Day 45 - Know Thyself, Correct Thyself

6. The realisation that for me to be able to change myself in thought, word and deed to the most effective living being that I can be and become – I first have to ‘know thyself’ and so commit myself to investigate, introspect and understand how I became who I am today, to prepare the road before me into self creation of a responsible, aware, self honest and trustworthy person for myself and so for all

I have come to realise that being consumed by emotion can be nothing but destructive in any given situation. I see that the emotion makes me spit out my backchat and points that I have observed to “attack” the other people in the situation and this is obviously hurtful to the other being and can possibly lead to the end of any relationship.

I practically apply this principle by observing myself in every moment and when I go into reaction I investigate the trigger of this reaction and clear it so that if and when similar situations arise I stop the reaction from coming up so as to see the situation clearly and direct from a stable standing instead of an emotional one.

In situations where I go into reaction I base my reaction off of my perception of certain points including the other person’s body language, their tonality, their words (or what I choose to hear) and my previous experiences.

For example:

When a person asks me for a tool and I tell them where to find it, then realise that I should ask them what they need it for. I ask them why they need it and the answer they give reveals to me that it is something that will damage the tool as it is not designed for it, so I explain to them that it will be damaged and that they should use something else and their reply is that they won’t – even though they do not need to use a tool like that and there are other tools that they could use makes me angry as they assume that they know better than me instead of hearing me on what I am trying to show them. I used to go straight into explosive anger but have now been able to stop myself from becoming angry and as such, I am able to show them that the tool is not right for the job without attacking them for wanting to be superior to me.

I have come to realise that I go into 3 “stages” of anger:

Stage 1: The anger sparks in me and I start trying to suppress it instead of directing myself to stop.

Stage 2: The anger starts to show by me starting to argue with the other person instead of explain the point clearly and hearing what the other person has to say.

Stage 3: I snap and go into what I call the “kicking and screaming” anger and start shouting to prove myself right.

I have been able to – using the practical application of this principle – successfully stop myself from allowing the anger to take hold and push me into stage 2 and 3 more and more as these types of situations come up.

I have realised that I have allowed myself to be consumed by anger more frequently than not and I have realised that it is simply a matter of stopping myself from allowing the anger to take over and directing the point from a stable point whilst considering the other persons position and not following my perception of who is “right or wrong”.

Day 42 - Fear is the Life Killer

I had to cut one of the dog’s nails today and she really doesn’t enjoy it, actually she gets so terrified that she throws herself free while being completely oblivious to any harm she does to herself or to the people around her. Every time we cut her nails she freaks out like this and makes it very difficult and dangerous for us to do the cutting. She doesn’t intentionally try to hurt anyone she only tries to push, flop and wriggle her way free, but when it is a very large dog like she is it can be dangerous as she can easily scratch or whack you very hard.

Usually when I do the nail cut I hold her as still as possible while the other person does the cutting, but if she jerks while you are cutting you can hurt her by cutting too much, so it can be quite a tricky thing to accomplish.

What I did this time is to decide to push her to push through this fear by holding her until she is completely relaxed and “fake” cut the nails over and over until she relaxed enough for me to do the real cut. She fought for a long time and whacked me around for a while till she relaxed and it did work. The reaction that she had to go through was so extensive and I do not want to have to push her through her fear and make her realize that I am not hurting her in any way.

I am amazed by how much fear she had to push through before she finally started letting go. I have tried to slowly push her through the fear before but it never went away and she was unwilling to let me assist her in removing it. When you work with animals the communication barriers that are in place are extremely difficult to work around and most of the time you have to end up showing them that what you are doing is in the best interest of all as the benefit much outweigh the cost of pushing through fear. In this case it is a matter of ‘if I do not cut your nail, it will grow so long that it will break and cause you massive amounts of pain and by cutting it we avoid that outcome’.

I realised while I was assisting her that this principle of sucking it up and pushing until you can stand and not allow yourself to be buried under the weight that fear brings into our daily lives is the only way that we are able to let go of fear and see all that is going on around us without hiding behind a wall of excuses and justifications.

There is a saying that I see as very assisting in terms of working with fear:

Fear is the mind killer, I will face my fear and I will let it pass through me, once the fear is gone there will be nothing, only I will remain.

Fear is momentary and if you stand and breathe the fear will pass as it is only what you think is going to happen to you not what is really going on around you, if you do not allow yourself to get sucked into the projections then you will realise that it is only a cloud of “what ifs” meant to haze your eyes so as to make you blind to reality.

Have you ever looked at yourself and your life without only seeing the “what ifs” that blind you? Do it and you will suddenly see that the problems you face are in fact simple to correct you have only been too scared to see the answer.