The Price of Outrage

Last week, I had an appointment with my primary care provider. During the appointment, we discussed several things that are going on with me physically, and she wrote up orders for tests. Two of the tests were a blood test and a UA, so I set up an appointment with a lab near my work to submit my samples. I had been needing to go to my provider for a while, as I've been experiencing stomach 'attacks' over the past 4 months. What was on my mind was (is) what might be going on, and there are several possibilities swirling through my head. This in itself was (is) causing me some anxiety/fear, although it wasn't really at the conscious level. It was my intellect doing all of the processing, and fear and anxiety were running subroutines in the background. 

So I make my appointment at the lab. Since the blood test required a 12 hour fast, I would have preferred an early morning appointment, but the best I could get was 11:30am, which gave me ample time to get the testing done, get something to eat, and show up at work. As I arrived for the test, I had those two things going against me - some underlying fear, and it having been about 16 hours since I last ate something.

I signed in to the testing center, and provided a urine sample. The receptionist took my insurance card, and informed me that their lab does not take my insurance. This is where the outrage began, and my thinking was, "This is stupid!" You see, even though a month or so ago I gave away all of my pet peeves, I guess I forgot one - insurance, and our country's (lack of) health care system. Let the inner rant begin! The initial reason the outrage started is because I get my insurance ultimately through the state, and there are two different companies who administer the state insurance. My company was the wrong one for this lab. Stupid! It's still the same money! And I vented my frustration at the receptionist, which was totally unskillful. I also apologized to her right away - I know what it's like when a customer gets mad at me for something completely beyond my control. The receptionist gave me another lab to go to, along with my urine sample. Fortunately, the lab was close by, and if I got in quickly, I could still make it to work. (One of the things I have to do is plan appointments and such well, as I go almost everywhere on my bike - it's not like I can hop in my imaginary car and be somewhere in 5 minutes). 

I get to the new lab - which I've actually been to before, I just can't remember when - and check in. They say they can take me in a few minutes. I looked in my backpack for my urine sample, and discovered my backpack was open and there was no urine sample inside. This gave me an opportunity for some comic relief, which helped quell the rant; however, the rant was still simmering. I'll mention here that the state of Arizona has done an exceptionally good job at taking care of my health needs, and I am cognizant of this. I'll also mention that this whole thing was a very, very minor inconvenience that did not affect me negatively at all - my mind, my perception negatively affected me.

Fortunately, all's well that ends well (almost), and I was able to reload, give my samples, and be off to work. I went to work and parked in my customary spot, walked in, and began my shift. I made a funny FB post about the experience that gave people an opportunity to laugh.

After my shift, I went out to my bicycle, and found that I had left it unlocked (probably because my mind was still ranting). I also discovered my first urine sample in one of my panniers (saddle bag). I must have put it in there after the first lab, and not even remembered I'd done it.

So the price of my outrage was embarrassment, I ruined my serenity, and I could have freely given my bike to any dishonest person who happened to walk by during my 8 hour shift.

Being in recovery, I cannot afford such outrage and inner ranting. It doesn't matter one bit whether I am wrong or I am right about the object of my anger; the point is that my frustration and anger can snowball, and, through some weird quirk in my mind, I will turn it all around and direct it toward myself. I will use it as a tool against myself. In that moment, there was nothing I could do about my insurance or about the state of healthcare in this country. In that moment, it was not my battle to fight. And this knowledge swirled in my head right along with my 'righteous' anger, but the anger was winning - for awhile. Fortunately, creating a humorous FB post about the episode and talking about it with some folks at work helped me let go of the anger and return to a more serene state of mind. 

I want to mention here that being sensitive to outrage, anger, and conflict does not mean I can never be a voice for change without putting my recovery in peril; it's quite the opposite, actually. Because I must not dabble in outrage at anything, right or wrong, I must learn how to express my views in a calm, effective, persuasive manner. If I want to be part of a reform movement, I'm much better off being the person who approaches things with rationality and compassion.

I am grateful for this episode, because it reminds me of how quickly my mind can take a minor incident (and sometimes even an incorrect assumption) and run with it to hell. It reminds me that I have to be vigilant with my thinking, and that no matter what is going on around me, my focus must be on acceptance with life the way it is in this moment. Having a consistent mindfulness meditation practice has helped me immensely in bringing my mind back to center, and I am grateful for the growing ability to get back to sanity whenever I go off the rails.

Namasté,

Ken

Prayer: An Inside Job

Prayer is an important part of my recovery, and an important part of recovery for a lot of people. I have learned that prayer doesn't change God's mind, it changes mine. Prayer is really about endeavoring to align my will with God's will for me. 

I don't write much about prayer - believe it or not, it's a little too personal for me to write much about publicly. Prayer comes from the deepest part of me, and the way I pray and the content of my prayers is unique to me. I know a lot of prayers from different faith traditions, and I'll usually run with one set of prayers for awhile, and then move on to another set, and so forth. Sometimes I really get into the Psalms from the Hebrew Bible, and then I'll ignore them for awhile.  I pray for others' highest good, and it aligns my thinking into looking for their highest good. For instance, say there is someone I know whom I don't hold in very high regard; if I pray for that person's highest good, it causes me to look for it in them, and that can help bring it out. If I don't, then that person just remains a schmuck in my mind, and I can't do anything for them.

One of my favorite prayers, and one I've recently been practicing lately, is the Prayer of St. Francis (of Assisi). It has special meaning for me because he had PTSD (my opinion). St. Francis, before he was a saint, fought in the Crusades. In the Crusades, he had some experiences that deeply affected him. When he returned from the Crusades, he went crazy and nearly killed himself. This is when he had a religious or spiritual experience that caused him to live the life of a monk. The Franciscan Order of the Catholic Church came out of his practices and his band of followers. His story is really interesting. Following is the prayer that is attributed to him:

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace - 
that where there is hatred, I may sow love;
that where there is injury, I may sow pardon [forgiveness];
that where there is doubt, I may sow faith;
that where there is despair, I may sow hope;
that where there is darkness, I may shine light;
that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be comforted, as to comfort; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love;
For it is in self-forgetting that one finds, it is in forgiving that one is forgiven, and it is by dying to self that one awakens to eternal life. Amen

This is a wonderful prayer with which to start the day, because it prepares my mind to be a selfless healer, and it tells me what I need to be about today. But for the past couple of days I've prayed it and started crying, because I realized that I could also turn it inward. I can apply this prayer to those things which I still harbor inside that are injurious to me - remnants of shame and self-hatred, despair, doubt about who I Am, darkness, and sadness. I can use this prayer to help heal myself. 

I've been in recovery nearly three years, and it has just been the past couple of months that I've started to really enjoy living. In this post, "Why Even Bother?", which was written a little less than a year ago, I wrote about surviving without having an automatic joy for life and living. It's not that I've been unhappy this whole time and just been faking it; it is that I've had to put in a fair amount of conscious, consistent effort to stay at a level where I can function comfortably. So, I've been chugging along comfortably, but lately, I've noticed a feeling deeper inside where I'm really starting to like living for the sake of living. I feel like I could have a day where I accomplished absolutely nothing, was of service to no one, and be perfectly ok with that - to just take some time to just be here now. It's a nice change; it's nice to be just for the sake of being. It's nice to feel like being here, without necessarily having to do something to make living tolerable. Being alive is starting to feel...natural. Wow!

Motivation brings more motivation, and success breeds success. Feeling better, healthier, makes it easier to do the things that make me feel healthy. I feel my world expanding, my consciousness expanding, and I'm getting eager for more. And prayer is a big part of that. 

One person once told me, after I had been praying for them, "Your prayers are powerful." I don't think they meant my prayers; I think they meant prayers are powerful. I've known that prayer can be a powerful thing. When I was a young boy, I swallowed 3 pennies. Boy, did that hurt! I couldn't tell anyone, of course, so I prayed and asked God to relieve me of the pain, and it instantly left. I've had other occasions where prayer has been very effective, and I know it's been effective in the lives of others. But something inside - doubt, perhaps? - has caused me from time to time to stop praying, or stop believing in prayer. 

Now I'm getting excited because this recent shift is telling me that I can do more and be more than I've ever been and done before. My faith tradition tells me that I already have every quality of my Creator inside of me - it would be impossible for me to not have it (or you or anyone else) - and that my job is to do whatever needs to be done to let everything go that is not me, that is not allowing the Light within to shine brightly. And St. Francis' prayer really seems to fit that purpose, if I turn it inward. It would be a lovely thing if I had all the faith in the Universe to believe without seeing, but I don't - sometimes I need to see. That's ok today - all I need to know today is that I am loved and supported, whether I'm feeling it or not.

So, like a teenage boy with a new car, I'm eager to take this new level of faith out on the road and see what She'll do. I'll keep you posted!

Namasté,

Ken

Don't Look!

As I was driving home tonight, I twice looked in my rearview mirror after safely passing through an intersection to see a car behind me go through the intersection after the light had turned red. This is one of my pet peeves, and it's a symptom of alcoholism. Or at least of alcoholic thinking, because the only thing that feeding my pet peeves does is create righteous indignation (which is irritation about other's behaviors in order to make me look good to myself or others). And righteous indignation is one of the things that can lead a sober alcoholic or a clean addict back to using and drinking.

How can a minor irritation lead me back to drinking? Well, first of all, I was looking for it - indicating that the alcoholic within is still alive. I didn't happen to just notice it - I deliberately looked in my rearview mirror (which is always set to nighttime to make it harder to see behind me, day or night, because I've had the tendency thru life to look behind rather than ahead). Second, it can set up a mood - "my God, how unthinking must a person be? Why am I surrounded by idiots?" And so I start looking for more cases of inconsiderate idiots. And, as Jesus warned me, what I look for is what I'll get (Seek, and you will find - Matt. 7:7-8). So, 15 minutes after discovering the first two inconsiderate idiots (who are now safely at home enjoying their supper), I'm seething because I'm surrounded by inconsiderate idiots - I, the intelligent, rational, Ken, am once again alone in a world full of people that I can't relate to. And that mental/emotional isolation is the trigger for the next drink or fix. It really does not take much.

But sanity intervened tonight, as it has for the past couple of years. I asked myself, if pushing the envelope on yellow traffic lights is something that I need to be upset about, how upset do I need to be? Well, there are many large cities all over the world that employ the use of traffic lights, and hundreds of millions of people driving, and even if only a small percentage of people blast through red lights, a small percentage of hundreds of millions of people is still a pretty big number. So I can assume that at any given moment, some inconsiderate idiot is blasting through an intersection on red, making innocent people suffer. It's an incredibly huge problem! And one that I don't need to be concerned about. 

PETA once sent me a letter of warning because they found out I was killing off most of my pet peeves by starving them to death. I recognized a while back how dangerous it is for me to feed my pet peeves - they'll eventually turn on me. Today I avoid undue irritation. I am grateful that some things that used to really. piss. me. off. no longer do. Not my circus, not my monkeys, so to speak. So allowing the larger pet peeves to die a slow death has left room for other stuff that I might find irritating, but isn't necessarily a pet peeve. Now, because I'm not in a continual state of pissed-offedness, I recognize when something or someone pushes one of my buttons. And because I can recognize one incident or one word that gets my goat, I can ask myself, "How important is it to me?" or "What am I supposed to learn from this?" or "What am I supposed to do with this?" It's not a matter of ignoring things that piss me off - that would only create a pressure cooker inside of me. It is a matter of me knowing that I have the power of choice today; today, I get to choose my battles. I no longer reside in a place where the majority of things and people around me irritate me.

Does this mean that nothing I see in the world should bother me? Certainly not! What I see outside of me is merely a reflection of what is within me, and if I see something that disturbs me, then I need to do something about it. But I need not attack - either what I see or myself. What I can do is seek to understand, and then ask the Universe (God) what I need to do about it. Last week I was to a planning commission meeting to advocate for something I feel strongly about, and last night I was at a city council meeting to advocate against something I feel strongly about. I've never been to meetings like this in my life before (except maybe in a middle school civics class). In both cases, I got up and said my piece. What comes of it will be what comes of it - but I did my part (so far) in changing something about the world in which I live. I think most of the time, however, the things I need to change are my own skewed perceptions.

Continued peace of mind, serenity, and happiness, which I believe are essential ingredients in my recovery, require cultivation. I cultivate a peaceful state of mind by understanding that it's actually easier, once I get the hang of it, to change my consciousness than it is to change my environment. And once my consciousness is mostly clear of problems that aren't mine to do anything about, I can focus my attention on what is mine to do. And that leads to an even more peaceful life for me, which in turn leads to actually feeling like I'm useful and I belong.

Isolation, fear, and loneliness are the cause of what ails me. The cure is connection, courage, and engagement - in whatever form that takes.

Namaste,

Ken

Chaos Withdrawal

I have been going through something the past couple of months where I just don't feel right. Lately, it has manifested itself in a slight recurrence of depression symptoms - wanting to sleep, sleep, sleep, and dreading the future instead of looking forward to it. Fortunately, today I can look at my lack of enthusiasm and my lack of desire to become engaged with life as a symptom that something's not quite right rather than the way I used to look at those feelings - I used to feel like those feeling were the truth about me - that I was lazy and disinterested in life.

I think I know what part of it is - I recently changed my vocational activities. Previously, I had one full-time job at an inbound call center in Brookfield, and two part-time jobs in Waukesha. In January I released the call center job, and one of my other jobs became full-time. My call center job had hours all over the place, and I was always busy to some degree. Additionally, there were performance parameters at the call center job, and I had specific things to do with specific ways to do them. 

My new work schedule is pretty much 8:30 - 4:30 M-F, and then 8-4 Saturday and Sunday for my part-time job. Additionally, I have a lot more time on my hands, as the commute to either job is under 30 minutes each way. Way under, actually. That's pretty boring, very stable, not much to remember. 

I recently (yesterday) had a performance review at one of my jobs. It was excellent! I'm doing very well! Now if I can only convince myself! Neither of my current jobs have as many performance parameters as my old full-time job did. Certainly there are things at both jobs that I must do, but, for the most part, what I do each day and how I do it is largely determined by me, so long as it falls within my job descriptions and the policies and procedures of each of my employers. Other than the occasional emergency, there just isn't a lot of stress at either of my jobs. At my old full-time job, each day was stressful, but it was stress like exercise - like loading boxes onto a truck is stressful. When you're done for the day, you're done for the day.

So, that's great - I have plenty of stress-free work where I'm allowed to do stuff I enjoy and am good at. Great news! Unless I'm addicted to the cortisol created by daily stress - then it means I have to get used to a whole new way of life, and it might even (will be) uncomfortable.

"At the root of the addiction...is a reluctance to deal with ourselves on a deeper, more personal level. Cramming every moment of our lives with work, appointments and tasks means we don’t have to think about larger issues. And as it turns out, people will do almost anything to avoid themselves." Rachel Nuwer,  from the article I linked to.

So is that why my inner voice has been nudging me to meditate more, to exercise more, to make better use of my free time? Is that why my home is still disorganized, tho' I've lived there 2 months already? I may dream of a serenely creative life, but what does that really look like? I've never lived one of those before!

It's that big ugly word, fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of success, fear of responsibility. And all I know to overcome fear skillfully, is to consciously face it head on. To simply say, 'Damn the torpedos, full steam ahead!' and to let the chips fall where they may. 

Pain is an indicator that something needs to change. My indicators usually come through psychic pain. I don't like pain, and chemicals no longer work to alleviate my pain (except those produced by exercise, which is a good thing, I think), so I am left with changing whatever needs to be changed so I can live pain free (one of the reasons that I don't take a lot of credit for 'how far' I've come - you'd get pretty far, too, if you had a big grizzly bear named Pain on your ass!).

Mentally, I have to wrap my thoughts around, "I am doing a good job. I am exactly where I'm supposed to be, doing what I'm supposed to be doing." The only one complaining about my performance is me.

So, as usual, it's all good - I simply have to accept it.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Namaste,

Ken

Let Freedom Ring

In my last post, I wrote a bit about building my own prison, and how, if I've constructed the walls that keep me from living a joyous and abundant life, then I also have the power to deconstruct those walls.

I've found that tearing down the walls is a stone-by-stone process. That's sort of bad news for a person who wants everything the moment I think it - in other words, NOW. The good news is that the process of tearing down the wall I've built is a process that makes me stronger the more I do it. Additionally, I don't have to do it alone, or by my own wits. I have lots of help. I only have to be willing.

I have been saving up money and looking for an apartment - a nicer place to live than where I'm living now. That's not a bad goal. It's a good goal. But, there were a couple of hitches that I was aware of, but thought that I could work my way around. Apparently not - it looks like I'll have to work my way through.

I've applied for a place I really like and can afford. I hadn't heard anything back from the apartment manager, and I left a message with them yesterday or the day before, asking about the status of my rental application.

The challenge for me in looking for a new place to live is my past - it's a little spotty in places. On paper, I don't look like someone who would necessarily make a desirable tenant. Or, to put it in a bit of a nicer way, there are other apartment hunters out there who are probably more desirable than I am. So, I have been concerned with that. It's been in the back of my mind, and sometimes the front, for a few weeks now.

This morning, I woke up with a resentment. That doesn't happen often, so I usually pay attention when it does. Resentments are poison for me. (Actually, they're poison for anyone, but for folks in substance abuse recovery, resentments are particularly potent poisons). It doesn't matter what or who the resentment is about. In that way, it's like alcohol - it doesn't matter if I'm drinking Chivas Regal or Night Train, it's all poison to me. The same with resentments - no matter who it's about, no matter if it's justified or not, or even real or not, a resentment is poison.

So anyway, I wake up with a resentment this morning toward a person whom I think is keeping me from my good (a nice place to live) by some actions they took several years ago. And this is what Source and wisdom point out to me: 

(This is my Higher Power speaking): First of all, Ken that person's action was a reaction to your irresponsible actions, and it was perfectly justified. Second of all, you have not yet faced the consequences of your irresponsible actions. To blame someone else for anything that is going on in your life negates your Power of Choice, and makes you a victim. YOU ARE NOT A VICTIM! So don't play one. I understand you want a nicer place to live, and YOU understand that you can't have anything until you own it in your consciousness. So here's what you need to do:
1. Pray for the person you resent - bless them, forgive them, and release them. They have no influence on you today, other than what you come up with in your mind.
2. Have you noticed that the amount you have saved up for your apartment is the same amount of the consequences of your irresponsible actions? If you take your 'apartment' money and change it into 'restitution', your way will be made clear. 
3. Speaking of resentment - have you noticed, too, that you hate where you're living now? That's a lot of negative energy you're sinking into a  place you don't want to be. If you really want to move on, accept and bless where you're at, and make the best of it. You haven't been doing that lately, have you? If you did get a new place today, you'd f%$# it up with your shitty attitude, no matter how nice a place it might be. Your happiness is your business, and it's an inside job. Remember, when you allow Me to fix your insides, your outside will take care of itself. Isn't that the way it's been working this past year? So...
Do what you know in your heart to be right. Pay your restitution, and take care of the space where you're at. You might not move to another physical place right away, but the space that counts - the space in your heart and in your head - will be much more pleasant and comfortable than it has been.

And after I decided to do the right thing, the apartment manager called me and let me know my application was denied. I thanked her for getting back to me, and I knew in that moment what my course of action was to be.

So that's it. At least for this particular stone. I'm really very grateful, because until recently, every mess I've made has seemed impossible to rectify, so I've always sought ways to ignore or evade the consequences of my actions. This experience of being a responsible individual with integrity is still very new to me, so each time I step up to the plate rather than running away, it's a miracle to me. And I've learned, too, that my miracles are my miracles - nobody else in the world needs to give a darn but me.

Namaste,

Ken