"When These Crop Up"

“Life is a carnival, believe it or not", as the song goes - and we all have ringside seats to the circus that is our lives. It is quite a show although some of it isn’t very funny. Each of us moves through time and space to experience, the continuous stream of events. We make observations and have experiences with them. 

Not everything happens within our field of vision. Most of it is beyond the reach of our eyes and still affects us even though we may not actually be aware of their causes. The effects and causes that are within our vision, that touch us in ways we are conscious of, we think of as 'our lives'. Regardless of our awareness of happenstances, in or out of our field of vision - all of it affects the world in which we live – and therefore, in some way, it affects us.

Not all of what goes on in the world is good. So let’s look at some of this ‘bad stuff”. What exactly am I talking about? (The good stuff isn't what is troubling, is it?)

People are unthinking and they step on our toes causing us harms - real or imagined. They lie. They cheat. They steal. They are rude. They make mistakes - even as we make mistakes - unintentionally and sometimes they might even do it on purpose.

Our human senses - sight, sound, smell and yes, even the stores of memories and our imagination delivers events, many of which can be hostile to our sensibilities.

We begin to process this information in order to respond to it. 

Each day, from the moment our feet hit the floor until the second we fall sleep at night, our entire existence runs like a film strip stringing together frames of events, situations and encounters with people – and some of the scenes in the movie are just plain wrong.

In the magnificent spiritual text, story and prayer book, “Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism” the co-authors and co-founders of the spiritual fellowship taking its name from the same volume, tell us that practitioners of the Twelve Step lifestyle should continuously be on watch for the effects that negative forces in the world have on us. Selfishness, dishonesty, resentment, and fear are specifically mentioned. That means that seeing is not only permissible – but it is a direction.

They do not tell us to resist these things. They wisely suggest quite the contrary. “Watch” they tell us. They were smart to suggest this.

Watching, seeing, and being aware – all suggest that these things are not to be ignored. When we ignore, run from, or in any way suppress these thing we always end up allowing them to crop up and overwhelm us.

When this happens, we know what it is to be cut off from the Sunlight of the Spirit. We become rudderless.

We are to watch which means that is OK to see them. They are there. Ignoring negative emotional forces is foolish. That is why this mediation never suggests that thoughts be supplanted or replaced with ‘better’, less objectionable ones.

What we do when we meditate is watch for these things with purpose. The purpose is to remain in the conscious, aware state - as these negative forces wax and wane, never overtaking us – always on the doorstep to the psyche and yet not cropping up inside us, on our side of the threshold, less and less as we develop more and more resiliency.

Awareness becomes our armor. It is an effortless protector allowing us to bounce back from the barrage of psychic attack that is life itself. We live unscathed by the intelligent adversity trying to kill us and spread its confusion through us.

When we have this protection of awareness we find that we do not fear these negative forces. The foundation of courage is faith through awareness which displaces all fear.

So we watch and we see. We begin to see resentment and all negative thought and emotion for the foreign substances they are. 

Peace and Love,

Danny S – RLRA

Real Live Recovered Alcoholic

http://recoveredalcoholic.blogspot.com