I’m in an interesting place at the moment having stayed all day with this anomalous situation I’m in. I’m going to see if I can find an earlier similar upset that lies at the base of it and, if I can, to clear it in the moment.
It isn’t often that I find myself facing an issue which is equally weighted on both sides of the question. With regard to email, I both want your participation through sending in article and video suggestions and I also don’t want the overwhelming number of posts I get every day unrelated to suggestions. And the weight of wanting the one and not the other is evenly balanced.
What that means is that there is no clear way to resolve the issue, no clear side to come down on.
Since an upset is almost never centered in the present moment, but is almost always anchored in the past, I ask myself for an image of a time when I was upset in a similar way. If I get the earlier similar incident, there’s a good chance this upset, as an upset, will lift.
The first image that comes to mind (and the first image is usually the relevant one) is of me arguing with a former girlfriend. Let’s call her “Ruth” (not her name). I cannot bring the issue back but we both felt incapable of letting go of the issue we each had with the other.
I remember calling the issue “nuclear” because we would both go ballistic if we didn’t have our side of the issue acknowledged and attended to but there was no apparent arrangement we could make that would satisfy both of us.
I don’t remember how it worked out but we did eventually split up.
Other more recent memories of similar, evenly-balanced, non-negotiable issues flood my mind as well now, but the great granddaddy of them all, the head vampire, was with Ruth.
And, oh look, I do feel an easing of this present issue when I locate the nuclear standoff between Ruth and me. Yes, yes, there is relief setting in. The truth has set me free.
In this Now moment, I feel the original issue fall away. What that says to me is that this present issue around email was anchored in that past issue with Ruth. Now the feeling of being in an evenly-weighted, nuclear standoff with myself is subsiding. What a welcome result. I’m processing this upset in real time here. I can feel the truth setting me free and myself relaxing, calming down.
Alright, in the space created by seeing what the issue is that’s been driving me, how looks the problem now?
Well, I no longer feel distressed. The issue now seems manageable. That strange feeling of dread and super-anxiety has gone. Now it seems a simple matter of just stating what I want. In fact it seems super-simple. Only the unconscious connection to the earlier similar upset prevented me from seeing how simple the matter was.
Here’s a trial statement of it.
I’m very happy to receive article and video suggestions and in fact receiving them makes my life very much easier than otherwise.
But I’m afraid I cannot manage my work and receive emails that ask me for my opinion on things, ask me to read a goodly amount of text for the sake of my comment on it, engage in a personal conversation, or things that are unrelated to the work.
There. That’s it. Easy. I can’t believe it was so difficult before, but the feeling of anxiety I felt was a leftover from the arguments with Ruth, not anything to do with life in the Now.
After all that agonizing, I get to see that I was experiencing a record. I was trapped in the playing and replaying of an old memory connected with a disagreement I had with a former girlfriend. So there we are, a demonstration in the moment of how to clear an upset. Once the upset cleared, the present-day issue itself was easy to state and resolve. Everything assumed its proper proportion.
The issue in the present was not what was causing me to be upset. The issue in the past was.
What is the key feature that links both upset and record? It’s facing an issue that is equally weighted on both sides. I both want and don’t want email. And I and Ruth each wanted something equally and were both unwilling to compromise or sacrifice what we wanted to satisfy the other. That equal weighting is what connected both present and past upsets.
This process, which I have called the “upset clearing process,” that I just went through in a foreshortened fashion is exactly what I recommend to you to use to clear any upsets that come up for you in the process of clearing away any and all of the old business that Hilarion and Jesus have been discussing in their June 2011 messages. It really does work, as you can see.
OK, that’s enough of playing around with that issue. Now back to work.
