought sequence makes him stop momentarily and say, wait, what? It introduces a moment of enforced mindfulness in which he realizes that you are not participating in his dream-reality. This is disorienting momentarily, and then of course, enraging. So you really have to slip away during the brief disorientation phase.
To a human being, the one truly incongruous thing you can say is "Everything is exactly as it should be!" This is because in the human dream, nothing is as it should be.
Yet when we succumb to the sense that nothing is as it should be it's just a failure of attention. It is what happens when we begin to be carried away by the thoughts in our minds as though they were true statements about reality. Below the layer of noisy thought—below, above, between it—is the silence in which they occur. Direct your attention to that silence.
Without the thought that something is wrong, nothing is wrong. When you bestow your attention upon a thought that causes suffering, and you ride along with it, you intensify its existence. We are lazy about where we place our attention and our attention is extremely powerful.
It takes no effort at all to continue to suffer. Suffering is the lowest common denominator. It does take some effort to move your attention away from the loudest, most prevalent sensory experience to that in which it is occurring. This is how you break the spell.
Marian, you made me laugh with this one. I was actually almost attacked by a hooded man who appeared in my room in the middle of the night 20 years ago... long story, but instead of screaming I turned to face him and calmly asked him "Who are you?" I sat in the bed and reached for his mask. Then I said to him. "I think you may get in trouble for this." I actually saw fear in his eyes before he turned around and ran away!
I love the idea that we are as we should be and.... our children are as they should be as well, etc.
Posted by: Aileen | September 29, 2009 at 11:09 PM