One of Those Days

"The responsibility for both present and future is in our own hands. If we live right today, then tomorrow has to be right."
Eknath Easwaran

I'm having one of those incredibly bad days where from the moment you wake up everything feels off. I keep trying to say things and it is like I have to recall the stuff from my brain to be able to form thoughts. I keep doing things wrong and then have to redo them...usually more then once. I feel like I'm in this fog and can't focus enough to get out. It is very frustrating.

It is easy on days like today to cry, "woe is me" and just give up to the despair that seems right around the corner. But I won't. I can't let that feeling of hopelessness take hold again in my life.

So I take a moment to breathe and look at the trees turning outside the window. I take a minute to count my blessings and that turns into quite a long contemplation. The "fog" is still with me but the negative feelings have passed.

As Hannah Montana sings,

Everybody makes mistakes

Everybody has those days
Everybody knows what, what? I'm talkin? 'bout
Everybody gets that way

A simple song with a powerful message because somewhere across the globe or down the street someone else's day has started off on the wrong foot and they are feeling just like me. I send them some love and light and ask the Goddess to send them a messenger of hope so they won't become lost in a moment of confusion and doubt.

It's so much easier to let the negative feelings swallow you alive then to fight them. And sometimes you get so tired arguing with your inner being that it just seems easier to just give in.

But that is not me...and not today.

I did an entire chakra reboot using the Reiki symbol for past life regression. It can change the way the events effected you at the time...so in essence you can change the past.

Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly upon our own point of view.

Obi-Wan, Star Wars

History is written by the conquers...and that doesn't necessarily mean that is the truth. Why then can't we "rewrite" the way that events shaped our lives? If our truth is based upon our point of view, then what if our view was to shift 180 degrees?

A king has the blind men of the capital brought to the palace, where an elephant is brought in and they are asked to describe it.

"When the blind men had each felt a part of the elephant, the king went to each of them and said to each: 'Well, blind man, have you seen the elephant? Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?"

The men assert the elephant is either like a pot (the blind man who felt the elephants' head), a winnowing basket (ear), a plowshare (tusk), a plow (trunk), a granary (body), a pillar (foot), a mortar (back), a pestle (tail) or a brush (tip of the tail).

The men cannot agree with one another and come to blows over the question of what it is like and their dispute delights the king. The Buddha ends the story by comparing the six blind men to preachers and scholars who are blind and ignorant and hold to their own views: "Just so are these preachers and scholars holding various views blind and unseeing.... In their ignorance they are by nature quarrelsome, wrangling, and disputatious, each maintaining reality is thus and thus."

The Buddha then speaks the following verse:

O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim

For preacher and monk the honored name!

For, quarreling, each to his view they cling.

Such folk see only one side of a thing.

So in this vein of thought I have been taking my past and turning it this way and that and looking at if from a different view. I've found that most of my thinking around certain events is indeed "one-sided". With that insight I am able to go back and look at things from outside myself and see them in a different light.

It is a slow process wrought with emotion and sometimes the feelings rise up to choke me...but I push them back down into the past and remind myself that these are the shadows of things that have been. They can not hold me in the present unless I let them.

Last Saturday was another of those days where nothing was working. I was trying to bead a leaf and failing at every turn. But after four hours I finally had something I was happy with. I've written down the pattern so I can do it again. I'm glad I kept up with it and didn't give up when I really, really wanted to.

I'm still plugging away on the blanket. I'm on my 4th color now. It is mindless zen kind of knitting that can be done anywhere. It is nice to have a project like that once and a while. It is nice not to think of counting or charting for this project. I think my mind needed the break.

I hope you all enjoy the first weekend of October.

Bright blessings and happy crafting,

Ruinwen

:)