How come Paul (middle) gets a new glove and I don’t?
Whenever things get tight or confused or complicated, I/we get stressed.
And “Getting Stressed” is a signal that invokes a program. Let’s call it “Stress Reduction.”
In my mind, I see several routines for different situations: “Normal Stress Reduction.” “Abnormal Threat Identification.” “Abnormal Threat Reduction.” Probably others.
There are so many aspects of this I’d like to talk about. But I want to zero in for a moment on complaints as one tool in the “Normal Stress Reduction” toolbox.
The Question: Why have I been so sick this past month? Bedridden, aches and pains everywhere, more but TMI. (1)
What are my guides trying to mirror back to me?
“I have complaints.”
Are my psychological complaints being mirrored back to me in the form of bodily complaints?
Or is it something deeper? Are they trying to reveal a side of me to me and just piggybacking on the physical complaints?
Let me push that edge. Let me call myself on my own number, whatever it is.
As a young child I was a career complainer. The youngest of the bunch, the brat, the runt of the litter. “No one listened to me” was my standard complaint. (2)
But they respected “being right.” So I became a stick-in-the-wheel, career complainer.
Why am I drawing attention to this and why at this time? Because I’m being bombarded these days with thoughts of responses to others which were automatic to me decades ago and now sound utterly foreign to me. Did I really say that? I’m saying to myself a lot.
There’s nothing hid that shall not be made known is true on so many levels. This is the most-intensely-personal level I’ve experienced. I’m being shown my own “missed marks” (sins).
What I said wasn’t evil. It was just thoughtless, unconscious, unkind. I never strayed outside the bounds of decency, thanks to my Mother, but I could be cutting, apparently.
I go to respond to person A today and realize I’m really speaking to person B from my past. And I stop. I no longer entertain those senseless, unkind responses. But how many of them there were!
I feel sickened when I see some of them. Or some of my never-ending complaints. Wow.
When you don’t know what love is, it isn’t clear what star to steer by. I was adrift and confused. But not greatly open-hearted either. (3) I’d give myself a bare pass in human development.
What business have I complaining about another’s deeply-hidden vasanas (core issues) when my own “own me” so much?
It was totally invisible to me what I was doing. It was Manipulation City in those days and I was (in my own eyes) Top Gun.
I feel a raft of emotions – repulsion, disappointment, amazement, shame, regret, on and on.
How could I have been so blind to the systematic development of a manipulative skill set under the title of “Complainer”? I see person B’s routine so clearly. Why could I not see my own?
Lord, three score years and ten is not enough for a person. Look how long it takes even to realize one major number. I’d have been dead before I’d have seen it.
And that’s just one realization. How many do we have in a lifetime?
Footnotes
(1) Too much information.
(2) I made sure all my complaints were well-founded. Within a tight range – such as problem identification, risk assessment, etc., my talents are well-used.
But like the comedian who can’t stop telling jokes, the career complainer isn’t fun to have around the house.
(3) That had to await the heart opening on March 13, 2015. See “Submerged in Love,” March 14, 2015, at http://goldenageofgaia.com/2015/03/14/submerged-in-love/ ; “Activating the Wellspring – Part 1/2,” March 14, 2015, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2015/03/14/activating-the-wellspring-part-1-2-2/; and “Activating the Wellspring – Part 2/2,” March 15, 2015, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2015/03/15/activating-the-wellspring-part-2-2/.