The material presented
here is not Al-Anon Conference Approved Literature. It is a method
to exchange
information, ideas, feelings, problems and solutions on a personal
level.
It used to be that I didn't have any feelings. I'd anethetised them all because of how emotional living in the alcholic insanity was. Then I found al anon. And I found every single one of my feelings. And I thought I was going to die. So when my Buddist sponsor proposed to me that I didn't have to feel something every moment of every day, I told her she was nuts. She's a corporate litigator, but she was the problem, not me (I'm thinking there's a pattern here...). Now, after my melt downs last week, this week end, and how this morning I spent like 10 minutes trying to remember why it was my alarm was going off (the fact that it was monday never entered my mind for those 10 minutes), I'm anesthetized again. Feeling nothing. And for whatever reason, the reasoning of my Buddist sponsor has come back to me. Feeling nothing, she explained, is not necessarily a reflection of mental illness as much as it is a reflection of where you're at. Intense emotions suck energy. Ongoing, smaller emotions will continually suck energy, in a leeching effect. Its that you don't notice the latter because it's so quiet. The second part is what you need to worry about. Not the first. The first is certainly more destructive in some ways, she said. That's why she has a job, she said. But it's also the second part that makes her job more interesting. That creates some of the more spectacular stories and crimes of the time. Water destroys rocks over many years. People don't think about water as the most destructive force on earth. Then their houses leak during rainstorms. Be the water of change in your own life, she always said. Not so successful recently. All I want to do, at least on this monday, is go to bed. School? There's school?
I'll get backatcha. Work? Oh. work. Forgot work. (Hey! No customer complaints this weekend! Yea! ) See, I forget what's at the heart of my sponsor's argument: I don't need to be super human. I need to be human. I need to let myself be myself and do whatever I need to be my very best self. Swimming? Ok. Sleeping? Might be good. Eating? Sounds like a plan. All these little things. And to detach from the emotional turmoil I'm so used to living in, yeah, there's the key. Part of this is an expression, also of what my Buddist sponsor emphasized is a belief of a chaos filled life. Having lived in one herself, she said she often felt as if chaos was a choice each of us made when we felt afraid to live in the now. It's also a reflection, she felt, that each of us live under when we believe that our lives have become hum drum or that someone might think "what kind of life do THEY have?" That is where, she emphasized to me, it is none of your business what they think of you. ever notice how, generally speaking, the advice of the universe is just so fantastic in idea--and so difficult in practice?
The statement that struck Annemarie hit me as well. I often think it's the hanging on to an emotion when it's actually done that sucks energy. Feeling an emotion when it happens and letting it go when it's done is one thing; trying to hang on to it is another. How often, when we're furious with someone, does it start to dissipate and we think, "Oh, no, I'm still mad. What s/he did was awful!" And then we try to force the fury. It can happen with love, melancholy, anything -- we want the feeling to stay and try to make that happen, when feelings are by nature very fleeting. They come, they go, they come again......
Here's the other part that struck me: See, I forget what's at the heart of my sponsor's argument: I don't need to be super human. I need to be human. I need to let myself be myself and do whatever I need to be my very best self.
A variation of that is wanting to be someone we're not. I remember reading an essay by Thomas Merton, a contemporary monk. He said that every created thing is a perfect, one-of-a-kind expression of Higher Power on this earth, as long as it's being what it was created to be. If you have a tree deciding it would rather be a monkey, you're not going to have a very good tree OR monkey, and the world will have lost an expression of Higher Power.
It's much better the way he puts it!
Thanks for the as-usual thought-provoking post, Tiger.
I'll get backatcha. Work? 
) See, I forget what's at the heart of my sponsor's argument: I don't need to be super human. I need to be human. I need to let myself be myself and do whatever I need to be my very best self. 
