The following is the most liberating, practical and helpful thing I've ever realised.
Sometimes I wake up worrying about money. I wake up in the morning with this gluey, tense feeling in my guts or solar plexus and immediately my mind starts adding up numbers, working out everything I need to pay for that month and strategising how in the short term and long term I can make this all work out. It's extremely stressful. Later that day someone might ask me how I've been and I might say "I woke up worrying about money again this morning…"
But wait! That's actually wrong.
If I rewind that morning's experience and take it atom by tiny atom, this is what is really going on:
I wake up with this gluey, tense feeling in my guts or solar plexus.
It feels really uncomfortable.
THEN my well meaning, yet misguided mind, in order to control and get rid of this yucky feeling in my body, throws up a story or a concept of something worrying that's going on in my life because it believes, incorrectly, that if my mind can 'solve' that problem or situation then the discomfort will go away. The mind is totally well-meaning and due to it's logical, problem-solving nature, it thinks that by matching this worried feeling to a story or a controllable outcome in my life, that I can get rid of the feeling by solving the life-problem that it has selected for me.
But THIS IS A TRAP. It is a decoy that, rather than making the feeling go away, actually makes the feeling get stronger and last longer. The idea of rejecting that feeling, solving it, getting rid of it in this thinky way ABSOLUTELY DOESN'T WORK. If anything, it perpetuates it and magnifies it by chewing it over and over.
So, back to me lying in bed. What is really going on?
My body, and yours, is the most GENIUS self-mending, self-cleaning organism that we know of in the Universe. It is constantly scanning for viruses and bacteria and harmful agents and then making its own drugs, amazingly secreting things, and administering them to us in the body all day and night while we go on with our lives, (rarely thinking about this miraculous self-mending process that's constantly going on). The genius body system is also regenerating our cells with any energy or resources it can draw upon. Our skin mends if we cut it. Our bones knit and mend if we break them. It goes on and on, organs, glands, sophisticated mending and healing systems constantly working. BUT IT DOESN'T END THERE…
…our body is also self-mending and cleaning all our accumulated EMOTIONAL pain and stress in just as sophisticated a way. This is why we wake up, often, with a very uncomfortable tightness or stuckness down our front, somewhere from the throat to the belly. It's NOT because we've woken up worrying about money, or our health, or any of the mind's versions of what's 'wrong' in our lives. NO! It's simply because our genius mind/body system is doing a well-needed emotional poo. It is offloading some of the accumulation of emotional pain that we all carry and it cleverly waits until these moments, when we're not so busy or thinky, to do it.
Please get this. It will radically change your life for the better. You're not worrying about what you think you're worrying about.
When we wake up and feel the feeling of that constipation being pushed through by our genius mind/body system, the mind, before we've even remembered who we are in the morning, gets busy in it's well-meaning way, to give us 'the reason' for this discomfort imagining that if we can solve it then the feeling might go away. This is the most distracting, incorrect and useless strategy that sucks us in every time. We lie there in bed turning that problem over and over trying to solve it and this GETS IN THE WAY of the genius process our body is doing, which is cleverly shitting out some accumulated emotional pain and stress.
At these times if we are skillful, we will ignore the mind's version COMPLETELY and only focus on the physical sensation. If we place our attention on the yucky, tight feeling in the body and gently breathe into it, allowing it, even encouraging it, staying with it in a soft and trusting way, knowing it's part of our body's genius process, not 'something's wrong today' then miraculously it moves, it shifts, it transforms. We need to take the attitude that we are sitting with a child who is constipated and feeling insecure. All we need to do is hold it's hand, and be there, fully present - nothing more.
Do not get tricked into the mind's version of your morning emotional poo any longer!
And this doesn't only apply to the morning wake-up tension. Exactly the same is true for every time we are triggered, upset, or reactive to something that has happened 'to us' during the day. I believe that our genius body/mind system, or Life itself, is daily sending us difficult and challenging situations and people DELIBERATELY to trigger the body into releasing that stuck emotion. That's the very reason adversity exists in our lives. It's part of the genius way Life itself is mending us and cleaning us. When someone upsets me, if I am skillful, I will feel the familiar volcanic eruption of pain, anger, fear, in my chest and instead of fighting that person, I will go straight to the physical place where my body has started shitting out accumulated tension and only deal with that person AFTER I have attended to and dissolved what just happened in my body.
What I'm saying is that difficult people are WALKING LAXATIVES! It may sound radical but it's true. When someone upsets us we experience a totally disproportionate reaction. We feel the pain of everyone who ever treated us that way back to our childhood. This is the body's genius finding ways to self-clean, self-mend all that accumulation. We attract and react to those people or events as a way to heal ourselves.
Could it be that ALL this adversity is actually a gift? A benevolent invitation for the skillful to poo out some harmful, stressful built up stuff in us?
When I treat these triggers this way I become POWERFUL. Suddenly, rather than be disempowered by the events I am now using them for their correct purpose which is Life's genius, cleaning and unclogging me by finding ways to discharge accumulated emotional shit.
Don't believe your mind in the morning when you wake up worrying! It's just your genius doing it's work. PARTICIPATE with it, don't resist it. Don't believe the mind's victim story of what happened to you - on the human level it hurt, but on a deeper level it's just part of Life's genius giving you the opportunity to offload some toxic old pain. Breathe into it, let it dissolve and shift - above all DON'T THINK!
USE IT and empower yourself with all apparent adversity! This is the point of all challenging feelings and events.
All workshops and talks at www.jamiecatto.com