Bad habits, 2

God, but I love the world's timing!

So there I sat in the early evening – this evening, though you won't read this post till tomorrow – writing about how I react when I feel ashamed of myself, how I grit my teeth silently and spend the day working hard to prove I'm better than that, how what I ought to do (at any rate if I'm in a romantic relationship, at any rate if I'm spending the day with my partner) is at least communicate what the hell is going on with me.  I wrote and wrote and then had to bundle my stuff up quickly to get to the UU Sangha that I attend every Tuesday.  So I get there and we meditate and then it turns out that for Dharma study we are reading a chapter from Pema Chödrön's recent book, Living Beautifully With Uncertainty and Change.  And in that very chapter, smack at the bottom of page 11, she writes:

In My Stroke of Insight, the brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor's book about her recovery from a massive stroke, she explains the physiological mechanism behind emotion: an emotion like anger that's an automatic response lasts just ninety seconds from the moment it's triggered until it runs its course.  One and a half minutes, that's all.  When it lasts any longer, which it usually does, it's because we've chosen to rekindle it.

The fact of the shifting, changing nature of our emotions is something we could take advantage of.  But do we?  No.  Instead, when an emotion comes up, we fuel it with our thoughts, and what should last one and a half minutes may be drawn out for ten or twenty years.  We just keep recycling the story line.  We keep strengthening our old habits....

We can counter this response by training in being present.  A woman who was familiar with Jill Bolte Taylor's observation about the duration of emotion sent me a letter describing what she does when an uneasy feeling comes up.  "I just do the one-and-a-half-minute thing," she wrote.

So, that's a good practice instruction: When you contact groundlessness, one way to deal with that edgy, queasy feeling is to "do the one-and-a-half-minute thing."

So there.

There's more.  You remember a few days ago, in my post about why I drink, I mentioned a subtle, baseline level of anxiety in the back of my skull?  A little farther on (page 13 by now) Pema Chödrön is talking about a set of difficult emotions that she refers to cumulatively as "the fundamental ambiguity of being human."  After talking about them for a bit she goes on to write:

If the way to deal with those feelings is to stay present with them without fueling the story line, then it [raises] the question: How do we get in touch with the fundamental ambiguity of being human in the first place?  In fact, it's not difficult, because underlying uneasiness is usually present in our lives.  It's pretty easy to recognize but not so easy to interrupt.  We may experience this uneasiness as anything from slight edginess to sheer terror....  We may feel off balance, as if we don't know what's going on, don't have a handle on things.  We may feel lonely or depressed or angry.  Most of us want to avoid emotions that make us feel vulnerable, so we'll do almost anything to get away from them.

But if, instead of thinking of these feelings as bad, we could think of them as road signs or barometers that tell us we're in touch with groundlessness, then we would see the feelings for what they really are: the gateway to liberation, an open doorway to freedom from suffering, the path to our deepest well-being and joy.  We have a choice.  We can spend our whole life suffering because we can't relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.

So the challenge is to notice the emotional tug ... when it arises and to stay with it for one and a half minutes without the story line.  Can you do this once a day, or many times throughout the day, as the feeling arises?  This is the challenge.  This is the process of unmasking, letting go, opening the mind and heart.