Noticings

As I step back into what's going on here at home I am deeply aware of some very critical and unkind thoughts toward a forwarding company who has a package for my husband. These are not new thoughts toward this company and others I have deemed to be similar but I do find them rather interesting at this point in my journey. What I notice behind the bad mouthing is how powerless I feel when confronted with what I perceive as immovable objects called institutions. I've had a running battle of sorts with institutions most of my life fueled by these feelings of powerlessness and helplessness and it's always felt much more powerful to get angry and decry their rules and regulations than let myself really feel this powerlessness.

Well, it didn't take long to catch myself in the act and to see past the facade of self-righteousness this time. There is no need to try to feel powerful in the face of what is beyond my control; frankly, pretty much everything in life is out of my control so I can and have in the past expended a great deal of energy resisting it (it being life really) and being frustrated and critical. It is the most pointless waste of time I can think of yet here I was yesterday and early this morning caught in that old drama until I saw it clearly and breathed with it and made peace with it exactly as it is.

This seems to be a personal example of something I've been contemplating a great deal over the past week. Going through various museums and visiting war memorials in DC really brought up how tightly we tend to hang on to a way of doing things that has seen its day and is ready to be retired but our investment in it is such that we often cannot see any other way of being. What I'm referring to here is how humanity in general seems to see the only way to peace and freedom being through war. I remember a few years ago watching a David Hawkins workshop DVD where he mentioned that the planet had only been not at war 7% of the time in human history or something to that effect. I am reluctant to say that we were at peace because not being at war and being at peace is not necessarily the same thing. Seeing the way we tend to romanticize war in our own peculiar ways even while saying we don't want to be at war is not just something 'they' do. We do it every time we fight whatever is going on in our lives, like me with 'institutions'. It is so deeply ingrained in most of us that even when we do our best to choose peace or love it tends to show up in the most insidious ways. That doesn't make us bad or wrong or anything else for that matter; it is a wonderfully humbling experience that reminds me that we're all in this together and that there's always another opportunity to make peace, no matter how far down the path of war I may have wandered. Powerlessness is the key; not trying to make myself feel powerful but rather being at peace with the feelings of powerlessness and recognizing that isn't who I am either.