My one and only New Year’s Resolution for 2020 is to be more patient with myself.
I have struggled my whole life with this issue, always putting way too much pressure on, blaming and shaming myself, and driving myself harder than I would ever drive anybody else. And even though I have grown leaps and bounds, and changed so much I wouldn’t know me from a couple years ago, the things I blame and shame myself for haven’t gone away.
What we focus on is what we get, so by causing myself so much angst for things that I could control but don’t seem to bother controlling, I am focusing on what I don’t want so much that I just keep getting it. I tell myself I’m lazy in that regard, so instead of thinking, Okay, I guess that’s really not that important to me, I can let it go, I get impatient with myself for being too lazy to fix these things. But, if they were critically important to me, I’d fix ’em. I always do.
We make sure we get the stuff we truly want.
Or at least I do. Maybe you do, too. Some people focus way too much on what they don’t have to ever get what they think they want, or what they feel like they should want, but when it comes to what’s really important to them – and that can mean healthy or unhealthy – they usually get it.
But there is always a tendency to self-deprecate, to push away comfort, to tough it out, to do the lone warrior thing – here’s the grand prize winner: not to be a bother to anybody. Can I get an oh shit from the peanut gallery?
With my students and my clients, I am an ocean of patience, Patience incarnate. I can listen to the same struggles over and over and continue to be positive and supportive, offer suggestions about things they can do to feel better or play better, and never ever once say, “You know what, you have sapped the entirety of my strength and I am done with you. Take this shit seriously or go home.”
But when it comes to me, no no. I have to work harder, try harder, play better, yadda yadda yadda, because otherwise I’m a lazy-ass failure and a waste of time. I’ve gotten marginally better about it over the past few years, but a couple months ago it came up and smacked me hard. And I realized that I needed to ease up on myself so that I can focus on what is truly important to me and let go of what is not, without spending a bunch of energy on blaming and shaming myself.
Today during satsang, the presenter talked about karma, and how it’s our reactions to things that happen to us that engage our karma. When we can have things happen and not react, then the karma can’t get any traction. He told a story about a man he knew years ago, who cut off his thumb in an accident, and he said the man experienced ecstasy, because that karma was done. Same principle when we let go of blaming and shaming ourselves over things we could control but don’t bother to. That pain can no longer have any traction with us.
Source has made this world, not to be a paradise but to be a school of very very hard knocks.
Some of us are starting to figure out how to get better grades. Some of us have a hell of a lot of homework to do. Don’t fight the homework. Let it be. Do it. Relax, and don’t blame yourself or think you’re stupid if you need some help. You’re not. This shit is designed to be ridiculously challenging. But we can choose to see the good and not react to the bad. It’s hard as hell to be consistent about it, again by design. But we can choose to see paradise anyway, and if that’s what we focus on, we’ll get there.