December 21, 2022
Life offers many opportunities to showcase my worrier role. A weekend ago one cat needed to go to the emergency animal hospital. Not even a week later, the other cat descended into one of his stomach distress episodes.
Attempting to smother my worry while he’s in midst of a bout has been impossible. Since his symptoms last through hours of prowling and eating invisible lint off the floor, I find myself shadowing his distress. I follow him from room to room, up the stairs and down the stairs.
Eventually, the cat tires of prowling and curls into a ball to sleep. Eventually, the medicine takes hold and his stomach settles. But my worrying doesn’t sleep.
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By and by I tire of the prowling of my mind and attempt to quiet it. Reminding myself that right this moment, everything is fine, works for about fifteen seconds. The much stronger habit of playing the “what-if” game easily overwhelms it. He’s uncomfortable. Is he going to vomit? Why hasn’t he eaten, he had the medicine hours ago! What if there’s something seriously wrong?
Haphazardly seeking solutions on the fly is not my preference, so it’s next to impossible to stop the “If A, then B” calculations of my brain. My higher self admonishes, “Be in the present, where everything is exactly as it should be,” but my practical mind replies, “Sounds good, but first let me figure out what I’m going to do if this, this, or this happens.”
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I’ve been reading Vidya Frazier‘s newest book, Living Free in 5D, and just finished some sections about the observer. One suggestion is to step aside from your “self,” and observe the role you’re playing at a given moment (we all have multiple, ever-changing roles over a lifetime).
Last night, as I sat in the living room and tried to stare through the wall to see how the cat was doing in the other room, I remembered this exercise and asked myself: Who is observing this? Who is experiencing this? The answer to both was, somehow, “Not me.” This offered just enough space to disengage momentarily from my role as worrier.
Later, noticing that my fretful self was not reassured by the cat’s apparent improvement, I asked: Who is doing this worrying? After a few seconds, the question changed to, What is worrying? Then, What is the energy that is worrying?
When I asked, what is the energy that is worrying, something popped off the obscured ball of truth I’m always holding in my hands, like candy coating flaking away from the delight of the chocolate center.
The obsession with “what if” feels like an energy I’m choosing, a tricky but familiar card in the deck of life. It’s a well-thumbed card, grimy from overuse, not just by me but by the entire human family since time out of mind. I thoughtfully finger the ragged edges before sliding that card back into the deck.
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It would be nice to wrap up by saying that I appreciate my cat’s illness prodding me into spiritual explorations. In all honesty, though, I just want him to be well, even though I realize we can’t all be well, all the time.
Another wise nugget I gleaned from Vidya’s book was that, though we intellectually know differently, we still cling to the immortality-tease of perfect health in a perfect body. Vidya notes that society’s extreme emphasis on health and fitness “ignores, and actually denies, the fact that bodies are not designed to be perfect. They’re part of the 3D material world, subject to illness, injury and eventual death…No one can successfully avoid these realities.” (As she notes later: at least, not at present.) (1)
This is self-evident. Even stone monuments decay, and how much less durable are we, with our fragile and vulnerable flesh?
I gently rub the acupressure points along the cat’s spine. He is hunkered in classic, inscrutable Sphinx fashion. His eyes close, his mysterious feline face subtly relaxes. We are definitely not stone. We are partnering Spirit as best we can in our houses of bone and blood.
(1) Living Free in 5D, Vidya Frazier, pp. 83-84. See www.VidyaFrazier.com.