It’s amazing and I mean amazing what a good dose of presence can do. I stood out on my deck this morning for a long time. From there I can see over the tree tops across the valley to Eldora Mountain ski area. Even though its October the sun still hits the deck early and it warms the wood under my feet. That warmth, even though it was simple, reminded me to live in the moment.
I woke up early the other morning with an anxious feeling. My ex-wife’s parents are visiting Colorado for the first time since we ended our marriage. The impending interaction with them was looming over me before my feet even hit the floor. I thought to myself maybe I’ll get lucky and somehow manage to avoid them. Don’t get me wrong, they are really nice people and loving grandparents to my daughter. I decided to get curious about this anxiousness. Was I still feeling some guilt about breaking up the marriage? Nope, I had left that in the sand. In this case the anxious feeling was simply rooted in my need to have everyone like me. "Cool! I just wrote a Manifesto post about this exact thing last week. I’ll fix myself, promptly."
I was recently reading a book by Eckhart Tolle called The Power of Now. This book is unreal and it is all about our egos and how we avoid the present moment in our lives, unconsciously. His words popped into my head as I was having my ginormous coffee on the deck. There was one paragraph in particular where he talks about observing your emotions as if you’re watching yourself. Notice your feelings and just observe them almost like a parent watching a child play. So I did and now I’m better.
When I do run into my former in-laws I’ll do my best to notice any feelings that come up. I’ll do my best to not take anything personally. Not to be overly cliche, but the anxiousness is a delusion or illusion that I have crafted in my mind anyway.
Another story I remembered that helped me shake the anxiety this morning is from the Bible. Jesus is in a temple filled with people and a blind man comes up to him and asks to be healed. So, Jesus bends down by a pool of water and rubs his hands in the mud. He puts his hands on the blind man until the man’s eyes are completely covered by the mud. Jesus then bends over and rinses the mud out of the blind man’s eyes with the water from the pool. After that the man can see.
My learning from that story is this: to me Jesus represents my authentic self, the mud represents the ego or in today’s case my anxiety, the water from the pool represents the present moment. In other words, by remembering to be true to myself and by staying present my anxiousness was removed. The warmth from the sunny deck on my feet this morning reminded me of this, which washed away my ego’s need to be liked and gain approval.
I’m here, standing in my shoes. I’m good. How about you?
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