Fighting violence

Last week I found myself feeling super-sensitive, especially, to anything that in any way could be perceived as violence or aggression. My heightened awareness of this sensitivity meant that, in fact, I started to attract that even more into my experience. One of the days I got an e-mail about a chicken farmer in the U.S. fed up with trying to conceal what cage-free actually means and how much the chicken suffer in the horrid conditions, despite not being in cages. Another day my sister sent me a message about how she was looking for yarn for her next knitting project and got upset when she found out about the horrors of where angora wool comes from. The final drop in the ocean was when after a few days with my father (during which I felt he kept making a lot of insensitive jokes), we got into a conversation about war. I have a very good relationship with my dad, and it was really shocking to me how different our opinions were on this subject. My father felt that defending one’s country was the absolute value and truth and that it should be done at all costs, while I took the position that violence and aggression were not a solution. My reasoning was that such approach does not seem to resolve anything and just results in further aggression and resentment that lead to more violence spanning generations. Or as Dalai Lama has put it: "Through violence, you may ‘solve’ one problem, but you sow the seeds for another". Our conversation quickly escalated, and we both felt frustrated with each other’s inability to see the other’s point of view.

When the conversation ended and I was on my own, I felt really upset – not only with the subject matter, but also with the fact that our discussion itself turned out to be quite aggressive and insensitive. As much as it would have been easy to brush off any responsibility and blame the world for being the way it was, I decided to take a moment to understand what inner trigger within me was reflecting all of this outwards and attracting these situations into my experience. So I decided to talk to my sister. She was extremely supportive and patient with me being upset, and that alone allowed me to stop resisting it all and dive into ‘when was the first time in my life when I felt how I feel now?’.

Immediately, a long-forgotten childhood memory came up of when I was probably 5 or 6. We lived in a block of flats surrounded by more blocks of flats with playgrounds in-between where kids from the neighbourhood used to meet and let their imaginations run wild in all sorts of games. One day that summer to a complete amazement of us, city kids, an unkempt brown puppy appeared as if out of thin air. It was an absolute miracle to touch his fur, see his happiness about all the attention from kids and how much he enjoyed little bits of food that we all started snatching from our kitchens. Although the exact memory escapes me, I am pretty sure that this only lasted for about half a day. By the evening, the puppy had become an object of attention of a group of fairly nasty kids who used to terrorise the neighbourhood and was lying injured by their well-aimed stones. The final few days of the puppy's biography before his untimely death were filled with immense suffering which was observed through our wide innocent eyes. This was it - my first experience of facing many facets of this world that don't get easier to handle even when we are adults - human cruelty, suffering, helplessness and inability to help, and, eventually, the permanence and even vulgarity of death. Although we were all shocked by this event for many weeks that followed, eventually, as the last bits of the puppy's fur disappeared, the memory sunk down deeper and deeper, until such time would come that I would be ready to heal it.  

In my new memory of this situation the puppy grows up on a farm and lives a full happy life surrounded by his furry little grandchildren. In the meantime, a small city girl continues to get lost in big fairy tale books with happy endings. 

Paw-akening

So you know my firm declaration of last week? It didn’t quite work out that way. Pepe, our puppy, and I were home alone the following night, and I woke up in the middle of it. I don’t know what exactly awakened me but I found myself unable to sleep and really worried to see how shivery and unwell Pepe was.

It turned out that the most self-loving thing, as it always is, was not to try to change anything about the way I was feeling, but dive deep into the sleepless irritation. In other words rather than resisting the feeling, letting it overcome completely and being open to whatever is in store no matter how painful or uncomfortable it might feel.

I had established previously on that day that all the annoyances I had been feeling - the way my dad organizes his home and my friend not looking after herself – were all connected in a way that they were all reflecting the same issues within me, i.e. things being chaotic at work and me not having time to pamper myself. On top of that there was an irritation that my dog was not feeling well (thinking it was a reflection of how I was feeling). Diving deep into this at night, surprisingly, revealed that everything was connected but at a much deeper level.

I approached the situation in a meditatively questioning manner. What was there to learn from the way I was feeling? What was the connection between my father, friend and puppy’s situations? What was the memory or past experience that was seeking to complete itself and become full through this? And then it hit me.

It washed over me like a giant cold wave – a realization just how absolutely in love I am with our puppy, how much joy he is bringing into our lives, how much it was hurting me to see him in pain and unwell, and how enormously I was afraid of losing him. As I allowed this to sink in, I was overwhelmed yet again with the realization that I had the exact same feeling about my father and my friend. Suddenly, I realized that with all three I had been at some point threatened about losing them. My friend overcame breast cancer last year, and I was surprised to discover all the residual angst, frustration and even anger that were still there left over from months of quietly worrying about her and really really wanting her to get better. My dad has had a string of dis-eases throughout his life that used to make us worried about losing him. For many years the most horrible thought I could think of was something happening to my father – a man so amazing that none of my boyfriends could match until I met my husband.

So here it was, the truth that not only all of this was connected, but that in fact my puppy’s limpy leg had an incredible offer to unearth all other situations when I had previously felt the same way – at loss with the fear of loss. Once revealed, such subconscious and suppressed memories can no longer affect us in the same uncontrollable and mysterious way. They become thoughts that I can choose to have or can replace with something else altogether. So I allowed myself to forgive myself and my friend for the difficult year of her being unwell, and I recreated and reimagined a particularly difficult memory of when I was worried about my father to something enjoyable an fun. Shortly after, I was fast asleep.

And as for Pepe, he is back to happily running on all-fours after us around the house, sticking his nose into garbage, and of course taking his daily self-loving naps in the sun.   

Pause for paws

Over the course of the last week I felt like a slowly growing snowball of irritations. All the frustrations seemed very small and appeared to be quite separate from each other. Obviously, it was mostly just annoying things that other people were doing that I didn’t quite agree with and felt I would do differently. For example, it irritated me to think about the way my dad organizes (or not, rather) his living space. I also didn’t quite like that my husband gently suggested that perhaps adults can do these things as they wished and that I knew all of this was the case before I made the decision to go visit him. A couple of days later, on an unrelated matter, I felt annoyed thinking about a close friend who I thought was being too tough with herself and who should give herself a break from all the self-imposed pressures, relax and enjoy life. Then finally, over the last couple of days our puppy Pepe developed a limp in his back paw which just added the finishing layer of worry on the fat parfait of frustrations.

And what was my response to all of this throughout the week? To keep resisting it all, of course! For each one of the frustrating emotions, I just added another one in the theme of ‘I shouldn’t be feeling like this’, or in other words, feeling bad for feeling bad. As this whole pot continued to bubble, I noticed other not-helpful habits creeping in. For instance, I continued to skip morning yoga and stopped going on daily walks (after all, Pepe wasn’t going to come with me). I decided to stay at home instead of going to a local knitting club where I could have had a nice time and meet some new people. Generally, I started feeling "antsy" and uncomfortable in my skin. Finally, I began to crave and give into things like potato crisps and chocolate (granted, they were all organic and without any "nasties", but that’s not the point!).

In the middle of this inner battle of irritation, I noticed a peculiar thing. While I was in the fully armed mode of self-irksomeness, our poor limpy dog was doing this. 

Yeah. Really. And ‘this’, my friends, is what the most unashamed version of self-love looks like. He was taking extra long naps and resting even more than his usual 95% of the day. He took every opportunity to be in sunshine. He started fasting and only ate little amounts of the very tastiest treats that I offered him. He became very gentle and calm, occasionally licking his leg in the most loving way possible. The loving licks were not limited to the limpy leg but were also granted to me at every opportunity as if expressing his infinite gratitude for covering him with the blanket or letting him drink water from my bathtub.

So this morning when I woke up and saw Pepe snoring in the same outrageous paws-up position, I knew I had to make a choice - either to spend the rest of the day continuing to feel irritated or to pause and stop pushing it all away. 

After a brief meditation, all the links of the seemingly unrelated annoyances became very obvious – everything, unsurprisingly, was pointing back to me. No matter how much I didn’t want to accept it, the simple thing was that everything that I was finding frustrating about people around me, was actually just me projecting my own frustrations outwards.

"What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us."

H. Hesse

My dad’s organizational skills were upsetting me simply because I was recently feeling more disorganized at work and at home than usual. The friend who was being too tough with herself and was not taking things easy was simply unknowingly poking at my own growing feeling that I should get done more and be able to fit it all in my daily routines, as well as it being a while since the last time I treated myself to a full day of rest.

To make the long story short, I don't know about you, folks, but I declare tomorrow a day of self-love and I will be waking up in the same position as Pepe.