I went to our town's Theravadin Sangha this evening. It's been a few months since I was there last, but I thought it might be useful in light of the. ... umm ... distractibility (or whatever you call it) that I wrote about last night. Anyway, the woman who gave the dharma talk (after we sat for 40 minutes) started by asking if anyone had made New Year's resolutions. No-one had, but she used this entry point to talk about intentions and intentionality. She even invited us to consider setting intentions for the rest of our lives ... or, you know, if that seemed too intimidating then maybe for the next year, or the next two weeks, or whatever we felt we could handle.
When the discussion started, one young man whom I hadn't seen before said his intention was to be kinder to his wife, because they were fighting a lot and he claimed it was all (or mostly) because of his own spite and jealousy. And I thought, "Oh wow, there's actually someone I might have something useful to say to." So when we were all done I talked briefly to him:
"Your story is none of my business, but I spent a lot of years where you are right now and one thing that helped me was just to slow down. It's so easy to respond to a trigger in ways that you later regret, when you jump at them automatically. And what I finally learned after decades of jumping at triggers was just to pause – for 30 seconds, or a minute, or 5 minutes – and then ask myself What do I really want to say? What's going to help? Anyway, it helped me."
He thanked me and said he'd try it. So hey – maybe I did something useful today ....
When the discussion started, one young man whom I hadn't seen before said his intention was to be kinder to his wife, because they were fighting a lot and he claimed it was all (or mostly) because of his own spite and jealousy. And I thought, "Oh wow, there's actually someone I might have something useful to say to." So when we were all done I talked briefly to him:
"Your story is none of my business, but I spent a lot of years where you are right now and one thing that helped me was just to slow down. It's so easy to respond to a trigger in ways that you later regret, when you jump at them automatically. And what I finally learned after decades of jumping at triggers was just to pause – for 30 seconds, or a minute, or 5 minutes – and then ask myself What do I really want to say? What's going to help? Anyway, it helped me."
He thanked me and said he'd try it. So hey – maybe I did something useful today ....
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